After a baker's dozen of 'Three Investigators' books written by either Robert Arthur or his initial replacement, William Arden, the series gained a third author with 'The Mystery of the Coughing Dragon'. Like Arden, that name is a pseudonym, this time for Kin Platt, an American author who wrote for radio, comic books and children's mysteries, winning an Edgar Award in 1967 for 'Sinbad and Me', a juvenile mystery in his 'Steve Forrester' series. As with many pseudonymous authors, he also wrote porn. It's hard to find a complete bibliography of his work and there are apparently unpublished novels in a university collection.

He proves to be a comfortable writer for the 'Three Investigators' penning some strong dialogue; arguably the best of the series thus far, but settling for a relatively straightforward mystery with few characters and few locations. He ties in other stories, giving Blackbeard the mynah bird from 'The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot' a brief appearance, but doesn't add much to the mythos of the series. Other than the dialogue, the only example I can conjure up is how Pete plays out more negatively than usual but Jupe calls him on it.

The beginning feels like a throwback, with Jupiter Jones planning another big robbery, entirely as an intellectual exercise. Wasn't this done already in 'The Mystery of the Vanishing Treasure', with more impact to the broader story? Instead, it's Pete who sparks the mystery by fixing a radio in the junkyard. Testing it, they hear news of five dogs that have been reported missing in Seaside, which isn't far away from Rocky Beach. They're thinking of heading down there with business cards as an attempt to drum up business when Alfred Hitchcock rings and the game is afoot.

One of the dogs' owners turns out to be an old film director friend of his, Henry Allen, who used H. H. Allen as his byline. He made horror movies long ago, which ought to prompt evocative history, given that Kin Platt was born in 1911 so a near contemporary of Robert Arthur, who was two years older. Dennis Lynde, by comparison, the writer behind William Arden, was over a decade younger, having been born in 1924. This would have been a better book, had Platt explored Allen's history a little more, but he's content to use it only as the means to set up the coughing dragon of the title.

You see, Allen lives in a house by the ocean, as the name of his town, Seaside, might suggest, and under the town is a network of caves. Out of those caves, Allen swears, emerged a dragon, which he both saw and heard, because it coughed. Needless to say, any mystery surrounding the missing dogs is immediately eclipsed by the coughing dragon, which our stalwart trio promptly explore in some neatly dangerous scenes. Even the steps down to the beach prove dangerous, when they fall away, railing included. In more clichéd fashion, Bob falls into a pit of quicksand at one point.

I mentioned that there are fewer characters than usual here. That's partly because Platt focuses so tightly on the Three Investigators, minimising other series regulars, even with Worthington in play. He also ditches a standard trope for the series, namely to add a temporary fourth member to the team in the form of a guest, usually a boy from a foreign culture. Platt completely ignores the idea here and the novel feels emptier for that omission. Mostly, though, it's because his location is so remote, without the benefit of a ranch or a fairground, let alone a castle, to provide multiple background characters.

Allen apparently only has two neighbours. Mr. Carter is cantankerous and meets the boys at his door with a shotgun in his hand. He clearly wants none of whatever they're selling. The other one, Arthur Shelby, is far more interesting, a prankster by nature whose house is a wonderful addition to the characterful locations the boys had encountered in earlier cases. His automatic gate is just the start. There's a trellis trap, an electric charge hooked up to his doorbell and even a fake bird attack. He's an amateur inventor and he calls his house Mystery Castle.

I'm not going to dig much deeper into the story, because it's not particularly substantial, Platt far more interested in character than plot; even though he oddly writes in so few actual characters to have character. Other than Allen, Carter and Shelby, he builds it into the historical backdrop that he hooks his story onto. Never mind the smugglers and rumrunners who used this cave system for their nefarious work, I'm talking about the South Pacific Coast Railroad.

I'm guessing that Platt's Seaside is the one that used to be East Monterey so is located further up the Californian coast than this novel suggests. That's three hundred miles from Rocky Beach, not a trivial distance for the Three Investigators, even with a gold plated Rolls Royce at their disposal. However, very close to Seaside are the towns of Alameda and Santa Cruz, which were the termini for the South Pacific Coast Railroad, a marvel of 19^th-century engineering Platt that suggests had a planned and partly built but never opened southern extension to Seaside. Whether it was true or invention, it's a great backdrop for a 'Three Investigators' novel.

And so there's good here, especially in the dialogue, the banter between the boys never feeling fresher, but it's ultimately a weak entry in the series. That makes it unsurprising that Platt would only write one more episode, 'The Mystery of the Nervous Lion', which was two books away on the other side of the debut contribution of another new author, M. V. (for Mary Virginia) Carey, who would eventually write fifteen 'Three Investigators' mysteries, one more than Lynde as William Arden, with whom she alternated for the longest time. Her first is up for me next month, namely 'The Mystery of the Flaming Footprints'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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