Mary Virginia Carey was not, it seems, scared of a little velitation in her stewardship of The Three Investigators.
Having written arguably the strongest post-Robert Arthur title in The Mystery of the Singing Serpent (1972), Carey structured The Mystery of Monster Mountain (1973) like a classical whodunnit, pulling out some strong clewing on the way to a conclusion that ringed (rung…? rang…? rong…?) the changes by introducing an element that some commentators are calling controversial to this day. And then, two years later, Carey wrote The Mystery of the Invisible Dog (1975) and…wow, honestly, that anyone can remember to complain about …Monster Mountain after this kinda amazes me.
Once again, the setup here has about it trappings not unlike a classic mystery, even if it takes a little while to appreciate them. We open with the boys on their way to see Mr. Fenton Prentice who resides in an apartment house: essentially a series of apartments set around a common social area which, in this case, contains a swimming pool. Prentice, it seems, has been having ghostly visitations:
“You don’t believe me,” said Prentice. “I was afraid you wouldn’t, but it’s true. Someone gets in here when I’m away. I come back and find that my things aren’t the way I left them. Once I found my desk drawer partly open. Someone had been reading my letters.”
And, lest this not exactly scream HAUNTING to you, there’s more, with Prenctice going on to explain having actually seen the apparition which is causing this disquiet:
“What I see is…not quite a person. It’s more like a shadow. Sometimes I’m reading and I can feel it. I feel that there is a presence here. If I look up, I may see it. Once I saw someone in the hall–someone tall and thin. I started to speak. Perhaps I shouted. He didn’t turn, but went into the den. I went after him. The room was empty.”
Since he insists there is only one key to his abode, and that secret passages won’t wash, how to explain the miraculous disappearance of this sinister wraith?
Before the boys can investigate too closely, however, disruption occurs outside, with the police chasing a thief into the environs of the apartment house only for him to disappear in not-quite-impossible-but-nevertheless-slightly-baffling circumstances. Here enters the classic mystery element, with this thief suspected of having made off with a valuable sculpture commissioned by Prentice and, hard upon the back of his passing through the domicile, a series of dangerous events occurring that involve and/or incapacitate the residents.
Miss Gwen Chalmers, who “works as a buyer for a department store downtown” is sent poisoned chocolates. Stockbroker Mr. Murphy’s flat is set aflame with him dozing inside, a (harmless) explosive device is placed in the engine of the car of Mrs. Bortz, the nosey battleaxe of a landlady…and more besides. And then Mr. Prentice comes to realise that the phantom he’s been seeing in his flat bears a striking resemblance to Sonny Elmquist, another of the apartment house’s tenants, a young man of somewhat dubious employment who claims to want to study meditation with the gurus in India.
What, frankly, is going on?
Someone was using violence to get people out of the building. Would the Three Investigators be next?
In a way, the title of this book is all wrong, because the mystery isn’t really about the invisible dog — indeed, it’s sort of a spoiler to explain why that’s the title, and it only really takes up a small part of the narrative. Although, that said, it’s arguably the cleverest part — taken largely from a John Dickson Carr story (in this collection), which I think is the one discussed (and spoiled) herein without its title being given — so you can understand the publishers wanting to draw attention to it…especially when some of the other elements here come into play. And, honestly, without spoiling it, I can’t go into the controversies. But, yes, they’re going to be controversial.
Did I care for it? Not really. The element of …Monster Mountain talked about above worked for me because it leant so fully into the mystery at its core and was, for this style of detective series, a fun way to subvert some expectations. In this book, though, we just sort of throw out the rules, and so it starts to edge into something that the series has very much not been for the 22 books prior to this.
Which is not to say that the book is without its strong points. I very much enjoyed the shocked Miss Chalmers reflecting that “The police told me the name [of the toxin in the chocolates] but it didn’t register. It wasn’t anything like arsenic or strychnine — you know, those classy poisons used in mystery stories”, and the clear novelty of being able to set up a closed-circuit television setup to keep an eye on the communal area (“Oh, yeah!” said Pete. “They’ve got them all over the place now. Security people use them to watch for shoplifters.”) is charming. I also learned — and that I, obsessive that I am, never thought to think of this before actually embarrasses me — that St. Jude is “patron saint of the impossible”, so expect that to come back up on the blog at some point.
All told, The Mystery of the Invisible Dog is not likely to feature highly on any ranking of this series I may eventually do, but it’s a perfectly enjoyable time until it veers into…what it does and probably should not. Carey has been so good with these characters and plots prior to now, however, that it will take more than one bump in the road to make me question her driving.
~
The hub for Three Investigators reviews on The Invisible Event can be found here.
