by Moe Zilla

Created on: June 12, 2010

Doug Cushman has tried writing several detective-story parodies for children. There was "Mystery at the Club Sandwich," which seemed loosely modeled on The Maltese Falcon, but with an elephant instead of Humphrey Bogart. And in the late 1980s, he'd launched a series of "young reader" books about a mystery-solving aardvark, with "Aunt Eater loves a mystery." But in 1996, he published "The Mystery of King Karfu," the first in a pair of books about an intrepid dog detective whose name was Seymour Sleuth.

"This is the casebook of one of my most baffling mysteries..."

Someone's stolen the Stone Chicken of King Karfu, and a telegram invites Seymour to investigate at the king's tomb. While he takes a boat called the Sea Pharoah, he reads up on the missing artefact. It's believed to be a clue that could lead to ancient king's legendary golden box, which contains his most valuable treasure. Seymour arrives in Cairo, takes a camel to the king's tomb, and the investigation has begun.

This book contains more text than most children's picture books, but it gives more advanced readers a chance to play along. Seymour's casebook shares four clues - a claw-shaped footprint in the mud, crumbs at the scene of the crime, a red fish, and what looks like part of a recipe. And since the stone chicken was stolen from an archeaology professor, his close acquaintances are the obvious suspects. There's an art student, the professor's cook, and a rival archaeology professor. Seymour interviews them all, and listens to their perspective on what happened.

There's some detective jokes here which adult readers will probably enjoy more than younger readers. (One of the clues is a red fish which the detective dismisses as unimportant because "It was a herring from the sandwich I brought for my lunch.") But he possibility of treasure makes the investigation more exciting. And towards the end of the book, the archaeology professor discovers someone has stolen his secret decoding book.

"There is only one person who would need the decoder book," Seymour Sleuth announces, and then escorts the professor to the tent of the guilty party. But the codebook is more than just the mystery's crucial clue. It also provides readers with a second chance to solve one of the book's mysteries. The stone chicken contains a message that's written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Young readers can crack the simple substitution code for themselves - on two separate pages.  

Though it turns out the ancient king's valuable treasure was just a recipe.

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