I've always been in two minds about this third outing for the Three Investigators, 'The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy', but I'm well aware that some of that has to stem from it being given the unenviable task of following my favourite instalmant of the series, 'The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot'. This one isn't as good in a number of ways, being far more of an adventure than a mystery, but it still contains some strong imagery that's stayed with me for the past forty years and a neat cultural outreach by including a couple of characters from Libya.

Technically there are two mysteries in play, which don't initially seem to be connected but which, of course, also turn out to be.

You won't be surprised to find that one involves the whispering mummy of the title, which belongs to another friend of Alfred Hitchcock, a renowned Egyptologist called Prof. Robert Yarborough. It's the mummy of Ra-Orkon, three-thousand-years dead but somehow able to whisper to him, albeit never to anyone else. It does so in an unknown ancient tongue that Yarborough is keen to decipher but which he can't quite figure out.

Naturally, Jupe is keen to dive into this mystery but Pete wants to tackle the other one, a far safer one, that of a missing cat, an unusual Abyssinian that has one orange eye and one blue. It belongs to Mrs. Mildred Banfry, who had heard about their ingenuity in tracking down an array of missing parrots and figures that they should also be able to find her prize Sphinx, which has mysteriously vanished. I do like how Robert Arthur split the Three Investigators up but inevitably brought them back together again.

However, even after re-reading this for the first time in many years, I still think of it in fragmented terms as a collection of setpiece moments that play entirely visually to me.

There's an early visual of Prof. Yarborough hunching over the mummy's sarcophagus in his home's personal museum focusing intently on a message whispered only to him that he can't understand. There's another visual in his museum of a statue of Anubis which topples over without warning to scare the crap out Yarborough's butler, Wilkins, who believes in a supposed curse surrounding the expedition that discovered Ra-Orkon's tomb and which clearly has come back to haunt them here in Hollywood. Another has the jackal god show up in person to issue a warning to Wilkins in a scene that's deliciously creepy even to an adult. No wonder the butler faints at the sight.

Surely the most abiding visual, though, is that of Pete and an Eygptian boy called Hamid who's the heir to a business in Libya, the House of Hamid, that buys and sells rugs. Initially on opposite sides, they join forces and are in Yarborough's museum when thieves arrive to steal the sarcophagus, the mummy already taken. The only hiding place is inside the sarcophagus, so they climb in, only for it to be strapped shut by the thieves, just a sliver of air reaching them courtesy of a pencil that Pete stuffed under the lid when it closed, and driven away to who knows where.

There's one final visual that has stayed with me, which stems from Pete and Hamid escaping from the sarcophagus in a warehouse and marking the outside walls with chalk question marks, so they can find it again later. However, they lose their way trying to get back to HQ at the Jones Salvage Yard and the boys have to employ the ghost-to-ghost hookup again to locate those question marks. One of the many phone calls that spawns goes to Skinny Norris, who sabotages the search with an abundance of chalk question marks on buildings all over Hollywood. I'd love to see this in a movie version and still appreciate how not everything works out for the Three Investigators.

The catch to all this is that the book needs those visual moments because this pair of mysteries are a little underwhelming. There's some good detective work at the very beginning of the book, with Pete and Bob practicing their deduction on Jupe as he strolls up, only for Jupe to outdo them with aplomb. There's some good, if simpler, detective work when Jupe disguises himself as Yarborough in order to get the mummy to whisper to him, which it does. However, beyond those instances, the solutions come more at random than by design, which feels like a little bit of a cheat.

Also, there are very few characters in this book, which means that there are even fewer that could be seen as suspects. Can we work out who's behind the ingenious whispering and the theft of Mrs. Banfry's cat? Maybe and maybe not, but then we could just toss a coin too and be about as likely to be right. On the flipside, the why behind it and, to a slightly lesser degree, the how are both more interesting and obscure than the who. Again, it's not a bad novel and I've surely always been a bit down on it simply because it comes after 'The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot', which is a superior work in every way. This may be lesser in comparison, but it still succeeds on most fronts.

Quite frankly, it ought to be an easy choice to be the first book to be adapted to film, something I see has happened far too infrequently. I'm only aware of two movies so far, both of them released in the 2000s, and neither looked at this one for its source material. The first was loosely adapted from 'The Secret of Skeleton Island' and the second from 'The Secret of Terror Castle', which were books six and one respectively. Maybe they'd have done better if they'd adapted this and followed the books closer ~~ Hal C F Astell

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