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dspeyer comments on Rationalist Fiction - Less Wrong
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Encyclopedia Brown is an especially bad example. Most of the mysteries he solves, he solves by knowing some piece of minor trivia which contradicts some off-hand statement of the criminal. This promotes "rationality" as "knowing a lot of facts", which is absolutely not what we're trying to promote here, and provides the wrong model of problem solving. Encyclopedia Brown is based on formal logic, not Bayesian probability.
Or non-facts.
I haven't read them, but I think it a bad sign that the tvtropes article "Conviction by Counterfactual Clue" is also known as "Encyclopedia Browned".
Whenever EB catches somebody this way, I always read it as that he's bluffing. After all, the perp always confesses when confronted with the alleged proof, so it really doesn't matter how EB knows (psychological analysis, another clue that would be harder to explain, the knowledge that Bugs Meany always lies); he just has to wait around until he can find something that he can claim proves his case.