Clue Books

This series of solve-it-yourself mini mysteries is based on the popular board game, Clue.

The characters in the stories are the usual suspects in the board game:

Mrs. White – Mr. Boddy’s bitter maid. She hates being a maid and working for Mr. Boddy, although she’s reasonably good at pretending that she’s not bitter in front of Mr. Boddy.

Mrs. Peacock – She is obsessed with proper manners and often accuses the others of rudeness.

Miss Scarlet – She’s very pretty but vain.

Mr. Green – He’s a pushy businessman.

Professor Plum – He’s very forgetful.

Colonel Mustard – He’s obsessed with dueling and is always looking for a reason to challenge other characters to a duel.

Mr. Reginald Boddy is a wealthy man who is friends with the other suspect characters. Really, the suspects are mainly friends with Mr. Boddy because of his money. They’re all shady and suspicious in various ways. They don’t particularly like Mr. Boddy or each other, although they hang out together and do things together all the time. At the same time, they keep stealing things from each other and Mr. Boddy and even apparently try to kill each other. However, even though there are times when someone, especially Mr. Boddy, seems to have been killed, no one actually dies.

In every book, Mr. Boddy seems to have been killed in the final chapter, but there is always a reason why he survives in the next book in the series. Each time, all of the suspect characters are still around, no matter what happened in the previous book. Mr. Boddy still keeps inviting his “friends” to do things with him and even seems fond of them, although there are times when it seems like he realizes just how untrustworthy they are. This pattern mimics the Clue board game, where players repeatedly solve the murder of Mr. Boddy in his mansion, with a different, random murderer each time.

The mysteries are sort of like Encyclopedia Brown books and similar solve-it-yourself mystery series. Each book contains a collection of short mysteries, and readers are given the opportunity to solve them before reading the solutions. Many of the mysteries are like logic puzzles. Not all of them are about a crime, either. Sometimes, the mysteries are about harmless things, like which of the characters was wearing which costume at a Halloween party.

When I was a kid, I used to buy these books at school book fairs. I liked the mysteries and puzzles. The characters got on my nerves because they were so duplicitous to the nice Mr. Boddy, but at the same time, I suppose that they have to be suspicious characters because they were specifically created to be suspects in a murder mystery game, and they all have to look potentially guilty.

Every book in the series is named after one of the stories it contains. Multiple authors worked on the series. All of the books in the series are available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Books in the Series

Since each of this these books contains a series of mini-mysteries, I’ll list them in each book review. Here, I’ll just make note of any particular stories I’d like to call attention to, like holiday-themed stories.