The Encyclopedia Brown Encyclopedia

An eight-foot-tall Baxter Cronkmeyer appeared at the Brown Detective Agency, which was odd, because he was an average-sized boy the last time Encyclopedia and Sally saw him. Oh, but it turned out that Baxter was walking around in stilts.

Oh, he sounds fun.

In all seriousness, someone almost hit Baxter with a car. Though the driver missed Baxter, the boy’s bike was destroyed.

Baxter didn’t see who was driving, but he recognized the car. It belonged to Jack Hightower, a seven-foot-tall 18-year-old. Baxter’s plan was to scare Jack by going to his house wearing stilts. If that plan didn’t work, then he was going to have Encyclopedia and Sally there to back him up. See, it’s times like these that I believe that the Brown Detective Agency could increase his fees.

The three went to Jack’s house. Jack immediately recognized that Baxter was not an eight-foot-man, but a boy wearing stilts. Really, I don’t understand why Encyclopedia and Sally even humored Baxter into thinking that that would fool anyone. A boy wearing stilts doesn’t look like a tall person, he just looks like a boy on stilts.

Sally accused Jack of almost running Baxter down and Jack denied it. He asked Baxter if he even saw him driving. Baxter admitted that he didn’t actually see Jack, just his car. Jack then claimed that his 17-year-old sister, Alice, had been driving the car all morning. He called Alice outside and she appeared. She was much shorter than her brother. When asked if she had been driving the car all morning, she hesitated, but said that she had.

Jack decided that he was sick of being accused of this nonsense. He slipped right into the car and began to drive off.

If Alice had been driving the car, Jack would have needed to adjust the seat before driving off.

So, that means that Jack tried to pin an almost vehicular manslaughter on his own sister. What kind of dirtbag is he? Also, since this case involved an 18-year-old (an adult) nearly running over a child and destroying a bicycle, the police should definitely get involved.

Not that the Idaville PD would do actually do anything.

Encyclopedia Brown Takes the Case (1973) book cover.

Encyclopedia is seen holding a bottle one can assume is labelled as “Skunk Poison.” 

Corby Briggs’ pet skunk, Buttercup, had been killed. Let’s not act surprised that a parent in Idaville allowed their child to have a pet skunk and let’s move on.

Corey paid Encyclopedia to find out who killed Buttercup. He said that everyone in the neighborhood didn’t like the idea of someone on the block feeding a skunk, yet for some reason, his parents let him continue with it. While pretty much everyone in the neighborhood was a suspect, three boys moved a bit higher on the suspect list when Corey explained that they normally cut through the Briggs’ yard on their way to summer school.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of children in Idaville cutting through people’s yards. They seem very casual about doing it. Is it that the people in this town trust each other that much that “our land is your land,” or is it that the children are just completely disrespectful. Maybe things used to be different, but I used to feel bad going into my neighbor’s yard to retrieve a ball that went into their domain. Everyone just accepts that cutting through yards as a normal mode of transportation, like getting into a stranger’s truck.

This is one of those cases where the criminal was just so monumentally stupid, he deserved to be caught. After taking a look around the yard, Encyclopedia checked the garbage can. He found an empty bottle of poison and a slip of paper that read “In order to succeed you have to proceed to exceed.” Encyclopedia figured that the slip of paper came out of the killer’s pocket when he was pulling out the bottle of poison, and that he didn’t notice that both were coming out at the same time.

If the slip of paper came out with the bottle and the kid didn’t see the paper out in the course of opening the bottle, pouring it into the skunk’s dish and throwing it out, then he deserved to get caught. If he was dumb enough to throw the weapon away at the scene of the crime, then he deserved to get caught.

The investigation took the children to Idaville Elementary School, where Encyclopedia spoke to Mr. Pearlman, the school’s assistant principal. He told Pearlman about the skunk poisoning and how one of the three students were suspects. He asked if any of the students had tests that day. Since a dead skunk was involved, Pearlman saw no reason not to divulge information about the students to two children who just walked in from the street.

Jim Carnes had taken a history test earlier that morning. Chuck Mitchell took a spelling test. Bert Fenton was just about to take a Spanish test.

Encyclopedia figured out that it was Chuck Mitchell. That piece of paper that was found with the poison was a reminder of spelling words that end with “ceed.”

So I guess the lesson for Chuck here is to be more careful when killing neighborhood animals and to be sure not to leave evidence at the scene of the crime.

