The Three Investigators series are a wonderful and wholesome mix of adventure, mystery, comedy, and critical thinking/detection. They enthralled several generations of readers worldwide – and in these new 60th-anniversary editions, they are again ready to take on the world!
The Secret of Terror Castle
The Three Investigators Book 1
by Robert Arthur
Genre: Middle Grade Mysteries with a Supernatural hook
In the first adventure of Robert Arthur’s classic mystery series, it’s 1964 in the town of Rocky Beach, California. Working out of their newly established Headquarters – an old trailer hidden behind carefully arranged junk in the Jones Salvage Yard – and driven around southern California in a gold-plated vintage Rolls Royce they’ve won the use of in a contest, Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews decide to get publicity for their fledgling detective firm by finding a real haunted house for the renowned film director Reginald Clarke.
But although the highly rational Jupiter starts with the belief that there is no such thing as a ghost, a spook, a phantom, or a spirit, Terror Castle – the old mansion supposedly troubled by the ghost of the late Stephen Terrill, the silent horror film star called the Man with a Million Faces – may prove him wrong!
By turns exciting, spine-tingling, and humorous, The Secret of Terror Castle promises to please not only the existing fan base of The Three Investigators series but a whole new generation of readers who will find in its pages three very different boys whose imagination, courage, and intelligence can remind us that curiosity, perseverance, and rational inquiry are just as vital as friendship and cooperation.
At the end of each Three Investigators book published by Hollow Tree Press are notes written by Robert Arthur’s daughter and son-in-law, exploring three subjects connected to the story – in this case, Silent Movies, Salvage Yards, and Rolls Royces – and young readers may want to use the notes as guidelines for further investigation. After all, the motto of The Three Investigators is “We Investigate Anything,” and their trademark is “???” – three question marks, taken together.
On the 60th anniversary of the creation of The Three Investigators series, the first-ever English-language e-book editions of Robert Arthur’s novels, as well as the first new English-language print editions in over twenty-five years, stand ready to delight a whole new audience. Be sure to seek out all ten titles!
The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot
The Three Investigators Book 2
In the second adventure of Robert Arthur’s classic mystery series, Jupiter, Pete and Bob are in search of a missing parrot. The case soon gets complicated as they discover that not one but six talking parrots and a mynah bird have disappeared.
With the help of their new friend Carlos, the Three Investigators figure out that each of the birds has been taught to recite part of a complex puzzle, that, when taken together, could lead the boys to a great painting. But as their search takes them to a spooky graveyard, they’re not the only ones hot on the trail!
By turns puzzling, compelling, and absorbing, The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot promises to please not only the existing fan base of The Three Investigators series but a whole new generation of readers who will find in its pages three very different boys whose imagination, courage, and intelligence can remind us that curiosity, perseverance, and rational inquiry are just as vital as friendship and cooperation.
At the end of each Three Investigators book published by Hollow Tree Press are notes written by Robert Arthur’s daughter and son-in-law, exploring three subjects connected to the story – in this case, Puzzles and Word Games, Parrots, and Sherlock Holmes – and young readers may want to use these notes as guidelines for further investigation. After all, the motto of The Three Investigators is “We Investigate Anything,” and their trademark is “???” – three question marks, taken together.
On the 60th anniversary of the creation of The Three Investigators series, the first-ever English-language e-book editions of Robert Arthur’s novels, as well as the first new English-language print editions in over twenty-five years, stand ready to delight a whole new audience. Be sure to seek out all ten titles!
**Don’t miss the rest of the series!**
ROBERT ARTHUR is best known as the creator of THE THREE INVESTIGATORS, the classic mystery series for young readers, for which he wrote the first ten books before his untimely death in 1969. By the time the last English-language-original book was published in the late 1980s, there were forty-three titles, some of which had been translated into over twenty languages.
Young readers in the U.S., Canada, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand, Denmark, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, and Slovakia, as well as in France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and throughout the Spanish-speaking world grew up on the books, and many credit their lifetime love of reading to having discovered the story of three young American boys who form a detective agency.
Robert Arthur got the idea for the series while working in Hollywood as a story editor, showrunner, and scriptwriter for Alfred Hitchcock’s TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In 1963, he left Hollywood and moved to Cape May, New Jersey, where, in a brown-shingled house two blocks from the Atlantic Ocean, he created The Three Investigators. The Secret of Terror Castle and The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot were published in 1964 by Random House. The series’ original title was ALFRED HITCHCOCK AND THE THREE INVESTIGATORS.
The books have supernatural hooks — haunted houses, whispering mummies, gnomes, ghosts riding carousels, screaming clocks, talking skulls — that turn out, after closer examination, to have rational explanations.
From his memories of his years in southern California, Arthur created the small fictional town of Rocky Beach, not far from Hollywood. His disbelief and dismay at the way old houses were being torn down and their contents junked resulted in his placing The Three Investigators Headquarters in a salvage yard, where all sorts of goods have been reclaimed and are for sale. He based his head investigator, Jupiter Jones, on his idea of a young American Sherlock Holmes, and the boy who keeps records and does research — Bob Andrews — he based on himself (they have the same initials!)
The books are a wonderful and wholesome mix of adventure, mystery, comedy, and critical thinking/detection. They enthralled several generations of readers worldwide – and in this new 60th-anniversary edition, they are again ready to take on the world.
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