Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews are back after their successful first outing in 'The Secret of Terror Castle' and that one rolls right into this, with Alfred Hitchcock introducing them to a friend of his, a retired Shakespearean actor by the name of Malcolm Fentriss, who has lost a parrot. It's clear to us that Hitch does so because such a case could never spark such an unusual result as their previous one, which would neatly excuse him from having to introduce it. Naturally, that doesn't remotely turn out to be true and so he's here once more reluctantly adhering to his promise.

'The Three Investigators' series ran to forty-three novels in English, of which I've read more than thirty, plus a later series of thirteen listed as 'Crimebusters' and hundreds more in Germany, but this is the one I've gone back to the most. It had everything I wanted from the series when I was an impressionable kid in the eighties and it works just as well today with me over fifty and with grandkids of my own. Now, had I not read this often enough to know much of it by heart, I would still be able to see through the puzzles a lot quicker than the adults do in this story, but it doesn't break the structure of the story at all, where investigation leads to discovery just as much as intellect is able to solve the eventual mystery.

The first escalation is that the Malcolm Fentriss that the Three Investigators meet at his house, who's a fat man with a gun that turns out to be a cigar lighter, isn't him at all. Jupiter realises this as they leave because there are no telephone lines running into Fentriss's house, meaning that they were lied to. The second escalation is that the real Fentriss's parrot, Billy, is one of a set of seven, each of which had been trained by its former owner to repeat a message. Billy is Billy Shakespeare, and his message is "To-to-to-be or not to-to-to-be. That is the question." The question to the Three Investigators is why anyone would train a parrot to stutter.

And so the game is afoot. Fentriss explains that he bought Billy from a Mexican pedlar selling from the back of his donkey cart, after he'd been recommended by a neighbour, Irma Waggoner, who had bought a parrot of her own and knew he'd be interested in a parrot that quoted Shakespeare. The fat man gave his name as Mr. Claudius, supposedly a police officer, and he's not the only sinister character taking an interest in the parrots. Miss Waggoner's parrot is Little Bo Peep, who has her own message, "Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep and doesn't know where to find it. Call on Sherlock Holmes."

Eventually, they discover that there are seven parrots in total, each a character from history or fiction and each of which has his a unique message of their own. What's more, the seven messages add up to a larger cryptic message that serves as the directions to a buried treasure, all a final joke from a puzzle fan, who only goes by John Silver, who wanted to challenge a friend and rival, a professional art thief by the name of Victor Hugenay, even from the grave. His final days were spent with that pedlar, a poverty-stricken Mexican immigrant with a young nephew, who nonetheless opened his doors to the man with generosity.

I adored everything about this story as a kid. I was a puzzle fan too, so enjoyed the cryptic nature of it. I also enjoyed how author Robert Arthur dedicated as much time in investigating the case to discover its scope, then to actually track down the parrots and finally to put the messages in order,, meaning that it plays out rather like a jigsaw puzzle without edges or indeed a box to show what picture it will become. I loved the danger that surrounds the investigation, not least when Skinny Norris, reprising his role as a nemesis to Jupiter Jones in the first book, gets his comeuppance in rather scary fashion.

And, while I was probably living in a small town in southeast England when I first read it and in a village in rural Yorkshire when I went back to it, neither location at all ethnically diverse, I remember enjoying the diversity of the farflung Long Beach, California. Ironically, of course, I now live in Phoenix, Arizona, which is a single road away from Los Angeles, to which Long Beach is now a suburb, and the diversity of Mexican immigrants like Carlos and his uncle Ramos is diversity here, too. I never dreamed back when I first read this that I'd end up living in this sort of melting pot.

Ramos doesn't help much but Carlos is a godsend, with his love of automobiles and sharp memory, even if he happens to drive a cart that's led by a donkey called Pablo. One day, he'll earn enough to be able to buy a car. I appreciated how he's left with potential for future appearances and he's far more welcome than Skinny Norris. I also loved the scene where Hans and Konrad, the pair of giant Bavarian workers at the junkyard that secretly houses the Three Investigators's headquarters, load both cart and donkey on to their truck to transport back to Uncle Ramos, with Carlos following proudly in the golden Rolls Royce Jupiter gained the use of by winning a promotional competition.

I won't spoil the ending here, even though this book was first published in 1964 so you've frankly had an abundant opportunity to have read it already, but I will say that I appreciated how it wasn't only brains that won out. Jupiter Jones shows great insight throughout, as we're already expecting from him only two books into the series, but the more athletic Pete Crenshaw plays an important part too, in a spooky scene in a fog-ridden graveyard on the California coast. It's Pete who grabs the treasure, though he has no realisation at the time that he's done so. Only a phone call from Hugenay admitting defeat prompts them to reevaluate what they have and actually solve the mystery.

The only catch to the novel is that, in admitting defeat, Hugenay offers deep respect to Jupiter and his team for outwitting him and so offers to show him the French underworld, should he ever happen to be on the other side of the pond, where perhaps he might bump into another mystery to solve. That never happened, to the best of my knowledge, but Hugenay did reappear, showing up next in 'The Mystery of the Screaming Clock' and then in three German-only novels, 'Poltergeist', 'Mysterious Testament' and 'Moon of Fire'. He's still a decent nemesis for Jupiter Jones, but I'd have loved to have read that French underworld novel! ~~ Hal C F Astell

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