No, but seriously. We should be concerned that Chuck is killing animals, as that could be a sign that he will grow up to become a serial killer.

The Browns were hanging out in their living room when Mr. Morton stopped by. Morton and Chief Brown had been friends since they were in school and now Morton was a high school teacher.

I wonder what Chief Brown was like as a child. Whose smarts did he rely on to get by? His son wasn’t born yet and given his complete lack of basic reasoning skills as an adult, there’s little to suggest that he would have been able to survive on his own as a child. I don’t think we’re going to find out in this story.

Morton put his briefcase down and took a seat. He explained that he had a bit of a mystery on his hands and while he wanted the Chief Brown’s help, he made it clear that he didn’t want to officially involve the police. If Chief Brown had been an honest man, he would have told Morton to give his son a quarter and let him handle it.

While Morton was giving his journalism class a test, he ducked out of the classroom for five minutes. When he returned, a glass globe in his classroom was broken. No one fessed up to breaking it and no one squealed. He wanted to know who did it.

Mrs. Brown asked about the test they were taking at the time, and Morton pulled out his briefcase. He explained that it was a test on caption writing. The students were given six photos and they were supposed to explain what was going on in each photo.

Morton allowed the Brown family to rifle through his student’s tests because, well, why not?

Encyclopedia noticed Gene Dickman’s test because he wrote only one word for each caption, whereas the rest of the class wrote complete sentences. For the photo showing a clock with both hands on the 12, he wrote “Noon.” An old sea captain looks through a spyglass, he wrote “Sees.” There was a photo of a screen with white dots, and he wrote “Radar.” I could describe the other photos, but you get the idea. Just know that the remaining three captions read “Level,” “Repaper,” and “Solos.”

Morton noted that that was an odd performance from Gene, since he was one of the best in his class. Encyclopedia looked through the other tests to see the names of the Gene’s classmates and he came up with the culprits: Robert Mason and Anna McGill.

He noticed that all of the captions were palindromes – they read the same backwards as they do forwards – just like the first names of Robert (Bob) and Anna. Gene was leaving clues for his teacher; clues that were not very obvious to anyone.

It would have been hilarious if his clues went completely undetected – which they would have, had Encyclopedia not seen them – and Morton failed Gene. Or, even better, Morton assumed the reason why Gene had only written one-word captions was because he was busy breaking the globe.

“No, it wasn’t me. It was Bob and Anna. Didn’t you realize that all of my test answers were palindromes like Bob and Anna’s names?”

“Why in the hell would I realize something like that? What is wrong with you, dude?”

Encyclopedia and Sally took the afternoon off and went to the Idaville Dog-Paddle Derby. Yes, like every other competition ever held in Idaville, this one included cheating.

When they got to derby, they found Fangs Liveright wearing a button that read “Meat Director” because he was “in charge of the meat.” The winner would take home five pounds of hamburger meat. So Fangs was in charge of the prize? Was that his only job? Why would that warrant a button?

Even though no one asked, Fangs explained the system of making sure the dogs had enough water to drink. Puddinghead Peabody – no explanation of that name provided – would empty out each water bowl after every race and refill it. Each dog got a quart of fresh water before each race.

Why put that much effort into it? I understand that it wouldn’t be nice to make them drink stagnant water with leaves floating in it, but they don’t need new water after each race, and they certainly don’t need their own bowl. Dogs drink from the toilet; they’re not worried about catching cooties from other dogs.

And they get a quart each before each race? I’ve done some light Internet research and learned that in a 24-hour period, a dog should drink no more than 65 milliliters of water for every kilogram they weigh. Doing some quick math, that means that a quart of water should be enough water for a 14½-pound dog for an entire day.

My point is that this system of canine hydration is ridiculously complicated and wasteful. There was no reason why Fangs would even explain it all to Encyclopedia and Sally, who didn’t even ask.

Unless it was key to solving the upcoming mystery, which, of course it is.

There were five dogs in the final race. Rags was the favorite. It should come as no surprise that Puddinghead’s dog was also in this race. When Horace Cushing – another official whose dog was in the race – fired the starting pistol, four of the dogs jumped into the water. Rags fell asleep. Puddinghead’s dog won. It was almost as if Rags was drugged, but how? There was no way that all of the dogs were drugged, otherwise all of them would have fallen asleep.