The Invisible Event 
It’s probably blindingly obvious, but I don’t really get what this book does and probably shouldn’t do.
Referencing Monster Mountain just adds to the confusion, as I recall this is a fairly straightforward fair play mystery.
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The easiest and least spoiler-y thing would just be to refer you to this post, I think.
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I’m not sure why everyone is being so cagey about it, since although it’s important to the novel, it’s not really a spoiler in that is doesn’t solve the book’s central mystery. But heck, I don’t mind telling you that they meet a kid who can astrally project… as in, some spiritual or mental essence leaves his body and can interact with the real world.
No, really. That’s a thing that happens.
It’s just an absurd point and entirely throws the book out of orbit with the others, because if we open the door to astral freaking projection, what else might be coming in?
I thought it would turn out to be a fraud, and Jupiter would explain it away, but nope. Even he just accepts it as fact and moves on.
And unlike Monster Mountain, where there is a level of interpretation and ambiguity to… you know… there is ZERO of that here. The kid absolutely 100% without doubt astrally projects. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
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I remember reading this book years ago. It was in the library. I’d never heard of the series, but it was a mystery so I picked it up. I remember the element you mention and it didn’t bother me at the time, but then I was very much a mystery neophyte. The other thing that I remember is the location of the dog. That was clever, and nice foreshadowing of Carr. Does the book mention him during the solution?
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Carr is not mentioned, no. The solution to his story is given, but the story is not named and it’s not mentioned that he is the author.
Series creator Robert Arthur did a similar thing with a Robert Barr story in The Mystery of the Talking Skull, interestingly. So presumably we can look forward to future entried in the series doing the same thing with authors called Farr, Marr, and Parr.
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Glad to see that we’re in almost complete agreement on this novel. I know I’ve hinted at it before, but this is why Carey is not my favourite 3I author. I can reassure you that we’re never going to lean as fully into it in the future, though, so I guess that should be a relief?
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That is indeed good news, because I could see Monster Mountain as a soft launch and this as the establishment of this sort of thing as a regular feature going forward. So knowing that we’ll be kept on (largely…) rational ground is great to hear. Thanks, Christian!
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The changes made to the German second edition of ‘Invisible Dog’ (renamed ‘The Three Investigators and the Carpathian Hound’) are of particular interest, removing, as they do, allparanormal activity present in the original text. In this revised version of the story, art collector Fenton Prentice is haunted by mysterious flashes of light in his den (as opposed to a shadowypresence).
Dr. Barrister, of Ruxton University, refers the boys to Professor Nora Arbiter, head of Neurologyand Psychiatry (rather than Professor Eugenia Lantine, head of parapsychology). ProfessorArbiter speculates that Sonny Elmquist is a somnambulist (sleepwalker), carrying outpost-hypnotic commands issued to him by an unknown third-party.
As events transpire, that third-party is revealed as none other than the scheming Mrs. Bortz,who upon noticing Elmquist’s sleepwalking habit, decided to take advantage of hisimpressionable disposition for her own busybody ends, and ordered him to sneak aroundPrentice’s apartment, giving the young man the key she’d had made.
Elmquist himself is unaware of this manipulation, but on one of the rare occasions he abruptlyregained consciousness in the midst of a sleepwalking trance, he witnessed the CarpathianHound being lowered into the pool. However, he was unable to identify the perpetrator. He alsoconfessed to causing the light flashes in Prentice’s apartment by accident—his real intentionwas to take a closer look at the Tibetan mandala hanging in the art collector’s den, andattempted to do so by shining a flashlight in through the apartment window facing the church.
The ‘phantom’ priest, in actual fact, was Father McGovern himself. An ardent pipe smoker, hewas forced to smoke away from the rectory because Mrs. O’Reilly detested the smell of pipetobacco. On the evening of the burglary, he had left his pipe behind in the church, and his furtiveattempt to retrieve his smoking apparatus spooked both the burglar (Murphy) and Jupiter. Toavoid provoking the ire of his housekeeper, Father McGovern locked himself in the vestry, onlyto re-emerge when the police arrived.
This version of the text is still in print in Germany today, and has been dramatized in an audioplay, and more recently adapted into a movie.
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This is fascinating, Ian, thank-you so much for sharing it.
Not only is it a series of explanations that a) make sense and b) provide a more satisfying conclusion than the original version of the book, it’s also an eye-opening revelation about how much leeway was (unknowingly?) allowed in carrying these books over the language barrier.
I mean, I should be up in arms about the sacrilege of not respecting the author’s original intentions…but, honesty, it’s so much better that I’m amazed it wasn’t translated back into English like that 🙂
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