The author of the Encylopedia Brown series has passed away. Donald J. Sobol wrote mysteries since 1959 in an innovative format that enthralled me as a kid.

Each book is subdivided into around a dozen short mysteries. Sobol intended them to be solved by the young reader, tipped off by a logical or factual inconsistency somewhere in the text. As Entertainment Weekly reports:

Sobol came up with the concept when he came across a book by chance at the New York Public Library. The book had puzzles on one side of the page and solutions on the other, and it occurred to him to write a mystery book in the same style.

Buried business lesson: You gain strategic advantage by making greater use of a given format. Are you limited by real constraints, or just convention?