Encyclopedia Brown’s author, Donald J. Sobol, has died at 87. Wow, did his books become a must read for me from elementary school to adulthood. I graduated from Leroy Brown to Dr. Haledjian in Sobol’s ‘Two Minute Mysteries’. Loved how he baffled me in each story. It’s one reason why I get so frustrated with today’s “Mysteries” that are so very easy to figure out.

Here’s a mystery I never did figure out and i always found ironic: Just how do you pronounce ‘Haledjian’? I always took it in as Hal-dee-an. What do you all think?

Involving Encyclopedia Brown, I also enjoyed the illustrations of Leonard Shortall. Shortall did the cover to the left and all of the interior illustrations of the early part of the series. I believe his illustrations are still being used inside a recent publication I saw of one of the early books. Here’s a list I found of books he illustrated.

I was constantly checking the Encyclopedia Brown series out of Princeton Elementary School library in Orlando. When the Scholastic van started coming to the school, ‘Two Minute Mysteries’ was one of the first I bought for 75 cents. I still have it and the rest I have since purchased.

These books, I think, really had me looking a bit deeper into what was going on in life and greatly contributed to my love of philosophy. They also helped in getting me to be a bit difficult in just buying into anything that’s tossed at me. What was the ‘Rest of the Story’?

I’ll have to go through these mysteries again and see how they hold up to today’s mystery writers, like Patterson, Brown and the like.

Click here for more about Donald J. Sobol and his books.

More and more most of the art I draw is at a local coffee shop where I get away from the phones, internet and various other distractions. Here’s one of the tables at the Chelsea Coffee shop with the drawing board that friend Richard Menard got me years ago, along with pens and an editorial cartoon. I clip the I-pod to the side of the board and listen to political talk shows.