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If you grew up in the 1960s, and most readers of these reviews and users of the Plumfield libraries did not, you would remember an old comedy show called Mr. Ed The Talking Horse, about – guess – a horse that talks! That show was based on an earlier series of stories written by Walter Brooks, a writer for The New Yorker magazine. Those stories and that 1960s black and white show may have been forgotten but what is still going strong today is the Freddy the Pig series of 26 children’s books that Brooks wrote over 30 years, starting in 1927. The first volume was Freddy Goes to Florida and introduced a small upstate New York farm owned by Mr. and Mrs. Bean. Their animals, led by Freddy the pig, all talk to each other and are quite intelligent. Mr. Bean knows that they can talk but they don’t talk in front of him since they don’t want to embarrass him. The series covers many, many topics, with a mild sense of satire woven through them. They have been reprinted many times and are bound to come back into print one of these days.
Freddy the Detective is #3 in the series and is the volume reviewed here. Freddy gets the idea that he wants to be a detective and opens his own agency on the farm, run out of his pigsty. He solves puzzles on the farm and gets involved with a bigger case involving real criminals and stolen money. The book is very funny and is cleverly written. The animal characters are wonderful, including a sarcastic cat, a slow but thoughtful cow, and conniving rats who are always plotting trouble. The reading age is probably 4th grade on up to adult (I like them, too). Most children like animals and like to laugh, so that Freddy the Detective, and hopefully more titles in the series in the future, would be ideal for their reading. The vocabulary is more sophisticated than one might think, so that the child reader will also learn new words as they read. All the Freddy books are great for reading aloud as a family, as the vocabulary, story, and humor can be appreciated at different levels.