12th November 2023

The 3 Investigators, now in the middle of their series of adventures, head away from their usual haunts on a camping trip, and to visit a cousin of their friends/employees.

It’s a classic mystery story where there’s a lot going on and a lot to investigate, with homemade technology, shifty characters all over the place, and an element of the supernatural to freak things up a bit.

I felt that some of the elements were maybe a tad too obvious, but then I have to remember the target audience haven’t been reading mysteries for anything like as long as me, and these are serving to introduce them to the genre.

A good contribution to the series.

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31st October 2021

Mystery number seventeen, and the second by author M V Carey, sees the three lads hired by a girl they know to investigate strange goings on at her house.

It’s a classic of the series that pulls in all the familiar elements, as well as providing a more varied line up of guest characters than in many children’s novels of the era.

But I don’t think it’s one that’s going to stick in my mind - I can already feel the details drifting away.

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5th October 2021

The fifteenth Three Investigators mystery is a really good one. Written in the early 1970s, it took me a moment to work out the timeline, as it refers back to events in the 1920s, which now feels beyond living memory, but would not have been so at the time.

Despite its age, and target audience, the book has a couple of strong feminist moments (although there are very few female characters), and feels generally more progressive than the Hardy Boys stories of the same era. It feels like there’s decent representation of a couple of neuro-atypical characters too which feels really impressive for the book’s age.

The plot focusses on an eccentric customer of the Jones junk yard, who vanished one day while talking to Jupiter. It felt a very natural set-up, and the investigation for the most part feels professional and believable.

One of the best in the series and one I’ve really enjoyed revisiting.

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