#1138: Dead Men Tell Their Tales in The Secret of Phantom Lake (1973) by William Arden

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?

#1086: Art Gives Life a Shape in The Mystery of the Shrinking House (1972) by William Arden

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.

#1053: Pouring Snake Oil on Troubled Waters in The Mystery of the Singing Serpent (1972) by M.V. Carey

Mary Virginia Carey would, in time, write more books in the Three Investigators series than any of the four other writers so employed, but got off to a slightly wobbly start with The Mystery of the Flaming Footprints (1971). So will her second title, The Mystery of the Singing Serpent (1972), find her on better form?

#1020: It Gets Worse Here Every Day in The Mystery of the Nervous Lion (1971) by Nick West

Welcome to Jungle Land!

#964: Keeping it in the Family in The Mystery of the Flaming Footprints (1971) by M.V. Carey

Pity the New Guy, who has to come in to an established IP and keep everything recognisably the same while also making changes that justify their hiring, like whoever has to reinvent James Bond now that Daniel Craig is done with the role (I have some ideas, by the way, if anyone at EON is reading). With The Three Investigators 14 books old, what could fourth author into the fray Mary Virginia Carey do to establish herself?

#910: A Shaggy Dog Story in The Mystery of the Coughing Dragon (1970) by Nick West

It’s been ten months since I last caught up with Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews, so how does new author Nick West — a nom de plume of Kin Platt — apply himself here, in the first of his two entries in The Three Investigators series?

#801: History Repeats Itself in The Secret of the Crooked Cat (1970) by William Arden

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.

#785: The Ear Knows Not When It Is Beguiled in The Mystery of the Laughing Shadow (1969) by William Arden

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).

#722: Junk in the Trunk with The Mystery of the Talking Skull (1969) by Robert Arthur

Whatever happens to the series from here, it would be difficult to deny that creator Robert Arthur set Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews off to a magnificent start with his ten Three Investigators novels.

#621: The Borrowers Afield in The Mystery of the Moaning Cave (1968) by William Arden

As the current glut of Golden Age detective fiction reprints is making us all aware, copyrights can be a tricky thing.  An author’s intellectual property is the characters and plots they create, and allowing others to have access to them is correctly something which is very closely guarded.