mysteries for children

Earlier this summer, I was discussing juvenile mysteries with a group of kids. I was trying to teach them the idea of "when you know how, you know who", because I'm a Dorothy L. Sayers fan. But before I could get started, I realized that taken as a body, juvenile mysteries don't have red herrings, or complex motives, or most of the other elaborations that make adult mysteries difficult to solve. Once I realized that, I stopped being quite so irritated with Sobol for making Encyclopedia Brown mysteries almost impossible to solve without a perpetual calendar, or an intimate knowledge of all flora and fauna.