The Encluesiast

At last, we tackle the reason these posts on Encyclopedia Brown exist: to analyze how the clues/solutions work. These mysteries are fundamentally about people lying, and the reader’s challenge is to find the “gotcha” that allows one to prove that the liar is lying. (Fortunately, in the world of Encyclopedia Brown, culprits confess as soon as they are caught in a lie, even when they are a large bully confronted by two small children who cannot possibly hope to overpower the bully if the latter should reply, “Okay, so I’m lying. Whatcha gonna do about that?”)

As I noted in my introduction, many Golden Age short stories work this way, in particular those by Edmund Crispin and Freeman Wills Crofts. (For this reason, my next post will be on Edmund Crispin.) These are also used in Monk and Columbo for the final “gotcha.” Novels use these too, on occasion, but this tends to be restricted to situations in which there is both a “who” and a more creative “why” or “how” element. In those cases, the clue/solution types outlined below are the author’s way of allowing the reader to solve the “who”; the “why” or “how” is clued in some other way, often something less conventional.

Most clues/solutions in the first five books fall into these four categories:

(1) The culprit’s story is contradicted by some (trivia) fact

If you search online for adults’ memories of (or encounters with) the Encyclopedia Brown stories, these types of cases are some of the most infamous in the canon, because the trivia facts that are required to solve them are sometimes things one cannot reasonably expect children to know. The facts required to solve the trivia cases in these five books are:

• That Southerners refer to the Battles of Bull Run as the Battles of Mannasas (1.3)
• That June has only 30 days (2.1)
• That balloons blown by human breath rather than by helium do not float (2.2)
• That dogs can’t see red (3.4)
• That squirrels don’t back down trees (4.2)
• That penguins are from the South Pole, not the North Pole (4.5)
• That under normal conditions, military forts do not fly their flags after sunset (5.3)

Incidentally, if any ten-year-old child besides Encyclopedia Brown solved the last of these, I think we would have a new (meta-)mystery on our hands: why in God’s name the child knew that!

(2) The incident the culprit claimed to have witnessed is physically impossible

• Blind men can’t read a newspaper (1.5) (I’m not counting this as a trivia fact)
• The screams should not occur before the shots are fired (1.7)
• Someone can’t cast shadows forward with the sun in front of them (2.3)
• A six shooter can’t fire more than six bullets (2.4)
• Someone with a broken left arm could not use their right hand to slip something into their left pants pocket while running (2.8)
• The liar’s vision would have been blocked by the car hood (3.1)
• The door swings the wrong way (3.3)
• It is not possible to count a million one-peso bills in a single afternoon (4.10)

Most of these are visual/spatial. There is one story, however, where the impossibility is auditory instead. And to make things even better, there’s both a positive clue and negative clue (with the latter being the more crucial one):

This occurs in “The Case of Sir Biscuit Shooter” (5.4). The “knight” in question is Barney, the uncle of Encyclopedia Brown’s friend Lionel. Barney is a clown in a circus troupe and his act involves riding a horse in “armor” consisting of pots and pans. Princess Marta, the circus’s lion tamer, is robbed when someone sneaks up behind her in her trailer and bonks her on the head. She didn’t see the culprit. But Kitty, the bareback rider, claims to have witnessed the crime. She says that Barney is the thief.

The negative clue here is that Barney couldn’t have done it, or Marta would have heard his pots and pans clanging together when he approached her from behind. Not only are we told at multiple points in the story that Barney’s armor makes lots of noise, we’re also explicitly shown that he can’t silence it: “Uncle Barney rose to his feet. Vainly he tried to quiet the pots and pans by pressing them against his body.” The positive clue that Kitty is the real thief—besides, of course, the fact that she blames Barney—is that she is wearing “soft slippers,” which would aid her in sneaking up on Marta. This is not Sobol’s only use of negative cluing in these stories. We’ll look at some subtler example shortly. But having the solution rest on the absence of a noise is a nice touch.

