A to Z Mysteries
Twenty-six nefarious schemes that would have worked if it wasn't for those meddling kids.
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Now onto…
The Series: A to Z Mysteries
The Author: Rob Roy
The Illustrator: John Steven Gurney
Length/Picture density: Typically 10 chapters, 70-80 pages, pictures every two or three pages.
The Premise: Three third-graders in a small town in Connecticut happen to encounter crime-based mysteries--usually robberies--on the regular and have a zest for solving them.
The Basic Formula: Standard mystery stuff. We establish a situation (typically: friendly side character has a valuable object), a crime happens in the neighborhood (oh no! It’s been stolen!), clues are gathered and theories developed over the next five chapters, and justice is served by the end. There are 26 books in the series, one for each letter of the alphabet. Alliterations abound.
Review: It’s essentially Scooby Doo in chapter book form (they even get a dog at one point!) At least one plot mirrors that of every Scooby Doo episode by being about someone trying to lower the real estate value of a property by spooking the residents. The mystery keeps you moving through the story, but what really carries the books are the relationships between the three main characters. They’re distinct from one another without being stereotyped or outlandish, and their friendly-mockery-based friendships feel consistent and genuine throughout.
These books do require a heavy tolerance for friendly mockery. I didn’t feel the need to do much editing on the fly (I typically will on words like “stupid,” “dumb,” etc. -- Leo must think that some books really lean into the word “silly”). The only instance I remember doing that was when one of the main characters, Josh, tells another, Ruth Rose, that she “throws like a girl” in the middle of a snowball fight. Not sure if people still say that, but I’m not planning on introducing that phrase myself.
You may get tired of the joke about Josh always being hungry, but my kid didn’t. He loved having a running gag that he was in on.
Most books take place in a small town in Connecticut, and you pretty quickly get a sense of a constellation of recurring neighborhood characters. There is a map at the front of every book, which makes the world easy to come back to. There are plot points that resurface, but for the most part the plot resets with each book, and there’s no harm in doing these out of order. The odd phenomenon of the kids regularly ending up in the middle of crime plots is almost never remarked on.
The kids occasionally end up in very dangerous situations that would be terrifying if they actually happened, but they keep their cool for the most part, which makes reading about them not too stressful — it matters a lot more how people are reacting to a situation than what’s actually happening. And it’s not like you’re worried about the actual outcome of the story.
Problematic/objectionable stuff: Not too much, unless you’re avoiding plots centered around crimes. The bad guys are usually sent off to jail or prison at the end (you don’t see it happen, it’s just implied), and I don’t love having that reinforced as a way of the world, but there isn’t a lot of emphasis on that end of things. Despite all the recurring characters, we don’t get any redemption stories. That’s too bad, because there was ample opportunity for one of the culprits to reappear later, having turned their lives around, but in this world, bad guys are bad guys, and they would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.
The cast, like Connecticut itself, is nearly all white. There is one book (The Kidnapped King) with a prince from a remote island, who starts out very exotisized, but gets less so as the story goes on. Other than that, race and ethnicity only comes out in the illustrations. The prince gets further humanized when the kids go visit him on his island.
The kids travel a fair amount, providing some variety in the physical environment and the maps at the front of each book.
Despite all of these being short mysteries starring the same three characters in the same town (usually), they’re less formulaic than you might think. The Magic Treehouse books follow the same plot arc every time, but with these the timing of the mystery, number of suspects, and how it’s solved vary a lot. The flip side of that is that the stories don’t always weave into a satisfying resolution beyond “bad guy caught, hooray.”
But wait there’s more: Hey, why stop at 26? Once you’ve exhausted the letter-associated books, you can try the same basic formula with numbers, months, and I believe there are also some U.S. government or history focused ones.
We’ve done a few of the numbered ones, and for whatever reason I don’t enjoy them as much. They’re about 30% longer, and the added pages draw out an issue with many of the shorter ones: the resolutions are often unsatisfying. Plausible culprits turn out to be red herrings for no reason that you could have figured out ahead of time, and the bread crumbs to the bad guy can be kind of limited and arbitrary.
There’s also a Thanksgiving-themed one that is entirely focused on the pilgrims, and, while it’s not blatantly offensive, it does have a 90s-era unproblematic stance on Thanksgiving.
Leo enjoyed these and wanted to get through all 26. I liked them enough, but I don’t feel the pull to go back for more. They’re fun and charming, but don’t have much lingering emotional resonance now that it’s been months since we’ve done one of them.
Still, having a series where each story was guaranteed to be a who’s-the-bad-guy puzzle centered on a trio of fun kids was a treat for Leo that he consistently chose over other options.