While I'm happily starting to dive into genre children's fiction that I haven't read, I also want to go back to a children's series that I have read, in fact over and over again as a child but not for a long time. I'm talking about 'The Three Investigators', a mystery series that proudly boasted the name of filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock on its covers rather than the actual authors, at least for a while. He "introduced" these supposedly real casefiles of three precocious California teenagers, for reasons we learn in this first book, but handed over the reins later in the series to a fictional equivalent, Hector Sebastian.

I learned that there were various authors as a kid, after attempting and failing to order the latest volume from a bookstore who couldn't find it under the author's name of Alfred Hitchcock. Ten out of the first eleven were written by Robert Arthur, who had got to know Hitchcock as a writer on his television show, 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents', coming to that from the pulps, where he wrote a host of short stories in multiple genres and edited a few, including 'Pocket Detective Magazine', which was the first pocket-sized all-fiction magazine; and from radio, where he won many awards for 'The Mysterious Traveler'. He edited many of Alfred Hitchcock's anthologies, then fictionalised him into 'The Three Investigators', tapping into a powerful brand.

I had an absolute blast with this novel, which took me right back in time, not only to the seventies when I started reading these books but to the sixties when they were written and to a generation before that, because Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews were kids but they interacted with adults and those adults had their own grounding. Here, for example, the principal character beyond the three investigators themselves, is Stephen Terrill, who's a constant presence even if he doesn't appear very often, and he's a silent movie actor who was unable to make the transition to sound films. That puts his day as the twenties.

He owns the Terror Castle of the title, a home which he bought with the proceeds of his fame as a silent star primarily in horror movies but was unable to keep because the industry moved to sound and his voice did not remotely match the image the public had of him. It's pretty clear to me today that Stephen Terrill was based on Lon Chaney, senior rather than junior, though his failure to adapt to sound was due to him dying in 1930 rather than any problem with his voice. Other stars did have that problem, mostly due to heavy accents. Stephen Terrill's tragic downfall ended when he drove his car off a cliff, though his body was never found.

Fast forward a few decades and Terror Castle is still there, but nobody else has managed to move into it because it's outrageously haunted, supposedly cursed by Terrill before he died. Anyone who tries to spend any amount of time there encounters a host of supernatural phenomena, the Blue Phantom who plays dark music on a secreted pipe organ and the Fog of Fear that sends everyone quickly running for the exits. So it's become a sort of landmark in the hills above Hollywood, a relic of bygone days since abandoned, known not for its former owner but for simply being haunted.

And, when Jupiter Jones, young nephew of junkyard owner Titus Jones and his wife Matilda, hears that the famous movie director Alfred Hitchcock is looking for a real haunted house in which he can shoot a film, he decides to form the Three Investigators to determine whether Terror Castle is the ticket. He even blags his way in to see Hitchcock to pitch his plan, which is a glorious scene that has great meaning to the series, because it's how he gets the big man to introduce his cases.

You see, Jupiter Jones used to be a child actor, Baby Fatso, but he hated how everyone laughed at him. That's why he didn't go into acting, even though he clearly has the chops; it's why he studied a great deal, leaving him beyond precocious; and it's why he feels driven to succeed in a completely different effort, to distance himself from his early fame. His brain led him to solve a promotional puzzle in a shop window, winning him the personal use of a gold plated Rolls Royce, complete with chauffeur, for thirty days. And that's his ride into the studio, where he pretends to be Hitch's own nephew with a suitably blustery backseat performance to the guards. After he repeats that act to the master, impersonating the young Hitch, Hitchcock promises to introduce his cases, should he succeed in finding a haunted house, if only Jupiter promises never to repeat that act again.

And so we go. Jupiter's gloriously bright and confidently different, a combination that made him a quick favourite of mine. His fellow investigators are friends Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews. Pete is the athletic one of the three, given that Jupiter is fat, I mean stocky, and Bob is recovering from a fall on a mountainside that broke many bones in one of his legs. He'll be fine, but he isn't yet. He handles Records & Research, meaning that he's the studious sort, if not as bright or as inspired as Jupiter, who's the fearless leader who's always a step ahead.

What I liked most about this first book in the series, beyond being a glimpse into the past from the past, was how far it delved into horror. It's not a horror story and I shouldn't phrase it as one, but it is full of horror imagery and trappings. Terror Castle itself is well named and it's packed with those tropes we know from 'Scooby-Doo' and Hammer horrors: pipe organs, suits of armour, amorphous fogs, ghostly manifestations, halls that echo everything from a certain space. Of course, they feel all the more horrific given that we're exploring the place at night in the company of teenagers.

Robert Arthur wrote ten of the first eleven books in the series before he died in 1969 and many of those play with classic horror imagery, in books such as 'The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy', 'The Secret of Skeleton Island' and 'The Mystery of the Talking Skull'. Arthur tended to use all this as stage dressing, not quite unmasking the lighthouse keeper during the final showdown who, no doubt, would have got away with it if it wasn't for those pesky kids, but providing a solid rational explanation for it all. However, it seems pretty clear that this series, especially the early Robert Arthur books, served as one of my gateways into horror fiction. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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