(3) Although the culprit’s story is physically possible, if it were true, some object would be in a different condition than it is now

We can thinks of these as relying on oppositions. Object is in Condition X, but should be in its opposite condition, Not-X. Here are all but two:

• The ground is dry, but should be wet (1.2)
• The hood of the card is cold, but should be hot (1.6)
• The chocolate is hard, but should be melted (2.5)
• The glasses are intact, but should be broken (2.6)
• The grass is green, but should be discolored (2.10)
• The brick is light, but should be heavy (3.5)
• The glass is intact, but should be broken (3.8)
• The bed is by the wall away from the window, but should have been dragged to the window (3.9)
• The house of cards is still standing, but should have fallen down (3.10)
• The tires are worn out, but should be fresh (4.3)
• The spider’s web is intact, but should be broken (4.4)
• The shoe is dry, but should be wet (4.6)
• The teeth are clean, but should be stained with berry juice (4.8)
• The ground is clean, but should be strewn with cherry pits (5.1)
• The supposed victims fell backward, but should have fallen forward (5.2)
• The cabinet door is closed, but should be open (5.8)
• The suit fits, but should be too small (5.10)

I’ve skipped two in the list above, because they are my favorite example of this solution type in these five books, and Sobol deserves praise for his subtlety in cluing them.

One is the final case of the first book: “The Case of the Champion Egg Spinner” (1.10). The “crime” in this story is something that entirely belongs to Sobol’s world of children: Eddie Phelan is cheating at egg-spinning contests. This was the story that taught me that a hard-boiled egg spins better than a raw one. If you already know that, then you know how Eddie is cheating but you don’t yet know how to prove it. The telltale clue lies in this passage:

Mr. O’Hara made the soda. He placed it before the boy. He did not see the egg spinning toward the glass till it was too late. 

The egg knocked against the glass and spun away. It dropped out of sight on Mr. O’Hara’s side of the counter. 

Mr. O’Hara looked down. “That’s the end of your egg. I’m sorry.” 

“Forget it,” said the boy with a grand wave of his hand. “I have to use another egg in the spinning match tomorrow anyway.” 

“I’d better sweep up the mess,” said Mr. O’Hara. He walked to the back of the drugstore. 

Encyclopedia left twenty-five cents on the counter to pay for his soda. As he went out the door, he saw Mr. O’Hara returning with a broom and a dustpan. 

The condition “Object is in Condition X, but should be in its opposite condition, Not-X” is met because we can say “The egg is fully solid, but should be partly liquid.” But we, the readers, don’t get to directly see any of the evidence of it being fully solid. However, we are able to infer this by Mr. O’Hara’s uses of the word “sweep” and his use of a broom. If the egg had been raw, and was therefore partly liquid, the correct tool would have been something like a mop.

Not bad for a kid’s story, eh?

The other particularly interesting bit of cluing of this sort is in “The Case of the Murder Man” (4.9). No, there isn’t an actual murder in these stories for kids! Rather, Encyclopedia Brown writes a little murder mystery play for the Children’s Interfaith Night. (Is that the kind of thing that gets performed at Interfaith get-togethers? Color me surprised.) I must admit that when I was reading/rereading these in preparation for the post, I was chugging along, solving them in one go. (This is not a brag. I’m a grown-ass man, and these are for kids.) But I actually had to read this one twice before I spotted what I was supposed to see. I’d like to think that were I reading an adult mystery, I would have spotted it sooner, and I just wasn’t expecting this sort of thing in an Encyclopedia Brown mystery. See if you can do better. Here’s the entire text of Encyclopedia’s play:

The scene on stage showed the inside of two apartment rooms at night. Between them was a hall with a window and a door marked “Stairs.”

In one apartment Frazer was reading a newspaper. Across the hall in the other apartment, Langley was putting on a pair of black gloves. He picked up a pistol and slipped noiselessly out the door. He tapped softly on Frazer’s door.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” said Langley as Frazer opened the door. “I thought we might play a game of chess. Are you alone?”

“I’m alone,” said Frazer. “I’ll get the chess set.”

Langley stepped in and closed the door behind him. He pulled out the gun. The silencer muffled the noise of the shot.

Frazer doubled over and fell to the floor dead.

Langley moved swiftly. He took a key from Frazer’s pocket. He unlocked Frazer’s desk and scooped out a bundle of cash.

Then he coolly telephoned the police.

Smiling, he removed his black gloves. The money he hid under his mattress.

When a detective and two policemen arrived, Langley was waiting for them in the hall by Frazer’s open door.

