The Three Investigators

#482: A Sea-Change Into Something Rich and Strange for The Secret of Skeleton Island (1966) by Robert Arthur

/ JJ / 29 Comments

Secret of Skeleton Island

Quite a week it’s been: a humdinger of a self-published impossible crime novel, then a low-key classic from John Dickson Carr…if the best things come in threes, it seems only sensible to finish with another case — the sixth, as I continue my way through this series chronologically — for Jupe, Pete, and Bob, a.k.a. The Three Investigators.

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#330: Highs & Lows – Five Reading Highlights of 2017

/ JJ / 26 Comments

good

January, month of rebirth and self-recrimination.  For every resolution to improve there must be some frank assessment of what debilitated you in the first place, and so the month can take on a curiously Jekyll-and-Hyde aspect for some.  So my Tuesday posts for this month will be a mixture of what is good and bad in my reading, and where better to start than a celebration of the previous 12 months?

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#289: The Literary Allusion That Wasn’t – Use of the Flying, Dying Message in The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot (1964) by Robert Arthur

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648-the-mystery-of-the-stuttering-parrot

The following will discuss specific details of the plot of The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot (1964), the second novel in the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series.  I suppose you could consider such details spoilers.  However, it’s a book with many flaws that I can’t believe the average reader of this blog would get much from, and the need to go into specifics is necessary in order to have a more interesting discussion.  Nevertheless, I’d hate to drop spoilers on you without warning.  Thus whether or not to continue reading is, as always, your choice.

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#277: The Temple of the Great Jupiter – The Three Investigators March in The Secret of Terror Castle (1964) by Robert Arthur

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secret_of_terror_castle

My inability to walk past a secondhand bookshop without at least having a “quick glance inside” recently resulted in me purchasing a stack of the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators titles, books I was aware of but have not previously read.  So buying 22 of them in no way counts as a spontaneous over-commitment, oh no.  Anyway, The Secret of Terror Castle is the first of the series and here are some thoughts on it.

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