It’s happened to us all: you’re minding your own business in a second-hand bookshop, and suddenly you stumble over 17 volumes of a juvenile mystery series you’ve never heard off…and a Three Investigators-adjacent-sounding juvenile mystery series, at that.

The Screech Owls series by Roy MacGregor, I would find as a result of research, was started as an attempt to capture reluctant readers. Beginning with Mystery in Lake Placid (1994), the series now runs to 27 titles, all, as far as I can tell, based around the eponymous high school-age hockey — I think it’s ice hockey, but everyone just calls it “hockey” — team and the various scrapes they get into. I wasn’t about to over-commit and buy all seventeen on offer (I’m not making that mistake again…) but picked up three, choosing Murder at Hockey Camp (1997), the fourth title chronologically, because I was intrigued about how this supposedly light-sounding series would cope with violent death — not something the Three Investigators have confronted yet.

The camp in question is off-season training, with the Screech Owls and their sister (?) team the Aeros having travelled up state with coach ‘Muck’ Munro to get in some practice. Run by Buddy O’Reilly, who appeared in three games for the Philadelphia Flyers in the NHL “but carried himself as if he’d won three Stanley Cups”, things are a little tense due to O’Reilly’s aggressive tactics: encouraging dodgy plays, singling out Wayne ‘Nish’ Nishikawa for abuse on account of his size, and generally being something of an arse to just about everyone.

Can you spell ‘future victim’? You can now…

This is not a long book — it wouldn’t be if the intention was to encourage people who dislike reading to pick it up — I’ld guess it’s about 10,000 words over 110 pages, and the murder doesn’t occur until page 70. This means that 64% of the book occurs without any murder, and so the obvious questions presents itself: how much of that time is spent setting up the mystery?

Given the relative brevity of this, and MacGregor’s own admitted inexperience when it comes to writing, it’s surprising just how much of this is spent doing fairly traditional mystery things. There must, after all, be suspects, and when O’Reilly is seen fighting with Muck we certainly get one, but I sincerely doubt that the guy who has been leading the team for the series this far is going to turn out to be a killer in Book 4, so you need at least one more likely suspect and then at least one other person to be the killer: and that’s exactly what you get. You also need a way for the police to fall for the wrong guy and the youthful heroes to be the ones who see through the misdirection, and you get that too. So far, so classic.

MacGregor does well, too, to hide the relevant setting up of these things in activities that feel like the sort of hijinks that people unexcited about reading might enjoy reading about: the mosquito prank and the shaving foam prank make for interesting reading on their own, but that MacGregor is clearly setting them up to intersect and thus feed the later plot is a good plotting choice. This ties in to O’Reilly’s behaviour and the sort of high-spirited, weekend-away-from-home attitude of these young kids (c.f. the prank played on Nish in the lake following his heavy challenge on Sara during the game). It’s very light, but there’s undeniably some good intention behind it from a plot perspective.

It’s not all a complete success, however. Ostensibly the action is seen from the third-person perspective of Screech Owls captain Travis Lindsay, but there are so many kids on the two teams (on page 78 two people called Andy and Gordie are mentioned, and I honestly can’t tell you if they ever feature anywhere else in the book) that, if I’m being honest, I sort of thought of them more like a collective of flies than of individuals. Like, so long as I had the various adult characters straight in my had, it didn’t really matter if I knew precisely which kid was doing what, because they become a sort of autonomous collective. It’s easily done — we’ve all written, and read, stories with too many characters — but I would have hoped that a tighter focus on a core group, like with the Three Investigators, would have been deployed to help the people this series was trying to attract latch on more easily to clear people and personalities.

Or maybe that’s worse…because what if you don’t care for the group you’re forced to spend time with? The more I think about it, the more deliberate this might be.

Anyway, the murder when it comes is treated intelligently and as the hugely disrupting and affecting event it would be in the lives of these kids. The police descend, the obvious conclusion is jumped to, and it’s up to Travis and Becky and Harriet and Tom and Alice and Phil and Geoff and others to ensure their coach isn’t, like, put to death. Again, the investigation here is cleanly done, and the eventual clue used to track down the real killer far from subtle, but you can’t deny that MacGregor has done some good legwork in folding the solution of the mystery into the foregoing narrative. There aren’t 70 pages of Youthful Fun, a sudden murder, and the solution to that murder drawn out of a hat with no reference to the opening 70 pages. On that front, it’s a success.

MacGregror also writes quite well, evincing a subtle anti-gun message that — as someone from a country where you can’t just buy firearms left, right, and centre and bleat about constitutional rights if anyone tries to stop you — I can’t honestly believe is terribly popular in the country of setting, and has a particularly interesting perspective on aspects of professional hockey:

[Buddy] seemed to be desperate to get back at Muck, but unable to break free of Jason’s hold. Travis had seen this a hundred times before in NHL games… You struggled for show. You made it seem like you could kill the guy if you could only get there — a huge, hulking hockey player in full equipment, held back by a smaller, older linesman wearing hardly any protective equipment at all.

There’s also clearly a message of the murder being a problem unto itself: once the real killer is found the kids needs not give it another thought, the final 11 pages (quite a proportion of the book, don’t forget) being the equivalent of those 1980s sitcom closing titles where the actors’ names appear over a frozen image of them laughing and showing what a good time everyone just had. And, sure, better this than a series of drawn out interviews with a police-appointed psychologist, but, wow, it sure is a lot of a short book to drive home the message that hey, fuggeddaboutit.

So, well, how to feel about the Screech Owls at this first encounter? It would be inaccurate to say that I regret buying just three of the seventeen titles, this clearly not trying to provide the same experience as the Three Investigators, the closest analogue I have to the style of book written here. And yet, in writing this up, I’ve become perhaps more appreciative of what MacGregor does well and what potential the series has as a whole. I’ll read the later books I possess before coming to any solid conclusion, but I might be inclined to buy more of these should the situation present itself. The titles alone invite some interesting speculation: Danger in Dinosaur Valley (1999), The West Coast Murders (2000), Sudden Death in New York City (2000), Trouble at the Top of the World (2009)…

Aaaah, hell, I’m going to end up really regretting my caution, aren’t I? Dammit, Jim!