The Encyclopedia Brown Encyclopedia

Millionaire C.T. Butler had been kidnapped, and it should come as no surprise that Chief Brown had no idea how to solve this one.

Mrs. Butler was of no help. She and her husband had been watching late-night television in their bedroom when there was a knock on the door. Butler went downstairs to see who it was. Mrs. Butler didn’t recognize the other person’s voice, but she said it sounded as if it was a friendly conversation. The voices eventually migrated towards the den. She eventually lost interest and fell asleep. She awoke briefly when she heard the front door close. When she woke up the next morning, her husband was gone. However, she didn’t think anything odd of that. She had figured that he had gotten up and quietly got dressed and left for the office without waking her up. Although the front door was unlocked, she figured that her husband must have forgotten to lock it on her way out. She didn’t know anything was wrong until she had received a call from the kidnappers demanding a half-million dollar ransom.

Chief Brown didn’t have a lot to work with here, but that didn’t stop him to speculate the hell out of things.

He figured that the kidnapper had a friendly conversation with Butler, and they moved things into the den. He then opened the window and forced Butler to climb out of it into the backyard where other men were waiting to take him. The kidnapper then went out of the front door. That way, anyone watching Butler’s house would have seen the kidnapper enter and exit alone and wouldn’t have seen Butler taken. Therefore, it wouldn’t have appeared suspicious to any neighbor with nothing better to do than to stare at Butler’s door all night.

Yes, that’s one possibility. Or maybe they all went out of the front door, but no one was watching the Butler’s house, so the kidnapping went undetected.

Oh, who am I kidding? As unlikely as Chief Brown’s theory was, we just have to accept that that’s the way things actually went down. There was still one problem. Who?

The only clue they had was that “7891011” had been written on the calendar in the den. Mrs. Butler said that that hadn’t been on the calendar the night before, so 7891011 must have pointed to something.

Encyclopedia asked his father if Butler had any enemies, but the Chief answered that all rich people have tons of enemies. He even went on to name a few: Arthur Jason, John McNear and Matt Short. But really, there were probably dozens more.

But since Chief Brown went through the trouble of naming those three men, we have to assume that one of them was the kidnapper.

Encyclopedia figured that Butler seized a moment and wrote “7891011” somewhere where it would be seen that would point to the kidnapper, and Encyclopedia figured it all out.

Since “7891011” was written on the calendar and not a notepad near the telephone, that must have meant that the number, written on a calendar, was of significance. 7891011 was referring to the seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth and eleventh months. Taking the first letter of those five months, you get “Jason.” So the bad guy was Arthur Jason.

Wow, that’s crazier than the kid who answered a test all palindromes to snitch on Bob and Anna.

How did Butler think that would have worked? It did, but it shouldn’t have. He’s lucky Encyclopedia has this weird mind meld ability where he’s able to get inside the heads of any victim/suspect and picture exactly what they’re thinking. Otherwise, Butler would have stayed missing for a lot longer.

And what was Jason going to do after he got the ransom and Butler was released? I know what I would do if I were Butler; I’d march to the police and say, “Hey, guess who kidnapped me.”

Since the Idaville PD had such an excellent record solving crimes, Chief Brown was sometimes called to neighboring towns to help out their police. One evening, he and Encyclopedia went to Ocean City to respond to a home invasion and robbery reported by a Mr. Bevan.

“Chief Brown,” Chief Moore of the Ocean City PD must have said at one point, “I don’t know how you do your police work back in Idaville, but here in the fine town of Ocean City, we insist at least one 10-year-old boy is present for the investigation of serious crimes.”

The problem was that Bevan didn’t remember anything between getting hit over the head and waking up in the hospital. The robbers may have taken his ring or he may have hidden it. He had no idea.

Two masked men forced their way into Mr. Bevan’s home in an attempt to steal a ring that once belonged to King Louis XIV. When the robbers asked him where the ring was, Bevan lied and told them that it was in his bedroom with his wife’s jewelry. One of them hit Bevan over the head and they began to tear the house apart.

Luckily, the police were able to find a typewritten note hidden in the house. It read:

Two men tried to steal the diamond ring. They hunted all over the house, raving about like madmen. They even split open the cat! When all failed, they beat me, but I didn’t tell and so they hunted a little while longer. I may be dying. I hid the ring in the vane.

