Juvenile Mysteries
#640: Minor Felonies – The Mystery of the Missing Necklace (1947) by Enid Blyton
Here we go again, with Fatty, Pip, Bets, Larry, and Daisy (and Buster, of course) up against Mr. Goon in the race to solve yet another mystery. And yet for all its familiar elements, change is afoot…
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#621: The Borrowers Afield in The Mystery of the Moaning Cave (1968) by William Arden
As the current glut of Golden Age detective fiction reprints is making us all aware, copyrights can be a tricky thing. An author’s intellectual property is the characters and plots they create, and allowing others to have access to them is correctly something which is very closely guarded.
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#586: Minor Felonies – Encyclopedia Brown Strikes Again, a.k.a. The Case of the Secret Pitch [ss] (1965) by Donald J. Sobol
Since starting this blog, I have made the acquaintance of The Three Investigators, the Five Find-Outers, and several other juvenile sleuths, the majority of who have been an absolute delight to encounter; today, I add Leroy ‘Encyclopedia’ Brown to that list.
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#583: Minor Felonies – The Clue of the Coiled Cobra (1951) by Bruce Campbell
There’s a comforting familiarity about the Ken Holt Mysteries for Boys written by Beryl and Sam Epstein under the nom de plume Bruce Campbell. This is only the third one I’ve read, but, perhaps because of the strict adherence to classic ingredients, I feel like I’m about 12 books deep in the series.
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#580: Minor Felonies – Spaced Out (2016) by Stuart Gibbs
Space Case (2014), the opening volume in Stuart Gibbs’ Moon Base Alpha trilogy, did a very good job of marrying some intelligent scientific speculation with an appealing juvenile detective and a decent whodunnit plot, and follow-up Spaced Out (2016) is even better again.
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#577: Minor Felonies – The Mystery of the Spiteful Letters (1946) by Enid Blyton
In the most recent episode of our podcast, I mentioned how Agatha Christie’s The Moving Finger (1942) was the book which made me appreciate how threatening a poison pen campaign could actually be. And four years after Christie used the conceit to drive a town mad, surprise Crime Writers’ Association member Enid Blyton made it the background for some childhood japes. What fun!
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#574: Minor Felonies – High-Rise Mystery (2019) by Sharna Jackson
Right, let’s get back into blogging things. This week, three very different novels published this year, beginning with High-Rise Mystery (2019), the debut fictional work of Sharna Jackson.
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#573: Lamentings Heard i’th’Air in The Mystery of the Screaming Clock (1968) by Robert Arthur
With a new school year about to start, and Peter F. Hamilton’s 1,152-page epic Pandora’s Star (2004) crushing the peak of Mount TBR, I’m going to take a break from blogging in September. But here’s one last trip with Jupe, Pete, and Bob before I go.
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#555: Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave in The Mystery of the Silver Spider (1967) by Robert Arthur
The Invisible Event 