by Moe Zilla

Created on: August 15, 2010

It's like The Three Little Pigs meets an episode of "Cops." It's one of several children's picture books that parody detective stories. (For example, "What REALLY Happened to Humpty Dumpty" seemed to be consciously modeled on The Maltese Falcon.) In "Where's the Big Bad Wolf?" a dog introduces himself as the police detective who's in charge of catching rascals who do bad things like stealing chickens. The book opens as Phineas T. Doggedly threatens to throw the Big Bad Wolf into jail if he gets in trouble one more time.

The wolf promises that he'll be good from now on - but on the very next page, someone's apparently blown over a straw house just by huffing and puffing!

It really does feel like a children's picture book crime story. "Late one night I'm driving down the road," reports the dog - from inside his blue police car with the red flashing light - "when out of nowhere a big gust of wind huffs and puffs! Suddenly, straw is flying everywhere! It's so think I can't see two feet ahead." See, the narration in most children's books doesn't focus on the visibility outside a police car's windshield...

"I stop my car..."

What makes this parody funny is that while the investigation seems detailed and real, the culprit is still obvious from the very beginning - to everyone except the doggy police officer.  In a trenchcoat and hat, the detective shines his flashlight on the scene of the crime, where he hears the sound of "pigs in distress." But already helping the pigs out of the pile of the straw is someone very tall, with a grey snout, but with shaggy sheep's wool pulled over his head. "I'm Esmerelda," this good Samaritan says. "Good thing I happened to walk by - just in time to rescue these delectable little piggies!"

Eileen Christelow is best known for creating the "Five Little Monkeys" series of books, and it's fun to compare the two books. (Both books show a lot of misbehavior - and an authority figure struggling desperately to restore order.) There's some similarity in the drawing styles, though the hunt for the missing wolf is obviously a much more complicated story. This story also has a lot more text than some children's picture books, but there's still a lot of Christelow's sunny, simple illustrations.

I have to say it's a little weird when the detective announces, "I know you did it, BBW!" (Apparently Eileen Christelow hasn't learned all of Craigslist's abbreviations!) But what's even more surprising is how long it takes the dog to realize that Esmerelda the sheep is really the wolf in a disguise. Eventually two of the pig's houses get blown down. But the detective starts to get suspicious when the pigs build an impervious brick house - and that night he discovers the wolf is panting and out of breath.....

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