Rest in Peace, Donald J. Sobol; you and Encyclopedia Brown will be missed!

I just learned that one of my favorite childhood authors, Donald J. Sobol, died last week.  I remember him particularly well, because his work was among the first books, inexpensive paperbacks, that I bought for myself as a child, using my own hard-earned money, as distinct from books selected for me as gifts by adults.  (I'm still wondering who in their right mind would give even a precocious 7 year old a book about Bizet's opera, Carmen, considering the very adult subject matter of sensuality, seduction, and murder. I did read it, but it would be safe to say that some of those adult choices in reading material when I was a kid were a bit hit and miss.)

While perhaps not quite as widely recognized or award winning as Maurice Sendak, or as lucrative and popular with adults as the work of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, Sobol's fiction  was just as entertaining, and more educational and analytical.  Sobol wrote the mystery series that featured analytical thinking and science knowledge without requiring the complex laboratories of the currently popular police dramas like the various forensic lab shows.  The  Encyclopedia Brown series of books that spun off into a comic strip and television series, and the Two-minute mystery books series.  In 2007, he received a special Edgar, the award for exceptional mystery writing.

In addition to writing for children, Sobol had a news reporter career before becoming a full time author.  He additionally wrote non-fiction books, and contributed to magazines under an assortment of noms de plume.

I was surprised to read that his manuscripts are in the Kerlan collection, at the University of Minnesota.

A quick peruse of Amazon.com shows that not only are his books still in print, a search of books by author turned up 551 items for sale; I stopped looking after page 10, but not only the fictional works, but the range of non-fiction topics was quite impressive.  Possibly the most surprising discovery in those 10+ pages of his work in print was that there is a new work of his scheduled to come out posthumously, in October 2012.