Poskitt's Puzzles

Last year, I looked back at the Killer Puzzles -- a series of notoriously difficult puzzle books from the 1990s. If you haven't read said look back, then for goodness' sake go and do so now, or this post will be even more inexplicable than it already is.

The Killer Puzzles had a predecessor series that spanned two titles published in 1989 and 1990, Poskitt's Puzzles -- the very first books ever published by Kjartan Poskitt (who already had name recognition as a television presenter, hosting educational series for children such as Science in Action). Whilst clearly aimed at a younger audience than the later series, you can clearly see how the deadlier puzzles evolved out of them.

Both books in the PP series are basically just one big puzzle, rather than the KP approach of lots of individual puzzles which, when all solved, would give you the key to solve a coded message or find a hidden image. First up is The Mystery of the Magic Toy, which is technically an adventure gamebook, although only in the most technical sense of anything I've covered for this blog, ever:

One of Mr. Belcher's toys is magic, but he doesn't know which one, and by solving the puzzles you can rule them out one by one. Apart from a maze, all the puzzles are pretty similar to the above. There are a couple of trap pages that will give you incorrect information if you answer a puzzle wrongly, which seems to be playing at a pretty high level for the target age. As with the Killer Puzzles, neither book in the series provides any answers of solutions, and the way TMotMT gets around this is quite funny, although it does mean that the book lacks any sort of 'reward' for completing it, which all the other books had:

The Mystery of the Pirate's Treasure takes a simpler approach:

Over a series of really quite nice illustrations, the book covers four different treasures, where they were hidden, what they were hidden in, and the order in which our hero Buccaneer Ben found them, the logic puzzle being to work out how the four different criteria match up. Should you do so, you will be able to work out where Ben lost an additional treasure, go back to the illustration and find the missing treasure hidden in said illustration. This is clearly an attempt to add a proper reward for solving the puzzle which was lacking from the first book, although it is fallible, since solving the book just narrows it down rather than making sure you have to solve the puzzle first. Apart from being much, much harder, the Killer Puzzles evolved in this aspect by making sure you had to solve every puzzle and providing a more substantial award for doing so.

Both books provide an address to send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to in order to receive the solution by post for readers who give up (something the Killer Puzzles did not offer, although several years down the line Poskitt provided hints and solutions on his website), which seems a bit much; these puzzles can be pretty tricky for the target audience, but I don't think there's anything they wouldn't have been able to solve with help from their parents. The sense of nostalgia I got at reading about an SAE fits the overall vibe of these books: they're quite nice, and it is interesting to see how the far more difficult series evolved out of it (as well as being about the only books Poskitt ever wrote that lack the occasionally rather dark sense of humour that came to be his trademark).