"I did not and do not like Encyclopedia Brown."

I love detective fiction; as a child simpleton (“Why isn’t he talking yet?” psychologists asked my parents on the occasion of my third birthday), I nourished myself on a diet of mystery stories: Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, the Hardy Boys. I adored the Hardy Boys. Or rather, I adored Frank, the older, studious, dark-haired Hardy boy. His younger brother Joe was sporty and blond, and even at that age, I distrusted blonds.

So it made sense that, around age seven or so, I should solicit the services of Leroy “Encyclopedia” Brown—boy detective, son of Idaville’s police chief, and hero of more than a dozen collections by Donald J. Sobel, who would go on to write nearly 20 more books featuring his prepubescent gumshoe. I was in trouble from the very first page. It featured a drawing of the sign posted on a gasoline can in Encyclopedia’s garage: “24¢ PER DAY PLUS EXPENSES.” Alarm bells blared. As I’d learnt from my mother, you get what you pay for.

Now, I’m no sleuth. To this day I usually even can’t identify the victim of a crime, let alone the culprit. “I wonder who dies?” I’ll ask myself on picking up Agatha Christie’s Lord Edgware Dies. But Encyclopedia’s cases—I use the term generously—were so obvious, so utterly rudimentary, that even my idiot brain clocked whodunit within two paragraphs. Not so Encyclopedia, who puzzled over his mysteries for 10 or 12 pages minimum before smugly announcing the solution to his sidekick/bodyguard Sally Kimball (a young woman with serious anger-management issues and what I now recognize as an assault record), and resident sociopath Bugs Meany (leader of the Tigers, an Idaville “gang” only slightly less intimidating than a hamster dressed as a Girl Scout). “There is no such date as the thirty-first of June,” Encyclopedia would explain, awing his audience.

Reader, I hated him. Even I knew there was no such date (The Case of the Secret Pitch). Even I understood that tears usually flow from the inner corner of the eye (The Case of Hilbert’s Song). Even I recognized that if a wristwatch runs 15 minutes fast, and a suspect in its theft arrives at a rendezvous a quarter-hour early, he’s your perp (The Case of the Stolen Watch).

But like his evidently lobotomized clients, I wound up owing a debt to Encyclopedia Brown. It’s thanks to him that through the decades since, I’ve sought out challenging, nuanced mystery fiction—the elegant psychological thrillers of Patricia Highsmith and Gillian Flynn; brainy police procedurals by Sara Paretsky and Tana French; Carl Hiaasen’s neon-tinted Florida romps. I’m proud to read these books and others; they’ve made me a sharper reader and a stronger writer. I’d say that’s worth 24¢ per day. Although maybe not expenses.

A. J. Finn has written for numerous publications, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Times Literary Supplement (UK). A native of New York, Finn lived in England for ten years before returning to New York City.