The Three Investigators series are a wonderful and wholesome
mix of adventure, mystery, comedy, and critical thinking/detection. They
enthralled several generations of readers worldwide – and in these new
60th-anniversary editions, they are again ready to take on the world!
The Secret of Terror Castle
The Three Investigators Book 1
by Robert Arthur
Genre: Middle Grade Mysteries with a Supernatural hook
In the first adventure of Robert Arthur’s classic mystery series, it's 1964 in the town of Rocky Beach, California. Working out of their newly established Headquarters – an old trailer hidden behind carefully arranged junk in the Jones Salvage Yard – and driven around southern California in a gold-plated vintage Rolls Royce they've won the use of in a contest, Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews decide to get publicity for their fledgling detective firm by finding a real haunted house for the renowned film director Reginald Clarke.
But although the highly rational Jupiter starts with the belief that there is
no such thing as a ghost, a spook, a phantom, or a spirit, Terror Castle – the
old mansion supposedly troubled by the ghost of the late Stephen Terrill, the
silent horror film star called the Man with a Million Faces – may prove him
wrong!
By turns exciting, spine-tingling, and humorous, The Secret of Terror Castle
promises to please not only the existing fan base of The Three Investigators series
but a whole new generation of readers who will find in its pages three very
different boys whose imagination, courage, and intelligence can remind us that
curiosity, perseverance, and rational inquiry are just as vital as friendship
and cooperation.
At the end of each Three Investigators book published by Hollow Tree Press are
notes written by Robert Arthur's daughter and son-in-law, exploring three
subjects connected to the story – in this case, Silent Movies, Salvage Yards,
and Rolls Royces – and young readers may want to use the notes as guidelines
for further investigation. After all, the motto of The Three Investigators is
"We Investigate Anything," and their trademark is “???” – three
question marks, taken together.
On the 60th anniversary of the creation of The Three Investigators series, the
first-ever English-language e-book editions of Robert Arthur’s novels, as well
as the first new English-language print editions in over twenty-five years,
stand ready to delight a whole new audience. Be sure to seek out all ten
titles!
• The three boys come from blue-collar and middle-class families. Jupiter, Pete, and Bob work hard for everything they get; their headquarters is in a battered mobile home trailer in the middle of the Jones Salvage Yard (where Jupiter, an orphan, lives with his aunt and uncle.)
• These are free-range kids (as was common at the time; I certainly was.) Their parents trust them, give them enormous leeway, and the boys reward that trust with their conscientiousness, discipline, and good old American can-do spirit.
• The books celebrate rational inquiry, critical thinking, and a belief that there is no mystery that cannot be brought to heel with the proper application of shoe leather and sharp thinking, courage, and determination.
• Unconsciously (I think) Arthur created three boys who more or less embody the three aspects of human personality, at least as famously defined by Freud – the id, ego, and superego. Together the three boys interact seamlessly, make up for one another’s deficits, and are tenacious, ingenious, courageous, creative, and self-confident. As a trio, they are a supremely satisfying combination.
• The books are written simply, but with literary flair; they’re frequently very funny; and they’re genuinely puzzling and exciting. • The books are apolitical. So many books for young readers today push an ideological agenda, and seemingly have been written with that in mind. These are just great stories -- no preaching about race or gender or sex or oppression -- just stories about three unusual American boys who live in a freer and more relaxed time.
EXCERPT
THE MYSTERY OF TERROR CASTLE
Jupiter started up the road, using a flashlight to pick his way around the rocks that had tumbled down from the steep canyon walls onto the cracked concrete. After a moment Pete hurried after him.
“If I'd known it was going to be like this,” he complained, “I'd never have become an investigator.”
“You'll feel better after we solve the mystery,” Jupiter told him. “Think of what a wonderful start it will give our investigation firm.”
“But suppose we meet the ghost? Or the Blue Phantom, or the mad spook, or whatever it is that haunts this place?”