They pieced together that Bevan must have typed this entire note after being hit in the head, but it didn’t really make any sense. He didn’t have a cat, so no felines were murdered during the search for this ring. And there was no way he would have climbed to his roof to hide the ring in a weather vane.

That’s when Encyclopedia figured out that being hit appeared to have affected his ability to type, as he was confusing his ‘c’s and ‘v’s. They weren’t raving about, they were racing about. They didn’t rip apart a cat, they ripped apart a vat of wine in the basement. And the ring wasn’t hidden in his weather vane, it was hidden in his cane.

So, to review, after being hit in the head, Bevan knew to hide the ring. He also knew he had to write a quick note and then hide that note from the robbers. Instead of writing a quick, “I hid the ring in my cane,” he went to the typewriter and typed out a pretty detailed account of the entire crime while leaving out any description of the intruders. Then he hid the note and then he passed out?

And what kind of head injury causes such a side effect? He was able to type properly except for confusing two keys that are next to each other on the typewriter? That’s a pretty specific head injury.

Best of all, there’s no mention in the story about whether or not the robbers were apprehended. I guess the police didn’t really care about catching the guys who invaded a man’s home and beat him unconscious.

Tyrone Taylor was quite the ladies’ man and was always seen around town holding some girl’s hand. He appeared at the Brown Detective Agency holding an arrow that he said came very close to hitting him in the head. He wanted Encyclopedia to find out who tried killed him.

He suspected it was some rival, going after the same girl Tyrone was trying to woo. He had also thought it could have been Cupid, because at the time, he was thinking about what kind of present he should give Ruth Goldstein – the girl he fancied that particular day. He thought it was Cupid because attached to an arrow was a diamond necklace.

Encyclopedia and Tyrone went to the scene of the near the home of Mr. Crane, one of the wealthiest men in Idaville. When they got there, they saw a few police cars near the house. Tyrone inexplicably freaked out at the sight of the police, gave the arrow and diamond to Encyclopedia and ran off. It’s never really explained why he’s afraid of the police. It seems as if he was guilty of something. Maybe he has warrants against him? We’ll never know, but I guess it explains why he didn’t go to the police when he was nearly killed.

Chief Brown noticed Encyclopedia, so he called him over to explain what was going on, as police normally do.

Apparently, a masked man had broken into Crane’s home. Crane, fearing that someone was after his most prized possession, the Greenwood Diamond, took a bow and arrow and tied the diamond to it. He ran to the back of his house to a narrow staircase. He went up the stairs and stopped at a window about halfway up, and he shot the arrow out the window so that the diamond would land away from the would-be thief. The thief saw Crane do this and beat him up out of anger.

Crane told the police that he believed it was Mr. Holt who beat him up. Holt had been trying to buy the diamond, and had recently brought “making threats” to the negotiation table. Holt was being brought to the scene of the crime for questioning.

Encyclopedia explained to his father that the diamond and the arrow had been found. Chief Brown put the evidence in the patrol car and he and Encyclopedia concocted a plan. He decided to wait for Holt at the bottom of the staircase where Crane was beaten up.

When Holt appeared, he acted as if he had no idea what was going on. Chief Brown explained that the Greenwood Diamond was missing, but it was “only an arrow flight away.”

Holt told Chief Brown to quit standing around and go outside to get it. That’s when the police knew that Holt had tried to steal the diamond.

You see, according to the plan, Chief Brown was to stand at the bottom of the narrow staircase and say that the diamond was “an arrow flight away.” If Holt hadn’t been there to see that business with the arrow, he wouldn’t have assumed that he heard “an arrow flight away,” he would have heard “a narrow flight away,” referring to the narrow flight of stairs. So his response, in theory, would have been “go upstairs and get it,” not “go outside and get it.”

This is kind of a bullshit theory, and they should be glad it worked. What if Holt’s response to “it’s a(n) (n)arrow flight away” was, “then go get it”? What if it was “it’s a what away”? Then the police would have been left with nothing. Because, really, if you’re standing at the bottom of a narrow flight of stairs and something is upstairs, you would simply say, “it’s upstairs,” you wouldn’t describe the staircase.

But this nonsense police work isn’t want sticks out most about this mystery. To me, it’s the fact that Crane’s “security system” comprises of him tying something to a sharp projectile and shooting it at a random spot out the window. First of all, it leads to the possibility that anyone can just go outside and steal whatever Crane intended to not have stolen. Secondly, and most importantly, he nearly killed a child in an attempt to keep a necklace from being stolen.

Is this allowed in Idaville?