While Encyclopedia was figuring things out, Puddinghead handed a one-gallon can to Fangs. Fangs brought it so that Puddinghead could shuttle water from the hose outlet at the shed a few hundred feet from the event.

Encyclopedia asked Puddinghead if he had seen anything odd at the shed when he filled the can up the last time. All he saw was Horace taking a smoke break. Encyclopedia asked if there was anything going on the second time, but Puddinghead explained that he had only made one trip.

Puddinghead was lying. If he was giving each dog a quart of water from a gallon jug, he would only have enough water for four dogs. A second trip was necessary for the fifth quart. In that second trip, he got the water for Rags, but spiked it so that Rags would fall asleep and be unable to compete.

Puddinghead went through all of that trouble of poisoning a dog so that he could win five pounds of ground beef. 

Tyrone Taylor was always hitting on the town’s 5^th grade girls. Sounds really creepy, until you realize Tyrone was 10 years old. Taking that into account, the creepiness factor decreases, but doesn’t completely disappears.

He was pissed off because he was trying to woo Betty Holden, but Stingy Stetson snaked Tyrone’s love interest. Stingy, as the nickname suggests, was a cheapskate. Tyrone saw Stingy at Mr. O’Hara’s drugstore with Betty. Stingy had bought her an “Idaville Special” with three scoops of ice cream.

Tyrone had no idea why Stingy was suddenly making it rain, so he assumed the worst. He accused Stingy of stealing money. He even dropped a quarter at the Brown Detective Agency so that Encyclopedia could find out what was going on with Stingy.

Encyclopedia reminded Tyrone that accusing someone of stealing money just because he stole his woman isn’t very nice. Tyrone explained that he had actually seen Stingy outside of the Medical Building the previous day. What was he doing there on a Sunday? It was closed.

Now, what happens next is needlessly complicated. Tyrone was hanging out by the Medical Building (by the way, that’s capitalized, which leads me to believe that that’s the actual name of the building) when he saw Stingy and his older brother, Pete, doing some weird walk across the parking lot to their truck. He couldn’t see the lower half of their bodies, but he could somehow tell that they were walking funny. Encyclopedia figured out they were walking along the white lines that marked the parking spots.

Encyclopedia later asked his father if the Medical Building had been robbed the previous day. Wouldn’t you know it, yes it was. About $200 was stolen from petty cash boxes in several offices. The thieves snuck into the building, but the security guard spotted them. Well, he spotted their feet as it turned a corner up the stairs. The guard went to chase them, but when he reached the top of the stairs, they knocked him out. When he regained consciousness, he saw a service truck for Mac’s Service Station – the same truck Tyrone saw – drive away out of the parking lot. The guard called Mac’s and found out that Pete Stetson normally drove the truck on Sundays, and some days he took his little brother along on some calls.

This is an open and shut case for the Idaville PD, right? No. Because when Pete and Stingy returned to the station, they were wearing shoes.

Are you kidding me? That’s their alibi? No, the thieves were barefoot and these two were seen several minutes later wearing shoes. There’s no way they would have been able to put on their shoes at any point between leaving the Medical Building and returning to the service station. It looks like this one is unsolvable.

Well, no. Encyclopedia figured out that the reason why they were walking along the white lines of the parking lot was because they were barefoot. They walked along the lines to keep from burning their feet on the hot blacktop.

To review, this kid planned to steal some money from a bunch of doctor’s offices and decided the best partner for that kind of crime would be his 10-year-old brother, the little brother used the money stolen to pick up chicks and the only reason why they got caught was because a horny 10-year-old was pissed about losing his would-be girlfriend. Also, the Idaville PD is enormously terrible at police work.

But we already knew that.

Freddie Zacharias had a pretty sound money-making scheme. Apparently, people vacationing on the beaches of Key South and in the surrounding waters were constantly losing their false teeth in the water. I didn’t realize that this was an actual problem, but it was.

The way the water currents work, the false teeth would wash up on the beaches of Idaville a week later. As a result, people who lost their teeth would advertise in The Idaville News for anyone who may have found what went missing. The enterprising Freddie would go to the beach searching for any lost teeth in hopes for reward money.