“I’m Langley,” he announced.

“Oh, yes. I spoke with you on the telephone,” said the detective. “What happened?”

“It was too hot to sleep,” began Langley. “So I decided to go out to a late movie. As I stepped into the hall, a man dashed out of Mr. Frazer’s door. He knocked me down, tossed the gun out the window, and raced downstairs. I saw Mr. Frazer through the open door. Finding him dead, I called you immediately.”

After examining the body of Frazer, the detective asked, “May I use your phone?” “Go right ahead,” said Langley.

The curtain fell. The lights in the Fellowship Hall went on.

The detective stepped from behind the curtain. He stopped at the edge of the stage and spoke to the audience.

“I had every inch of the dead man’s room gone over for fingerprints,” he said. “Everything was photographed, including the desk. The bullet that killed Mr. Frazer matched the gun found on the street below the hall window.”

The detective looked around the audience.

“After studying all the reports, I arrested Langley for murder,” he said. “Can anyone tell me what his mistake was?”

Did you spot it?

The condition “Object is in Condition X, but should be in its opposite condition, Not-X” is met because we can say “The phone in Frazer’s apartment has no fingerprints on it, but should have Langley’s.” The fact that there aren’t any means that he was wearing gloves. (Or, it means that he wiped down the phone, which Sobol doesn’t mention as a possibility, but which would also be suspicious.) And given that the weather is so warm that it was “too hot to sleep,” there would be no weather-related reason for Langley to be wearing gloves.

Discerning this negative clue requires even greater powers of reasoning than the one in 5.4 does, because the detective character doesn’t tell the reader that the apartment has no fingerprints besides the victim’s. If he had, that might put this case on par with the other Encyclopedia Brown cases in these volumes. Instead, the reader has to realize that because Langley was gloved, the detective won’t find any fingerprints. In other words, in most cases, we are shown the clue and reason backwards to the circumstances that gave rise to the clue; in this case, we are shown the circumstances, and must reason forwards to the clue that it will give rise to.

Returning to our four categories, one could certainly argue that (2) and (3) are similar enough to form one category. And indeed, one could make a case that some of the solutions that I put in (2) belong in (3), and vice versa. As this blog continues, and we examine other mysteries from across eras, I hope to show the value of keeping these categories separate.

(4) The culprit knows something that they shouldn’t or doesn’t know something that they should

This is maybe the most common “gotcha” in all of mystery media. It has its own TV Tropes article under the name “I Never Said It Was Poison.”

There is only one case of not knowing something that one should, in this case that water stopped flowing from a hose, when a van parked on it (4.7). The others are instances of knowing the following facts (when one shouldn’t):

• The length of the blade (1.8)
• That Vivian is a man, not a woman, and that he is a dentist (1.9)
• That the victim was wounded in the left foot, not the right foot (2.7)
• That the house was freshly painted (3.2)
• That Al’s full first name is Algernon (4.1)
• That the intended victim stays up at night and sleeps during the day (5.5)
• Information that could only be gathered by lip-reading (5.6)
• That Chief Brown said “an arrow flight” not “a narrow flight” (5.7)

We can separate 1.9, 4.1, and 5.7 from the others because they are not merely cases of the culprit knowing something that they shouldn’t. They are also cases of “An innocent person would have assumed X not Y.” An innocent person (if they make any assumptions about gender at all) would assume that Vivian is a woman not a man, because that’s more common. “Al” is most commonly short for Alfred not Algernon. “A narrow flight” is a more plausible thing to be saying, because it seems ridiculous that an arrow might be involved. Before the year is out, we’re going to see multiple versions of this verbal subtype.

The other common version of this in mystery fiction as a whole, though not present in these stories, is when a weapon is used unconventionally (e.g. if someone is bludgeoned with a gun or stabbed with a fireplace poker) and the culprit knows this, rather than assuming that the weapon was used conventionally (e.g. that the gun was used to shoot or that the poker was used to bludgeon).

To conclude, if you have children, these stories are a great way to turn them into encluesiasts. And if you’re an adult that’s interested in the mechanics of mystery cluing—who wants to get better at spotting them and understanding them—you could do far worse than to pick up one of the Encyclopedia Brown books and breeze through the cases.