Mysteries Ahoy!

Last week I decided I would take a short break from reading mystery fiction to (briefly) explore some other interests. Well, I didn’t end up reading as widely as I hoped although I did start to work my way through my hefty backlog of Doctor Who audio dramas but here I am back and raring to talk mysteries again.

Today’s post however won’t be about books but rather about the ways I have been able to share my enjoyment of mysteries with my daughter over the past few weeks.

Now, let me start by saying that I do not force mystery stories onto my daughter! I occasionally will point out one when we are looking for a new book but I let her tell me what she wants to read. Lately however she has been showing a growing interest in detective stories.

Part of the reason for that was the Outfoxed board game I blogged about recently which continues to be a hit with her but I think the biggest leap forward came courtesy of a Netflix TV show – The InBESTigators.

The InBESTigators is an Australian children’s television show about a group of elementary-aged kids who decide to start an investigation agency after solving a case at their school.

Each episode contains two short cases, recounted in the form of vlogs made after the cases are solved. One or two of the team will recount what happened and there are lots of short cutaways to show the things they remember and to bring the action to life.

The cases are, of course, entirely of the sort of crimes that would be appropriate for that age group. Missing backpacks, stolen snacks and so on. Many hinge on a central problem of how or why things happened in a particular way. As viewers find out, not everything is a case of someone acting with bad intent – often a particular set of strange circumstances will create the impression something has happened.

To give an example of a case – the first one involves a tin of money disappearing from a shelf behind where one of the InBESTigators is standing. No one else is in the room, the child placed the money on the shelf themselves and they could see that nobody entered.

The result is a surprisingly charming series, helped by the energy, colorful personalities and likeability of the four young leads. The decision to use lots of very short sequences gives the episodes a frantic feel that was more comfortable for my daughter than me but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the stories generally involved some pretty sound logical reasoning.

Now, obviously these cases are not going to challenge a teen or adult viewer but as an introduction to the idea of mystery stories as a game that you can play it is hard to beat.

So, this past weekend was Father’s Day and my wife and kid decided that they wanted to give me a day that had a detective theme. They set up a game for us to play where we would work as a team to crack a case – the theft of some valuable jewels.

The game was, of course, mostly set up at my daughter’s level. Suspects were crossed off when they told us they had an alibi and we worked out by process of elimination who was the guilty party.

To obtain clues we had to do games, find items around the house and solve some puzzles. It was a lot of fun made all the sweeter when we were rewarded with snacks for a job well done and my daughter is keen to don her fedora again to repeat the experience soon.

As Father’s Days go it was pretty special and I feel very grateful for the love and attention shown to me!