“That's exactly what I want.” Jupiter slapped the compact flash camera that hung from his shoulder. “If we can get its picture, we'll be famous.”
“Suppose it gets us?” Pete retorted.
“S-s-sh!” his stocky friend said, stopping and snapping off his flashlight. Pete froze into silence and the darkness closed around them.
Somebody - or something - was coming down the hillside directly toward them.
Pete crouched down. Beside him, Jupe was swiftly getting his camera ready.
The noise, a pattering of rock displaced by moving feet, was almost on them when Jupe's flashbulb lit up the night. In the sudden radiance of the flash, Pete saw two huge red eyes leaping directly at him. Then something furry scurried past, struck the concrete road, and went bounding away. In its wake several small rocks rolled down and came to rest at the boys' feet.
“A jackrabbit!” Jupiter said. He sounded disappointed. “We frightened it.”
“We frightened it!” Pete exclaimed. “What do you think it did to me?”
“The natural effect of mysterious sound and movement at night upon a susceptible nervous system,” Jupiter said. “Forward!” He
grabbed Pete's arm and pulled him along. “We don't have to move quietly now - the flashbulb will have alerted the phantom, if there is a phantom.”
“Can we sing?” Pete asked, reluctantly falling into step beside him. “If we sing 'Row, row, row your boat' loudly enough, we won't be able to hear the spook moan and groan.”
“There's no need to go to extremes,” the other boy said firmly. “We want to hear any moans and groan - also any screams, sighs, screeches, or rattling of chains, all of which are supposed to be common manifestations of a supernatural presence.”
Pete suppressed the impulse to tell his partner that he had no desire whatever to hear any moans, groans, screams, screeches, sighs, or rattling chains. He knew there was no point in it. When Jupiter made up his mind, he made up his mind. He was about as easy to move as a large rock.
As they moved forward, the rambling old building loomed larger, gloomier, and altogether less desirable. Pete tried hard to forget all the stories Bob had told them about the old place.
After a last stretch along a high, crumbling stone wall, the two boys entered the main courtyard of Terror Castle.
“Here we are,” Jupiter said and stopped.
One tower stretched skyward far above them. Another, shorter tower seemed to scowl down at them. Blank windows were like blind eyes reflecting the starlight.
Suddenly something flew around their heads. Pete ducked.
“Wow,” he yelled. “A bat!”
“Bats only eat insects,” Jupiter reminded him. “They never eat people.”
“Maybe this one wants a change of diet. Why take chances?”
Jupiter pointed to the wide doorway and the big, carved front door .directly ahead.
“There is the door,” he said. “Now all we have to do is walk through it.”
“I wish I could get my legs to believe that. They think we ought to go back.”
“So do mine,” Jupiter admitted. “But my legs take orders from me. Come on.”
He strode forward. Pete couldn't allow his partner to enter a place like Terror Castle alone, so he followed. They walked up the old marble steps and across a tiled terrace. As Jupiter was about to reach for the doorknob, Pete grabbed his arm.
“Wait!” he said. “Do you hear spooky music?”
Both boys listened. For a moment they had the impression they heard a few weird notes, sounding as if they came from a million miles away. Then in the darkness they could hear only the night noises of insects and of a small stone or two rolling down the steep sides of the canyon.
“Probably just imagination,” Jupiter said, though he did not sound too certain of it. “Or possibly we heard a TV set playing over the ridge in the next canyon. Some trick of acoustics.”
“Some trick, all right,” Pete muttered. “What if it was the old ruined pipe organ being played by the Blue Phantom?”
“Then we certainly want to hear it,” Jupe said. “Let us enter.”
He grasped the knob and pulled. With a long scre-e-e-ch that curdled Pete's blood, it opened. Not waiting for their courage to evaporate, the two boys marched into a long dark hall, playing their flashlight beams straight ahead.
