Convalescing With the Three Investigators


A couple of weeks ago I had the last of three procedures to deal with my kidney problems. All this last one amounted to was pulling out a stent that had helped my ailing kidney to drain properly. I figured recovery would be a snap. I was wrong.

When I got out of the outpatient surgery center we went to eat at Subway. After the pre-op fast I was certainly ready for something substantial. The post-op nurse had failed to make clear that I was not supposed to have any solid food until the next day. This probably explains why I spent the next 24 hours trying to throw up.

I also did not anticipate how bad the pain would be. By evening I had taken two hydrocodone tablets and could still hardly stand it. It felt as awful as the pain following the main surgery several months earlier. I began to wonder whether I’d have to run to the emergency room in the county seat. Fortunately by staying very still and keeping ice on me I eventually eased up enough to get some sleep. The night passed in alternating states of sleeping and awakening to take more medicine and deal with necessary functions and try to throw up some more. Mom stayed up half the night with me.

By next day I was finally feeling better. I was able to take much less pain medicine. I could start to eat again. But I still had no strength or energy. I spent half the day napping.

The next day I managed to get out for a while in the morning to go downtown and visit the local library. I spent much of my childhood there, and have always had a sense that I owed the library something. In a way my career has been a way of giving back to a great institution that has so enriched my life. Even though I don’t live near my home town any more, I still like to visit with the librarians there, compare notes about how our reading programs are going, and now and then visit some old friends that still sit on the shelves.

The library was where I discovered “Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators.” They were a juvenile mystery series created by Robert Arthur. Arthur served as a writer for Alfred Hitchcock’s network TV series. During the 1960s Arthur edited a series of anthologies for younger readers with titles like Alfred Hitchcock’s Sinister Spies and Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery. Each of these books bore an introduction purportedly by the renowned director. Presumably Arthur paid his former boss a consideration for the use of his name. I loved those anthologies. But I loved the Three Investigators more.

They were three teens who lived in southern California. First Investigator Jupiter Jones (that was his actual name) lived with his aunt and uncle, the owners of a large salvage yard where the boys had their headquarters. He employed classic Sherlock-Holmes style ratiocination to solve mysteries. Jupe also had a remarkable knack for talking adults into taking him seriously.

Second Investigator Pete Crenshaw was the group’s athlete. He did a lot of the legwork, and spent much of his time standing in awe of Jupe’s abilities. Bob Andrews, who handled the group’s Records and Research, knew his way around the library and the local newspaper morgue.

All three boys were acquainted with Alfred Hitchcock, who appeared as a character in the stories. He supposedly wrote the introductions, occasionally did the boys favors and introduced them to cases, and appeared at the end to listen to the boys describe how the case finally wrapped up.

The stories had plenty of excitement and adventure. The boys went all over California (and, very occasionally, beyond) in search of mystery. Many of the mysteries involved allegedly supernatural events, which Jupe invariably tried to debunk. Covers usually showed all three boys standing in shock at the sight of some bizarre event. A fair number of these covers featured skulls or skeletons. The titles--The Secret of Terror Castle, The Mystery of the Whispering Whispering Mummy, The Mystery of the Green Ghost, etc--combined with these covers to promise plenty of suspense and thrills. And they usually delivered. They were aimed mainly at boys (M.V. Carey, who wrote more entries than anybody else, used her initials to obscure her gender), but girls sometimes got into them too. Perhaps their number one fan is Robert Arthur’s own daughter, who created a web site in his memory—and was written into the books when she was a girl.

The books were series mysteries like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, but they were generally much better written. Arthur negotiated a deal with publisher Random House that allowed authors of the series to use their own names (or a pen-name of their choice) rather than some collective pseudonym like Carolyn Keene. They also got royalties from the popular series. This surely had something to do with the care the writers took.

The stories varied in quality, of course. Arthur’s own series entries are widely regarded by fans as the best. Some of the others did good work as well. The plots had a bit of a Scooby Doo quality to them, with the Investigators as the meddling kids investigating alleged ghosts, but no big goofy dogs in sight. They also remind you at times of 1960s and 1970s detective TV shows, what with the California settings and all.

I read a good dozen of them growing up, all from either the public or school libraries, mainly the former. They had handsome library-bound editions instead of the cheaper paperbacks. Eventually I bought one or two later entries in the series on my own. By this time Alfred Hitchcock had died. The series had become known merely as “The Three Investigators.” It ran through the mid-1980s, with over 40 volumes. There have been a couple of attempts to reprint some of them since. Currently I don’t think any of them are in print, at least in English. They’re said to still be going strong in Germany.

