Those books were like the MacGuyver TV series for me - loved them as a kid, but upon revisiiting them as an adult wondered what the hell I was thinking. Oh well, I guess he knew his audience. RIP.
I had a slightly different experience. I loved the Einstein Anderson books as a kid, but could never get into the Encyclopedia Brown stories, since I could never understand the ending explanations. Coming back as an adult, I felt unnecessary vindication in finding how many of the ending explanation simply didn't make sense.
As a child I felt the endings were less about deductive reasoning and more about "ha ha! here is a clue I wrote about in a way to deliberately make you, the reader, not attach importance to it!"
Having said that I did read all the Encyclopedia brown in the School library so they were still good, just not great.
Hah! Nice link. I do remember some of those from childhood, including this one which I found to be false even as a kid:
"""One solution in Encyclopedia Brown Takes the Cake relied on the fact that the culprit had used glycerin tears that fell from the outside corners of her eyes instead of the inside, thus revealing them to be fake, as "If only one tear falls, it will run from the inside corner of the eye, by the nose, and not from the outside corner." Only, none of that is true. """
