They would always try to blame it on an older brother or younger sister less ambitious than they who had gotten into the secret section first, but we knew better than to believe their shoddy Eleventh Hour justifications. You may have been fruitlessly working on the mystery for months and had only a Five Star notebook full of mistaken leads to show for it, but you had Eleventh Hour integrity, dammit. Whenever you went over to a friend's house and saw that they had broken the seal, you could feel that unmistakable rush of superiority. Sure, we would finally have the answer to the mystery we had spent the last 347 days pondering, but it would be a hollow victory.
Oh, the temptation! The shame associated with breaking the seal was more often than not too great to go ahead and sell out to the solutions section. The book actually had the solution to the puzzle right there, in a tightly sealed envelope-like contraption following the story. More importantly, we were determined to decode the puzzles without breaking the unspeakably cool sealed section in the back. It was an intricate mystery that grew increasingly complicated with each turn of a page, and as children we were absolutely determined to solve the complex series of riddles. The Eleventh Hour was so much more than just a pleasantly rhyming children's story. The Eleventh Hour was technically published in 1989, but it was such an integral part of my 90s childhood that I'm going to let that formality slide)
(I will admit up front that I may be cheating a tiny bit on this one.
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