Encyclopedia and Sally were throwing a football around on the beach. There was a strong wind coming in from the ocean, so they decided to stop that and build sand castles instead. They saw Freddie hard at work. He had a glass jar holding a set of false teeth and he was looking for more teeth and a few ads from the classified section to help identify the teeth he was finding. They exchanged pleasantries and then Freddie went off for more teeth and he returned a few moments later, empty-handed.

Two Tiger members, Duke Kelly and Rocky Graham, stole the jar from Freddie. Duke started playing with the teeth, pretending that the teeth were castanets and doing some faux-flamenco steps. At some point, he completely spazzed out and accidentally had the teeth bite his ear. He got angry and knocked the jar over, causing the ads to fly out of the jar. That’s when Duke saw one of the ads and figured out why Freddie was spending his afternoon collecting teeth on the beach. The two Tigers decided they should hold on to the teeth and collect the reward money themselves.

Encyclopedia and Sally confronted Duke, who said that he had been walking on the beach when he saw Freddie trip and fall. When Freddie fell, he dropped the jar, causing the ads to fly out. Duke, being the good guy he is, chased the ads towards the ocean. At that point, he tripped and fell into the water and a crab grabbed his ear, hence the injury.

There isn’t a single instance of a Tiger member doing a decent thing. Why do they think it’s believable when they try to come up with a story where they tried to help someone else?

Encyclopedia knew Duke was lying because the way the ads supposedly got blown towards the ocean. The wind was coming from the ocean, so he wouldn’t have chased them into the water; they would have gone further inland.

Tiger member Lefty Dobbs had called Encyclopedia to meet him outside City Hall, but he didn’t explain what the meeting would be about. Encyclopedia knew how the Tigers operated, so he was pretty sure there he was walking into some sort of trap. I’m guessing he rolled with it because he was certain that there was no way the Tigers would be able to outsmart him.

When he and Sally got to City Hall, they saw a nervous Lefty. Encyclopedia asked him what was going on, but was answered with a shush. Lefty took his watch off, held it in his right hand, looked up at the big clock on the clock tower, set his watch with his left hand and put a quarter in Encyclopedia’s hand. He looked up at the clock, fished a five-dollar bill out of his pocket and handed it to Encyclopedia. “This is a big case,” Lefty explained.

That’s when Bugs appeared with Officer Hall. Encyclopedia was in trouble for some reason.

Earlier, Bugs had gone to the police with some story that Encyclopedia was charging people for the rights to set their watches to the clock at City Hall. Lefty played along. He told Officer Hall that Encyclopedia charged him a quarter to set his watch and another five dollars for collection rights so that he could charge others to do the same.

Officer Hall took this charge very seriously. He staked out the area with Bugs and watched from a nearby dress shop. Apparently, he had enough evidence when he saw the money change hands.

I am continually horrified at what counts as police work in the town of Idaville. First of all, why the police take anything Bugs says seriously is beyond me. Secondly, all Officer Hall saw was that Lefty paid Encyclopedia money. He didn’t hear any of the conversation. There is no evidence to show that anything Bugs said was accurate or even warranting police resources in the first place.

In his defense, Encyclopedia noted that Lefty set his clock with his left hand, meaning that he had to hold his watch upside-down. At that point, Officer Hall realized that the whole thing had been faked.

Wait, what? That’s enough evidence to get Encyclopedia off? While it seems unlikely that someone would set their watch while it was upside-down, it’s not completely impossible.

What the hell is going on in this town? The flimsiest case in legal history was ultimately defeated with the old “no one would ever set their watch upside-down” defense? Isn’t there actual crime happening in this town?

Scoop McGinnis was a 5-year-old who, despite being illiterate, put out a two-page weekly newspaper named The Cricket with his sister. When news of the old Webster house being slated for demolition hit The Cricket newsroom, Scoop decided he should report on it. Being the dedicated reporter he was, he went to the dilapidated house on the beach to interview the house itself to find out how it felt about being knocked down.

Where are Scoop’s parents? It’s nice that they let him put out this newspaper and that they encourage his vivid imagination where houses can give interviews. However, why are they letting their 5-year-old head down to the dangerous house by the beach all by himself? He could get hurt.

In fact, he did get hurt. He ended up getting a splinter. He’s lucky that’s all that happened.

Scoop claimed that the house spoke to him as well. The house supposedly told him to bring him all of his money to save it from being torn down. Scoop ran home and returned with $1.50. When the house told him that it wasn’t enough, it supposedly bit him – that’s how he got the splinter. Scoop then dropped the money and ran out of the house and to the Brown Detective Agency.