They passed open doorways, full of shadows, which seemed to breathe musty air at them. Then they came out into a large hallway with a ceiling two stories high. Jupiter stopped.
“We're here,” he said. “This is the main hall. We'll stay one hour. Then we'll leave.”
“Leave!” a voice low and eerie whispered in their ears.
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Book
Links:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Terror-Castle-Robert-Arthur-ebook/dp/B0D6X4RD1Y
Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/books/the-secret-of-terror-castle-by-steven-bauer-and-robert-arthur
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/214574336-the-secret-of-terror-castle
The Three Investigators Book 2
In the second adventure of Robert Arthur’s classic mystery
series, Jupiter, Pete and Bob are in search of a missing parrot. The case soon
gets complicated as they discover that not one but six talking parrots and a
mynah bird have disappeared.
With the help of their new friend Carlos, the Three Investigators figure out
that each of the birds has been taught to recite part of a complex puzzle,
that, when taken together, could lead the boys to a great painting. But as
their search takes them to a spooky graveyard, they're not the only ones hot on
the trail!
By turns puzzling, compelling, and absorbing, The Mystery of the Stuttering
Parrot promises to please not only the existing fan base of The Three
Investigators series but a whole new generation of readers who will find in its
pages three very different boys whose imagination, courage, and intelligence
can remind us that curiosity, perseverance, and rational inquiry are just as
vital as friendship and cooperation.
At the end of each Three Investigators book published by Hollow Tree Press are
notes written by Robert Arthur's daughter and son-in-law, exploring three
subjects connected to the story - in this case, Puzzles and Word Games,
Parrots, and Sherlock Holmes - and young readers may want to use these notes as
guidelines for further investigation. After all, the motto of The Three
Investigators is "We Investigate Anything," and their trademark is
“???” - three question marks, taken together.
On the 60th anniversary of the creation of The Three Investigators series, the
first-ever English-language e-book editions of Robert Arthur’s novels, as well
as the first new English-language print editions in over twenty-five years,
stand ready to delight a whole new audience. Be sure to seek out all ten
titles!
“Good grief!” Pete said in a low voice. “We started out to look for a missing parrot. Now before we even get to the house, someone is screaming for help! I hope this isn't going to be another case like the last one.”
“On the contrary,” his stocky partner whispered back, “it is starting very promisingly. But all seems quiet now. We'd better approach the house and find out what is happening.”
“That isn't a house I want to approach,” Pete told him. “It looks like a house full of locked rooms that shouldn't be opened.”
“A very good description,” Jupiter replied. “Remember to tell it to Bob when we get back to Headquarters.”
Bob Andrews was the third member of the firm. He kept the records of their cases and did necessary research.
Jupiter started to slip toward the house, moving between bushes and flowers without stirring a ripple of movement in the vegetation. On the other side of the path, Pete kept abreast of him. They had come within a hundred feet of the house when something grabbed his ankle and he was flung to the ground. As he tried to pull free, the unseen hand gripped more tightly and jerked him back. Flat on his face, he couldn't see who or what had grabbed him.
“Jupe!” he gasped. “Something's got me!”
For all his stocky build, Jupiter moved swiftly. He darted across the path and was at Pete's side almost before the other boy finished speaking.
“What is it?” Pete croaked, rolling his eyes sideways at his partner. “Something's dragging me away. Is it a boa constrictor? This garden could hide anything.”
Jupiter's round, determined features looked unusually grave.
“I'm sorry to tell you this, Pete,” he said, “but you have been trapped by an unusually vicious specimen of vitis vinifera.”
“Do something!” Pete gasped. “Don't let vitis whatever it is get me!”
“I have my knife,” Jupiter said. “I'll do my best.”
He whipped out his prized Swiss Army knife that had eight blades. Then he grasped Pete's leg. Pete could feel him slashing fiercely. The grip on his ankle relaxed. Pete immediately rolled away and sprang to his feet.
