Several years back when I was working on a pitch document for a potential subversive cozy mystery series, I wanted my main character (a riff on Miss Marple) to have had a previous mentor relationship with a now-jaded adult who was formerly a child detective. I imagined her as a kind of Veronica Mars by-way-of Encyclopedia Brown, a character whose books were among some of my favorite reading when I was eight or nine. Even at that age, there was a simplicity to the brief mysteries, and it was always fun to try and figure out what the clue was that led Encyclopedia to his always correct solution, flipping to the “solutions” section at the back of the book to see if I had come to the correct conclusion. I had also very much enjoyed Joe Meno’s novel The Boy Detective Fails when I read it while in college. There’s something so fascinating about that archetype to me, perhaps speaking to the former gifted child in me, about a kid whose potential fails to pan out as an adult because they peaked too early in life. There was a 2009 film starring Donald Glover called Mystery Team that I remember trying and failing to enjoy when it first came out; it was more about adults stuck in their misdemeanor-catching adolescence, and the humor was a little too broad for me. I was hesitant to give Kid Detective a shot after the bad taste that one left in my mouth, but the Adam Brody of it all pulled me in, and I’m glad it did. 

When he was a kid, Abe Applebaum was the similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from Encyclopedia Brown of his quiet town. He figured out who stole the cashbox from the student fair, solved the riddle of missing jewelry, and even managed to solve a couple of majorish crimes. His youth was his advantage, as any time he had to hide in a closet when someone came home while he was searching their house, they found the situation cute rather than troubling. Eventually, the town set him up with an office, where the mayor’s daughter Gracie was his secretary and got paid in soda pop, but at age twelve, he lost all zest for his shenanigans when Gracie went missing. Although all of the adults in his life tell him that this is out of his league, he gets calls from his peer group asking when he’ll find her, and he carries that psychological weight into adulthood. Now, Abe (Brody) is barely getting by on the meager money he makes doing private detective work, sharing a rental house with a slovenly roommate and bickering with his current assistant, Lucy (Sarah Sutherland). It’s mostly still the same half dollar ante nonsense as when he was a kid—finding out if a kid’s classmate actually played with the Mets while on summer vacation, locating a missing cat—until Caroline (Sophie Nélisse, now best known for playing teenaged Shauna on Yellowjackets) appears in his office. Her boyfriend Patrick Chang was murdered, stabbed seventeen times, and she doesn’t feel like the police are doing anything. She wants Abe to solve the case. 

The actual mystery throughline in this one is clever, with red herrings aplenty and revelations that seem important in the moment but which end up leading nowhere, while smaller moments have greater implications down the line. That’s the basic art of the mystery misdirect, but comedic ones like Kid Detective are rarely woven so expertly. It turns out that Patrick was living a bit of a double life, as the Red Shoe Gang had started turning to the tactic of recruiting academic high performers to sell in school since they were above suspicion, and he had cheated on Caroline with an older girl. There’s also the presence of Calvin, Patrick and Caroline’s schlubby friend who has a strong crush on her, and he joins a pack of potential suspects that populates the film. Caroline is along for most of the ride, or more accurately is there to provide the ride, as she carts Abe around in a beige 1990 Chrysler LeBaron convertible so he can interview people. 

When reminiscing, Abe narrates that he used to lie awake at night wondering if he was the smartest person in the world. We do see that a large part of his solutions to the mysteries from his childhood were the result of the exact kind of (simplistic) deduction that Encyclopedia Brown would come to. E.B. would figure out that Bugs Meany had never actually hidden a dollar bill in the book he claimed to because he said he hid it between “pages 77 and 78,” which is of course impossible because those two page numbers would be on opposite sides of the same leaf. Abe does the same, naming a boy who was bitten by a dog the previous summer for stealing the school’s money because it was for animal welfare, and his apparent random deduction does seem to be correct based on the cashbox being found in the kid’s desk the next day. Abe has gone through his whole life like this, synthesizing scientific tidbits with questions that get people to think around their problems, like asking someone who had a piece of jewelry stolen at a birthday party who had the most cake, to determine who the burgled person subconsciously trusts the least. A lot of his leaps in logic, like that a person’s recent preference for bananas over peaches suggests a depressive episode because one fruit requires much less effort and cleanup, are far from “evidence,” but he gets things right just often enough that he’s decently good at his “job” despite the trauma and failure that haunt him. 

The first two acts of the film are comedically balanced. We establish who Abe is and that he’s still literally reaping the rewards of his past despite people’s general apathy toward him in the present, like still cashing in on the “free ice cream for life” that he was given at Old Mr. Hepburn’s sweets shop for something that he did as a child, despite Mr. Hepburn’s clear resentment of him. The scenes with Calvin are among the best. When we first meet him, he attempts to delicately tread around revealing some of Patrick’s indiscretions in front of Caroline, while also unsuccessfully concealing his crush. Later, he sneaks into Calvin’s family’s home while he believes that they’re away and ends up trapped in an upstairs closet in the younger sister’s room, where he ends up being caught while trying to escape after night falls and ends up branded as a pedophile. Another decent running gag is that Abe is so disconnected that he never seems to know what day of the week it is, breaking into people’s houses when he expects them to be at work only to be told that it’s Sunday. The only thing that doesn’t really work is the relationship that Abe has with his parents; there’s just something that’s a little off about the “You need to get a real job” paternalism that’s undercut when they follow him around while he’s following leads. 

In the third act, we take a pretty steep turn into the dark. There turns out to be a connection between Patrick’s murder and Gracie’s disappearance two decades prior that I didn’t see coming, although there were a couple of things that were already failing to add up for me. Patrick’s killing turns out to have had nothing to do with the Red Shoe Gang leads that Abe was trying to track down, but I won’t spoil it for you here. This is one that’s worth checking out, especially if you always wanted to be a kid detective, too. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond