少年探偵ブラウン 1

Simple mysteries that force you to pay attention to the details

This is the Japanese translation of 15 mysteries collected from various Encyclopedia Brown books, about the ten-year-old son of a small-town police chief who has such a knack for facts that he opens his own detective agency to help the local kids (and sometimes his father) with their problems. Each chapter is a stand-alone mystery where the incident is described with usually a single inconsistent detail thrown in, and the reader is tasked with figuring out how Encyclopedia Brown solved it before reading the solution.

The structure of the book is great for learning with, as most of the mysteries are not particularly complex, but they do require the reader to fully understand what is said in order to find the contradiction that unravels the whole thing. Several of the mysteries are solved through the nuance of the word choice, such as an action being described with a specific verb that the reader should recognize as significant. It forces you to read very intentionally, but as the chapters are relatively short and there's no over-arching story, it's also an easy book to just pick up and put down without requiring a lot of stamina to read.

The difficulty is hard to pin down. The book uses very little kanji, even in common and simple words that the target age group should recognize, so there are often long strings of kana that require a bit of extra focus to parse. The average sentence length is also quite long for a kids' book, and the reader needs to be able to comfortably follow them in order to identify important details. But besides a few upper-level grammar points sprinkled in each chapter, the content isn't otherwise hard, and there's plenty of repetition between chapters that makes it easier. I found it pretty straightforward at an upper intermediate level, but I still think it would be a frustrating first chapter book for someone still getting used to parsing words without kanji and keeping the relation between multiple clauses straight in long sentences.

Entertainment-wise, this is a nostalgic series for me and I enjoyed revisiting it. If you haven't already read Encyclopedia Brown in another language, it should be kept in mind that it was written for kids in 1960s America and that fact very much shows throughout; some of the signs of the time come off as quaint (like children entertaining themselves by having egg-spinning competitions), some feel a bit bizarre from a modern perspective (like the casual treatment of violence between the younger and older kids), and some are simply poor taste (one of the chapters revolves around the kids dressing up as Native American stereotypes and competing in an "Indian contest"). I found it silly and fun to read about the lives and problems of '60s small-town kids as an adult, but it definitely requires some concessions and suspension of disbelief to enjoy what little story there is as anything other than the framing for a logic exercise.