Not remembering this one from my youth, though I bought and read it on its original UK release in 1984, I was more than a little wary by the end of Hector Sebastian's introduction. A millionaire with a fortress to keep out the world and a woman waiting to be rescued by aliens from a distant universe? I'm on board with all of that. However, this is an M. V. Carey novel and I remember what she did in 'The Mystery of Monster Mountain'. When Sebastian suggests that the boys are going to "confront an intergalactic voyager on a mysterious mission to earth", I have to wonder if she's going to give us exactly that.

The good news is that she doesn't, but the subsequent bad news is that the result becomes rather predictable, even though she sets things up well. The millionaire is Charles Barron, who starts out on a very bad foot indeed, as an angry man yelling at Hans in the junkyard. The UFO nut is his wife Ernestine, an adherent to the teachings of Vladimir Contreras, who says that the world is falling apart but we'll be saved by friendly aliens from the planet Omega. If that wasn't enough, they're self-sufficiency nuts who have built a ranch up north, ten miles above San Luis Obispo, for which they're shopping for old school equipment like wood-burning stoves and hand-cranked phonographs, the exact sort of thing that can be plentifully found in Uncle Titus's junkyard.

Jupe finds them fascinating, so wants to be part of the delivery, when Konrad drives all the stuff they bought up to Rancho Valverde. Pete and Bob join him, of course, because they haven't been on a trip like this since 'The Mystery of the Sinister Scarecrow', and they do their homework first. Without attempting to get political, Barron reminds very much of Donald Trump. He's made a lot of money but there's always some sort of trouble with regulations or workers. He's convinced that savages are taking over the world, so he's converted his assets into gold and land, even moving a house onto the property from Milwaukee, because it's the one he was born in.

He also has a lot of workers living on the ranch. Hank Detweiler is the foreman, John Aleman the mechanic, Mary Sedlack the vet. Rafael Banales is in charge of the field workers, who are mostly Hispanic and living there with their families. Elsie Spratt is the cook, which leads to an inevitable character named Jack Spratt, for absolutely no good reason. These folk may not believe that the end times are nigh, but they do their jobs and understand that, should civilisation collapse, they couldn't be in a better place than Barron's ranch, even if it's somewhere that will host a whackjob convention like the Blue Light Mission.

And that's what happens, or at least that's what seems to happen. After the boys are persuaded to stop for dinner, they find that they're unable to leave. The military has closed the road amidst some sort of national calamity. The phones are down. There's no TV signal. Even the president is on the radio broadcasting about something that happened in Texas. Are we dealing with an alien invasion? It sure seems like it when a flying saucer rises over the cliffs adjoining the ranch. Simon de Luca is found in the meadow afterwards, his hair singed.

So here's where we ask if Carey is going to play this literally. After all, she had populated Monster Mountain with an actual monster, even if the core mystery of that book was entirely rational, and then she did the same thing in 'The Mystery of the Invisible Dog'. While she explained the titular statue away without any need for the supernatural, she had no problem including astral travel as a perfectly valid activity. And, rather unfortunately, most of the mystery here only works if we're convinced that the aliens are real, which Jupe isn't from the very outset and, quite frankly, we're not likely to be either.

That makes this something of a mixed bag. It's set up well, but it's pretty obvious that everything we see is some sort of elaborate hoax. What's more, it's pretty easy to extrapolate why, and once we do to identify where it is. I didn't get the latter entirely right but, had I been a thief seeking it, I'd have taken precisely the right things and just been surprised to find the subsequent extraction job a little less arduous once I got them home. If there's a real mystery here, it's in who the spy is. It's pretty clear, if we accept the hoax approach, that someone inside Rancho Valverde is helping the bad guys and it's much harder to figure out who, than everything else. I got that bit wrong, an impressive red herring misleading me well.

I liked this, but mostly because Carey set it up well and fleshed out her backdrop with a bundle of imaginary books about aliens, not merely 'They Walk Among Us' by Vladimir Contreras, his pivotal work about our imminent rescuers from planet Omega, but others by Korsakov and more that go uncredited. Her previous book, 'The Mystery of the Scar-Faced Beggar', boasted three imaginary books, all by new series introducer Hector Sebastian. This has double that number, which I'm very happy about. The boys do good work figuring everything out too, including subterfuge to get Bob behind the soldiers so he can listen in on their conversation.

But I didn't love it. Take away the wild and wacky backdrop and those imaginary books and there's not a heck of a lot left. The setpiece flying saucer is cool enough, I guess, but Jupe bringing up the famous Orson Welles 'War of the Worlds' radio broadcast is even better. I was thirteen when this came out in the UK and it was my introduction to that show. I didn't have the internet, so couldn't just search Wikipedia for the details or YouTube for a broadcast. I had to do that through the old school tech we had back then, which is rather appropriate given how this begins with the Barrons buying old school tech.

Next month, it's William Arden's turn again and he'll introduce us to the Purple Pirate. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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