A twenty-fourth case for Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews, and the sixth time they’ve been directed by Mary Virginia Carey, The Mystery of Death Trap Mine (1976) marks very slight change of pace for the Three Investigators.

When Allie Jamison, first encountered in The Mystery of the Singing Serpent (1972), reappears in the Three Investigators’ lives, the boys are not best pleased, for reasons I’m not going to claim I remember. Before long, she has enlisted them in accompanying her and her Uncle Harry to the backwater of Twin Lakes in New Mexico, where Allie is convinced that Uncle Harry’s new neighbour, the millionaire Wesley Thurgood, is up to shenanigans with the old mine on his property.

[Uncle Harry] turned to the boys and smiled. “Allie has a way of going off half-cocked,” he said. “She’s got it in for Thurgood because she tried to explore the mine one day and he marched her back home by the scruff of the neck. And quite rightly. It’s called Death Trap Mine because a woman was killed in there years ago on just that sort of an expedition.”

Despite the fact that Thurgood’s credit rating “would make a Vanderbilt look poverty-stricken”, which is good enough for Uncle Harry, there is undeniably something going on at Death Trap Mine. Why is Thurgood firing a shotgun on his property late at night? Why has be brought a gigantic guard dog? And what of the visitors Thurgood keeps taking into the mine at all hours? The seam of silver in the land is understood to have been wrung dry years before, and with nothing of value remaining there’s surely no reason for anyone to take an interest in a long-defunct mine, right?

In recent adventures from Carey’s pen — The Mystery of Monster Mountain (1973), The Mystery of the Invisible Dog (1975) — we’ve veered into, er, science fictional elements within this otherwise-grounded universe, so it’s pleasing to report this time around that she keeps us on more usual terms with our encounters here. And that’s a good idea for several reasons, not least because the boys actually confront a dead body for what I’m pretty sure is the first time, and also find themselves in mortal peril with a razor-sharp machete (used to prune the Christmas trees on Uncle Harry’s farm, since you asked) and a gun used at various times to threaten their continued adventuring. There’s no real sense of the boys being older (we’re told that Singing Serpent happened “the summer before”, is all), but Carey at least seems to want to keep stretching what they experience.

See also: the direct murder by the boys of an animal for, again, what I’m pretty sure is the first time. Sure, it’s a rattlesnake that was going to attack them (we presume), but you isolate the Vegan community at your peril.

Carey wrote some good detection in her earlier entries, and while some foundational elements of it are found herein — an examination of tyre tracks, searching out records at the local newspaper — it’s something of a crime itself that the one solid clue which is rolled out in the final summation wasn’t known to the reader (rot13: “Yvggyr Jrfyrl Guhetbbq unq oebja rlrf…”) and so undoes a little of the goodwill the book generated by simply being a fast, fun, engaging time. After the slightly otherworldly elements of Invisible Dog, it’s nice to find the boys back doing what they do best: unpicking down-to-earth mysteries with intelligence, grit, and adults around them shaking their fists and all but declaring that they would’ve gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids.

As a complete side-note, I had my eye on a very different conclusion to this mystery. I thought (and rot13 for sort-of spoilers, since this isn’t what happens) gur obql sbhaq va gur zvar jbhyq or Guhetbbq, fvapr vg’f qrpnlrq whfg rabhtu sbe vqragvsvpngvba gb or n ceboyrz. V gubhtug “Guhetbbq” jbhyq or Tvyoreg Zbetna, gur guvrs jub unq pbzr gb uvqr bhg va Gjva Ynxrf naq fbzrubj sbhaq uvzfrys pbasebagrq ol gur erny Guhetbbq, xvyyvat uvz ol nppvqrag naq uvqvat gur obql va gur zvar jvgu uvf bja jnyyrg va gur cbpxrg fb gung, vs sbhaq, vg’q nppbhag sbe uvf bja inavfuvat.

See, it seemed to me that the old “Zef. Znpbzore nccrnerq urer bar qnl naq whfg unccrarq gb unir rabhtu zbarl gb ohl svir ubhfrf” jnf n erq ureevat, naq fur jnf znlor orvat cnvq ol gur snxr Guhetbbq gb xrrc dhvrg be fvzvyne — naq Guhetbbq ernyyl orvat gur guvrs jbhyq ntnva nppbhag sbe uvz abg xabjvat juvpu pnef ur orra yraqvat gb juvpu svyz cebqhpgvbaf. I’m sure there’s a reason this wouldn’t have worked, but that’s where my brain was going, anyway.

If not exactly a classic in the series, The Mystery of Death Trap Mine proves a largely sure-footed progression of the boys’ adventures, hitting all the grace notes and thus probably just about satisfying those readers who had stuck with the series to this point. All long-running series will have ups and downs, of course, but it’s good to know that the decline and fall of the Three Investigators has been pushed back by at least one more book for now.

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The hub of Three Investigators reviews on The Invisible Event can be found here.