Pigging Out on Sherlock Holmes (LINK)
"As the story begins, Freddy the pig is shadowing his fellow animals on the Bean farm. "I got the idea," he says, "from a book I found in the barn,
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It's the best book I've come across in a long time, and you'll admit I know something about literature."
"He finds himself working to solve a real mystery when the toy train belonging to the human boy and girl on the farm disappears. He unearths clues, including green paint scratches and grey hairs, and eventually brings the crime home to the perpetrators, old Simon the rat (Freddy's Moriarty) and his criminous family. It takes a while, though: "Even Sherlock Holmes couldn't do everything in a minute," Freddy tells Jinx defensively. There are, of course, complications and subplots, including the appearance of a "city detective," provocatively named Montague Boner."
"Freddy the Detective was published by Knopf in 1932. It was the third book in the Freddy series, but the first to set what became a pattern in the ensuing two decades with
Freddy the Magician,
Freddy Goes Camping,
Freddy the Pilot, and so on. There have been a number of subsequent editions of Detective, and it is now
in print from Overlook Press. "