Freddy and the Ignormus

Freddy and the Ignormus is a children's mystery by the American writer Walter R. Brooks, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1941. It follows a long line of books about Freddy the pig and the animals who live around the Bean farm.

The trouble begins as a story the animals tell each other: a phantom of the Big Woods, the Ignormus, which nobody has seen and everyone has heard about. Then the legend stops being harmless. Something begins terrorising the farm animals one by one, and the First Animal Bank, the institution the community's savings are kept in, is robbed. Freddy takes the case with his usual confidence, and the mystery he has to solve is the one every small community faces in a story like this: whether the thing frightening everybody is a monster, a trick, or one of their own neighbours.

Brooks wrote the Freddy books for readers of about eight and up, and the farm and its animal society give him a closed world in which a talking pig can be a detective, a poet and a nuisance at the same time.