Behind him, his partner, with a broad grin, was putting away his knife. A heavy loop of vine that had been cut in the middle was bobbing up and down close to the ground.
“You put your foot into a twisted grapevine,” Jupiter said. “The harder you pulled to get away, the harder the vine pulled you back. It was a very evenly matched test. Neither of you was using any intelligence. The vine doesn't have any, and you allowed panic to cloud your mental processes.”
Jupiter usually talked like that. By now Pete was used to it.
“Okay, okay,” Pete said sheepishly. “I panicked. I was thinking about that call for help, I guess.”
“Panic is more dangerous than danger itself,” Jupiter said. “Fear robs the individual of the ability to make proper decisions. It destroys – destroys – Ulp!”
Looking at Jupiter, Pete had the impression that his partner was displaying all the symptoms of the fear he had just been talking about. He had suddenly turned pale. His eyes bulged. His jaw dropped. He seemed to be looking at something just behind Pete's back.
“You're a good actor, Jupe,” Pete said. “That's the best imitation of fright I've ever seen. But now what do you say we – we – ”
He turned and he saw what Jupiter was looking at. And the words stuck in his throat.
Jupiter was not acting. The very fat man who stood facing them, with a large, old-fashioned pistol in his hand, would have startled anybody.
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Links:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Stuttering-Parrot-Robert-Arthur/dp/B0D5VZD48W
Bookbub:
https://www.bookbub.com/books/the-mystery-of-the-stuttering-parrot-by-robert-arthur
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213690279-the-mystery-of-the-stuttering-parrot
**Don’t miss the rest of the series!**
About the Author
ROBERT ARTHUR is best known as the creator of THE THREE INVESTIGATORS, the classic mystery series for young readers, for which he wrote the first ten books before his untimely death in 1969. By the time the last English-language-original book was published in the late 1980s, there were forty-three titles, some of which had been translated into over twenty languages.
Young readers in the U.S.,
Canada, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand, Denmark, Italy,
Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, and Slovakia, as well as in France, Germany,
Japan, the United Kingdom, and throughout the Spanish-speaking world grew up on
the books, and many credit their lifetime love of reading to having discovered
the story of three young American boys who form a detective agency.
Robert Arthur got the idea for
the series while working in Hollywood as a story editor, showrunner, and
scriptwriter for Alfred Hitchcock's TV show, Alfred Hitchcock
Presents. In 1963, he left Hollywood and moved to Cape May, New
Jersey, where, in a brown-shingled house two blocks from the Atlantic Ocean, he
created The Three Investigators. The Secret of Terror Castle and The
Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot were published in 1964 by
Random House. The series' original title was ALFRED HITCHCOCK AND THE THREE
INVESTIGATORS.
The books have supernatural hooks -- haunted houses, whispering mummies,
gnomes, ghosts riding carousels, screaming clocks, talking skulls -- that turn
out, after closer examination, to have rational explanations.
From his memories of his years
in southern California, Arthur created the small fictional town of Rocky
Beach, not far from Hollywood. His disbelief and dismay at the way old houses
were being torn down and their contents junked resulted in his placing The
Three Investigators Headquarters in a salvage yard, where all sorts of goods
have been reclaimed and are for sale. He based his head investigator, Jupiter
Jones, on his idea of a young American Sherlock Holmes, and the boy who keeps
records and does research -- Bob Andrews -- he based on himself (they have
the same initials!)
The books are a wonderful and
wholesome mix of adventure, mystery, comedy, and critical thinking/detection.
They enthralled several generations of readers worldwide – and in this new
60th-anniversary edition, they are again ready to take on the world.
Website
* Newsletter
* X * Amazon
* Goodreads
Author Links
Website: https://www.threeinvestigators.net
Newsletter: https://elizabetharthur.substack.com/
X: https://x.com/RockyBeach2019
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Robert-Arthur/author/B0D3691VF3
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/50291.Robert_Arthur
Giveaway
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