Having thoroughly enjoyed some of the entries Dennis Lynds wrote as William Arden in the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, I was surprised and curious when I discovered that he had written an impossible crime story listed in Adey, ‘The Bizarre Case Expert’ (1970). Rigour isn’t always Arden’s jam, so how did he apply himself here?
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The private eye of fiction is positively assailed on all sides by the classic Simple Case That Turns Out to Lead to Something Much Bigger. So I guess it’s not surprising that the Three Investigators aren’t immune.
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I’ve read books in a single day before — hell, I still do — but it’s been a long time since I read a book in one sitting: take a seat, open the book, finish reading it, stand up. Welcome, then, to The Mystery of the Dead Man’s Riddle (1974), the twenty-second book in the Three Investigators series and the sixth to be written by Dennis Lynds under the name William Arden.
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Having recently read the twentieth novel in the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, and the tenth to be written by someone other than series creator Robert Arthur, my mind turns to how Jupe, Pete, and Bob have fared with multiple hands now directing their fates.
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Pirates! Sunken ships! Mysterious treasure! A race to unscramble a message from beyond the grave! I promise you that The Secret of Phantom Lake (1973) by William Arden, the nineteenth title in the Three Investigators series, contains all these things. So why the hell is there a cowboy on the front cover?
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It feels fair to say that the work done thus far by Dennis Lynds in the Three Investigators series, under the nom de plume William Arden, represents the solid and unspectacular middle ground while those around him — Nick West, M.V. Carey — plumb both the highs and the lows.
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There is an argument to be made that genre fiction and sitcoms share a huge amount of DNA: we want them to be the same sort of thing from episode-to-episode or book-to-book, and yet within the repetition of ingredients that define the form we also want something new.
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With the death of series creator Robert Arthur after the eleventh book in the series, The Mystery of the Talking Skull (1969), the Three Investigators were passed into the hands of Dennis Lynds, under the William Arden nom de plume he had used for the tenth book in the series, The Mystery of the Moaning Cave (1968).
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The Invisible Event 