Freddy The Detective

Freddy the pig does some detective work in order to solve the mystery of a missing toy train

"Oh, I am the King of Detectives, / And when I am out on the trail / All the animal criminals tremble, / And the criminal animals quail..." boasts Freddy, the poetry-prone, Sherlock Holmes-obsessed pig who stars in Walter R. Brooks's beloved series. From 1927 to 1958, Brooks wrote 26 Freddy books--including Freddy Goes to Florida--all focused on the well-rounded pig, who has been described by various fans as ingenious, intelligent, loyal, and resourceful. Since Brooks's books fell out of print, librarians across the country have scrounged up copies wherever possible, even resorting to photocopying the books and binding them with hockey-stick tape! To the delight of thousands, the fabulous Freddy books have been reprinted by Overlook Press!

The intrigue of Freddy the Detective begins on the Bean Farm (Freddy's upstate New York abode), when a toy train is discovered missing from young Everett Bean's room. Freddy jumps at the chance to prove his sleuth skills: "I'll find that train, you bet! There are a lot of mysteries on a farm like this and I'll solve 'em all!" he proclaims. The pig can't gracefully outfox the rats (and they sing derisive songs about him), but eventually he does solve cases from "The Mystery of Egbert" (about a bunny who'd wandered off from his family) to "The Case of Prinny's Dinner" (about a white woolly dog's missing food). The shenanigans all sound innocent enough, but Brooks is hilariously tongue-in-cheek; his insightful descriptions of animal characters are always compassionate; and his subtle appeal to a child's instinct for justice is no less than masterful. As Adam Hochschild of the New York Times Book Review writes, "The moral center of my childhood universe, the place where good and evil, friendship and treachery, honesty and humbug were defined most clearly, was not church, not school, and not the Boy Scouts. It was the Bean Farm." Welcome back, Freddy! (Ages 9 to 12, but great for reading aloud to younger children.) --Karin Snelson