None of this was making any sense to Encyclopedia. Scoop then said that he saw Bugs Meany in the house on his way out.

Okay, now things were making sense.

Encyclopedia removed the splinter from Scoop’s finger and the two went to the house. Scoop showed him where he was when the house reportedly spoke to him. Encyclopedia figured out that Bugs must have been in the other room.

Bugs appeared and asked what they were doing there. Scoop accused Bugs of stealing his money. Bugs denied being in the house earlier and pointed out that there was money on the ground. Sure enough, Scoop’s half-dollar was sitting on a dollar bill on the ground. Bugs then had the audacity to pretend to be offended that someone was wrongfully accusing him of something.

Bugs, you once told the police that Encyclopedia was involved in your faked kidnapping. Don’t be an asshole.

Encyclopedia pointed out that if Scoop had dropped the money and left, the half-dollar coin would have hit the ground before the dollar bill. Yet, the coin was on top. Bugs figured that Scoop would tell someone about seeing him in the house, so he didn’t steal the money. Instead, he put the coin on top so that the bill wouldn’t blow away in the wind.

If Bugs knew that Scoop saw him and he knew that someone would be back accusing him of trying to steal Scoop’s money, then why did Bugs even bother sticking around? He knew he wasn’t going to get the $1.50 and that he’d have to explain himself. Why not just leave and not have to answer any questions?

Chief Brown’s police work has earned him worldwide fame. Chief Carleton of Hills Grove, which is somewhere in Northern Canada, wanted Chief Brown’s help. Someone had stolen $10,000 from the home of Mr. and Mrs. Richter, who were vacationing in Detroit.

Their neighbor, Sidney Auckland, reported the crime. Yeah, let’s ignore the part where his name is a misspelling of largest city in Australia and the largest city in New Zealand.

Auckland had a key to the home and was checking up on it. It was getting cold, so he wanted to make sure the Richters’ heat was on so that the pipes wouldn’t freeze. When he got in, he said he found two men in the house. They knocked his eyeglasses off. Without them, he wasn’t able to get a good look at the men. They tied him up, stole the money and left. Auckland was able to free himself. At that point, according to the report, he found his glasses, called the police and then checked the temperature in the house (it was 70 degrees). He told police that though he wasn’t able to get a good look at the two men, he could describe them to the police.

Why is this story bullshit? That depends who you ask. If you ask me, I have a few reasons. First off, if he had been there for the sole reason of checking the house to make sure the heat was on. That should have taken a backseat as soon as he had been tied up. At that point, his should have been less concerned with the heat and more concerned with his own safety. Even if he was fixated on the heat thing during that whole traumatic experience, it should have been pretty obvious that the heat was on. Hell, if it was freezing outside, the heat must have come on at some point while he was in the house. Why would he even bother checking the temperature? Just get out of that house!

Okay, so he was obsessed with the temperature, so he checked it and it said 70 degrees. Are we supposed to ignore the fact that this took place in Canada, where they use Celsius and not Fahrenheit?

Encyclopedia thinks this story is bullshit because if it was below freezing outside and 70 degrees inside, his glasses would have fogged up, so he wouldn’t have been able to see the two men before they knocked his glasses off. So that supposedly proved that Auckland was lying and that he had stolen the money.

No, it actually just proved that he was lying, but it says nothing about whether or not he took the money, but whatever.

Apparently, Auckland stole the money and brought it home. Then he returned with a piece of rope and called the police with that story.

I don’t understand why these criminals put themselves closer to the crimes than they need to be. What Auckland should have done was steal the money and take it home and hide it. Then he should have gone somewhere public where someone would see him and serve as a reliable alibi. After that, he should have gone home and call the police to say that there was a break-in at the Richters’ home.. That way he could claim that he didn’t see who did it and he could say that he wasn’t around at the time of the robbery.

There’s no reason for him to make up that whole part about him being tied up by these fake robbers. By making the story more complicated, it gave some boy thousands of kilometers away the clue necessary to solve the case.

And now we know that Canadian criminals are just as dumb as American ones, but we don’t know why a simple burglary warranted the attention of a police chief from Florida. Was there no one in all of Canada able to crack this one? Even if this couldn’t be solved, why outsource it to Chief Brown? It’s a simple robbery, it’s not like the prime minister’s daughter had been kidnapped.