But their popularity means that there are scads of copies in used bookstores and library collections. In the 1990s I read a number of them from the urban public library near where I lived at the time. I’ve also collected several volumes of the series in library bindings. Terror Castle is still my favorite. It almost made one of my nephews afraid to go to bed one evening when I read it to him and his brothers a few years ago.

Recently I found my first “new” Investigators book in several years. It was The Secret of Skeleton Island, an installment that I had not read in so long it was almost like reading a new story. When I find childhood favorites like this I try to save them for just the right time to read. My recent convalescence proved to be just such an occasion.

The afternoon after I visited the library I found myself alone for a few hours at Mom and Dad’s house. It was a mild early summer (in Arkansas summer is well under way by late May) day. Around one side of the house Dad had left a row of scaffolding standing from some remodeling work. As a kid I could never resist trying to climb up on things. So I mounted the scaffolding with my Three Investigators book and sat down to read.

Every few chapters I would stop and lie back and look up at the canopy of green sycamore leaves above, and the pine branches and blue sky above that. The air smelled of warm pine. Now and then an insect buzzed by. I remembered lazy afternoons spent reading outside at this very house, or at my grandmother’s or babysitter’s place. I also wondered who the “Ingrid Jackson” was who had written her name in the front of the book years ago. I’ll never know who she was or what she did in life, but I do know that she was a fellow Three Investigators fan. And that’s enough, I guess.

Those first days after the operation were a frustrating time. I had to keep napping because ordinary everyday things exhausted me. I couldn’t go motorcycle riding with Dad that weekend except when I got on behind him, because my balance wouldn’t let me ride a bike on my own. In a way I was reduced to being a child for a few days. That’s no fun when you’re an adult.

But at least for a while, as I sat on that scaffold in the shade and read about Jupe and Pete and Bob at Skeleton Island, and felt the afternoon air, I had some good childhood memories back as well. You can’t buy memories like that. The Three Investigators, and the library where I first met them, gave me a lot of those memories. It’s part of why I love them both.

That was great!! Thanks for sharing. It sounds like you had a wonderful afternoon.

I hope you are feeling better these days.

Much better! In fact, I went to the doctor yesterday and he talked like I'm doing fine. I don't have to see him again for three months!

I just read The Secret of Terror Castle for the first time in about 30 years.

Just finished The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot, which was actually the first "Three Investigators" book I ever read. Nice little mystery.

Glad to hear you're doing better. Your detective books make me want to read Brains Benton again.

My God---I never posted in this thread? I think when I was younger my mother would bribe me for good behaviour by purchasing Hardy Boys books and later Three Investigator Books. It's a crying shame that they've stopped writing books in the series.

I wonder if Robert Arthur got the idea for the "parrot" from...

My favourite series of books when I was eleven or so...I spent one entire week reading one book a day during one half term I have never forgotten. I made my own three investigator cards, built my own hq in a garden shed (but couldn't figure out how to bury it away under junk) attempted to solve the Mystery of the Lots of Planes Flying Over...I adored these books and thought that they had been written by Hitchcock himself, since the authors name was not prominently featured.

I hope you are feeling better Daphne, BTW.

I loved the junkyard headquarters. Made a big impression on me as a kid.

Every time Jupe explained the question marks, I wet my pants.

Not really.

Yeah, really, a bit.

Nah.

Yea...

What was the explanation again?

Put on a Depend first, Evans.

“What are the question marks for?” he inquired. “They would seem to indicate a doubt of your ability.”

Bob and Pete grinned at each other. The question marks were Jupe’s idea. A question mark was their secret symbol. When one of them wanted to let the others know that he had been to a certain place, he chalked up a question mark. Jupiter used white chalk, Bob green, and Pete blue so each of them always knew who had left the mark.

“The question mark,” Jupiter said now in his most adult manner, “otherwise known as the interrogation mark, is a universal symbol for a question unanswered, a riddle unsolved, a mystery unexplained. Therefore we have made it our trade-mark. We will undertake to solve any mystery you want us to tackle. We cannot promise success, but we can promise to try.”

....oops, damn....

Very nice.

Someone should do a reboot of "The Three Investigators."

Sounds like you were a great fan!

At this point I've had nearly 3 straight years of great health. I hope you're doing well too.