A twenty-first outing for Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews, and the fourth to be written by Mary Virginia Carey, The Secret of the Haunted Mirror (1974) is another fast-paced and engaging turn for The Three Investigators, even if it doesn’t quite hit the highs that this series or this author have achieved before now.

Returning from a salvage trip with Jupe’s Uncle Titus, the boys see the solid gold Rolls-Royce which they have used many times in the past parked outside a nearby house. When Worthington, the car’s chauffeur, comes running out of said house in pursuit of a thief, the boys join in his efforts to catch the man but he gets away. The house, it turns out, is owned by the respectable Mrs. Darnley, who not only dresses as if she lived in the previous century but also has a fixation with mirrors: certain rooms in her abode being given over to recreating famous scenes from the lives of historically-significant owners of certain mirrors in her possession: Catherine the Great, Queen Victoria, etc.

Other rooms are simply festooned with mirrors, and Carey does well to communicate the sense of unease that such decoration would doubtless engender.

[Jupiter] roamed the shadowy rooms, trying to ignore the sensation that there was motion all about him — motion on every side, as if the old house pulsed with a sinister life of its own. He reminded himself, again and again, that it was all the result of the mirrors — mirrors everywhere in which only his own reflection moved.

It seems, however, that the library was the thief’s possible area of interest, as here is a grand old mirror which previously belonged to the magician Chiavo and has, of course, an eerie and violent history: it’s said that the man disappeared by stepping into the mirror itself, and will cause bloody mayhem for any owner of the mirror who is not in his direct bloodline…or, at least, so Señor Santora, who has travelled many miles to acquire the item, tells them. Can, though, he be trusted?

What unfolds, without wishing to be too dismissive, falls neatly into the expected pattern of these adventures: the boys try to figure out how Santora and the thief might be connected, and, in the meantime, a vision of Chiavo appears in the mirror when the house should be otherwise empty, with Mrs. Darnley and her two young charges Jeff and Jean Parkinson having just returned to the locked mansion.

“So the house was empty while you were out, Mrs. Darnley?” asked Jupe.

“Empty and locked. Dead-bolt locks on both doors and bars on every window. None of them was tampered with. No one could get in here. No one. And I know the doors were locked when we left. John left with us. I watched him lock up and then Jean checked to make sure the doors were secure.”

The book is fun without being exceptional, and Carey does a good job of scaling up the intrigue by folding in the apparent eagerness the president of a foreign country demonstrates to possess the mirror — how to explain that? And how to explain the figure who was seen in the mirror and vanished in a room with no other exits? The plot, it acquires the thickness.

This is, by my estimation, something like the seventh time that the Three Investigator series engaged in a seemingly-impossible crime, and this is at least an improvement over the likes of The Secret of the Crooked Cat (1970) by William Arden in that you’re given a clear, comprehensible explanation about how the effect was achieved. Adult readers will, of course, have seen this sort of thing (far, far too) many times, but again I must commend Carey’s writing in communicating the disquiet and lingering threat when she unpicks the impossible vanishing at about the halfway mark.

Jupe smelled the sick-sour odor of age and dampness, and of air confined for so long that it seemed dead.

The mystery itself, and the eponymous secret, is actually quite neatly folded in, though the book does feel as if that idea and the curse of the mirror were two entirely unrelated plots that happen to have ended up in the same narrative after extensive rewriting. There’s a sense of this not being quite a cohesive as Carey’s previous efforts — see Mrs. Darnley denying she’s ever seen a ghost on one page only to launch into a description of having seen the ghost on the very next page — and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of editing was done in the writing of this to perhaps simplify it for its audience.

But, look, it’s not without merit, it just does reach the heights of Carey’s two previous entries The Mystery of the Singing Serpent (1972) and the exceptionally-structured The Mystery of Monster Mountain (1973). The denouement has fun with the likes of bakery driver Henry Anderson being pulled into proceedings, and a good piece of threat escalation that explains the various plots brings the threads together well — honestly, it’s really not a bad entry in the series at all, it hits the expected notes and pays off as you’d hope…most mystery series would be delighted to have an entry of this quality among them, especially when it doesn’t even represent the peak of what that series has achieved.

The Secret of the Haunted Mirror is, then, a good chance to pause and (ahem) reflect on what’s been so good about the Three Investigators books over recent entries. Both Carey and Arden have found strong voices, rich form, and new confidence in handling these characters, and the fact that we’re still not even halfway through the official list of titles — 43 books in total — bodes well for the series going forward. Incredible to think that work of this quality was once put out in such quantities, so I remain excited to see how things develop from here, even if it is going to get tricky reading the last 11 entries as I don’t have copies of them. That, though, is a problem for later. For now, this was fun and I shall retain a slightly reserved but nevertheless positive impression of it going forward.

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