Elementary Dr.Watson...

Early teens is the age when kids start getting into the reading habit. Initially, reading starts with books describing adventures of youngsters and exploits of teen sleuths. My early teens were no different. I started off reading books authored by Enid Blyton. I remember my first book being "The Children of Willow Farm". The book was about a bunch of kids spending their holidays in a farm.

Slowly I graduated to reading other books by Enid Blyton like the Famous Five series, the Secret Seven series and the Five Find-Outers (interesting name). The theme behind most of these books was the same with a little variety, but still each book sounded interesting and new at that time. Though most of these books had banal themes, they did and do teach teens a lesson. One thing that struck my mind is that they do preach kids an approach to solve problems. Isn't the first and prime step in arriving at a solution to a problem gathering the facts about the problem? The commonality you would observe by reading these books is that the little heroes make an attempt to gather all the facts about a problem before they structure the solution. These facts are addressed as "clues" in these books.

The next phase in the reading timeline are American sleuth series like Hardy Boys series(Franklin W Dixon), Nancy Drew series (Carolyn Keene) and the The Three Investigators (Alfred Hitchcock). Did you know that Franklin W Dixon is the pen name of Edward L Stratemeyer (1862- 1930) ? His publication house (Stratemeyer Syndicate) hired authors to write both the Hardy Boys and the Nancy Drew Series. So to clarify any confusions, there is no such person as Carolyn Keene, but different authors working for the Stratemeyer syndicate under this fictitious name. Again Alfred Hitchcock is the pen name of Robert Arthur and is not in anyway connected to the famous movie director of Psycho fame (www.threeinvestigators.net). These series are mostly about high school teens solving more gruesome crimes instead of petty ones.

As I grew up, I started reading detective stories like Sherlock Holmes adventures (Arthur Conan Doyle) and other stories from Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple series). More about this in part 2 of my current posting. I plan to contrast and compare methods of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes in my next posting.

Until then a piece of trivia I remember from a long time. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was apparently a county cricketer who has one wicket in first-class cricket? Can you guess who the batsman is?

Answer in the continuation post.... until then... ciao

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