by Moe Zilla

Created on: May 27, 2010

Seymour Sleuth is an enormous brown cat. He wears a white tuxedo to match his bushy white moustache, plus a black bow tie and a red fez - and he looks like Sydney Greenstreet. "I travel around the world solving mysteries," Seymour explains on the book's first page. And "The Mystery of the Monkey's Maze" is a children's picture book which takes the form of a scrapbook about one of his strangest cases.

You might call the pages "busy".  There's a newspaper clipping about a rare flower, and a postcard from Borneo, plus a blue ribbon the detective won in a curry-cooking contest in Singapore. When the detective flies to investigate in Borneo, there's a photograph of his airplane, plus luggage claim tickets, and even an air-sickness bag. And there's lots of photographs of his ride on an elephant when he finally arrives on the island.

But all the extra pictures provide the thing you always want from a mystery: they really do give the reader a chance to solve the case themselves! After reading one of his earlier books - The ABC Mystery - mystery author Sue Grafton described it as "the kind of competition I love...clever, entertaining, and imaginative." (Mimicking the format of her book's titles, she even added that the story was "E is for Excellent.") In this book, the detective realizes that only three people live near a researcher's camp. And one of them has been sending threatening messages like "Beware the Monkey's Maze."

Yes, there is a Monkey's Maze. (According to local legend, it's the only place where the Black Flower of Sumatra will grow.) But the threatening messages were left in the researcher's hut where, an inspection reveals, there's also some incriminating clues. There's a white feather, a chocolate wrapper, and a pin with the initials "SW."

The mystery is important, because without that, it's just another funny story about talking animals. But I like how each suspect has a legitimate motive for the crime, plus a few "Red Herring" clues that make it seem they're likely culprits. For example, one of the suspects - Silo Wiggit - has the initials S.W. But another suspect has a parrot who sheds blue feathers, and a third one has a real fondness for chocolate. At the end of the book, the detective lists out all the clues again. And by the book's final pages, the scrapbook format brings the case to a satisfying conclusion - with a confession form signed by the guilty suspect. There's a fingerprint sample, a mugshot, and a statement from the detective. "It is not surprising I solved this mystery so quickly.

"After all, I am the greatest detective in the world!"

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