I'm starting to run out of the ten 'The Three Investigators' novels that were written by the creator of the series, Robert Arthur. This is his ninth book in a row but 'The Mystery of the Moaning Cave', which is up next, was written by William Arden, before Arthur contributed a final book before his death in 1969, 'The Mystery of the Talking Skull'. I always preferred Arthur's books to those which followed by different hands, in part because he had a particular nostalgia for older culture. I saw that in 'The Secret of Terror Castle', which was ultimately about a silent movie actor and I clearly remembered it here because 'The Mystery of the Screaming Clock' is about a radio actor.

Initially, of course, it's about a clock and there surely can't be too many better openings to 'Three Investigators' novels than "The clock screamed." It's an apparently ordinary electric alarm clock that Jupiter Jones has plugged in to see if it works and it scares the crap out of everybody within earshot. Clearly it's a mystery and we're set in motion on the very first page. Of course, the boys investigate and some solid deduction and a little bit of luck gets them answers even though some of the trails they follow reach dead ends.

In fact, Arthur's sense of humour is given a strong showing here, because, in one instance, a trail appears to be literally that, a dead end. The boys acquire a phone number and call it, pretending to be the phone company in order to convert it into an address, only to hear a horrible scream. So they head over to the address given, only to discover that it was Mr. Hadley's dying scream, as he is about to be buried. That's a glorious touch, especially with the door promptly slammed in their faces. Of course, they get past this dead end and by chapter five find themselves inside a room in which a dozen different clocks all scream.

What I think I like the most about this setup is that it's impeccably weird but utterly believable, a stark contrast to the setup in the previous book, 'The Mystery of the Silver Spider'. Jupe lives with his aunt and uncle, who run a salvage yard in which he and his friends are often press-ganged into helping out. It's utterly natural that he'd plug in an alarm clock to see if it worked. It's equally as natural that a box of junk would end up at a junk yard. Add one quirky element and everything is ready to fall into place. It's a firm reminder that mysteries are all around us.

Compare that, however, with the prior book, in which the three boys are being driven around in a gold plated limousine when a European prince's car almost crashes into them and the soon-to-be crowned head of state asks them to be his guides around Disneyland, after which he invites them to his coronation and the government enlists them to be junior agents. Yeah, that's an incredibly large plot convenience to hinder a story with from the outset, because that sort of thing does not happen every day and not even one part of it is ever likely to happen to us.

By the way, one of Arthur's regular tropes was to include a fourth boy in each of these novels, as an excellent way to layer in a foreign culture for one book only, the particular culture changing in each story. That European prince, Djaro Montestan, was the least likely of them to show up in the first eight books, but he fit the template nicely. There's a fourth boy here too, but he's not from a different culture for once, which is almost disappointing. He's Harry Smith, a seventeen-year-old who lived in Hadley's house with his mother, who was Hadley's housekeeper, and he's as American as apple pie.

The other element that seems familiar here is stolen art, the MacGuffin at the heart of the best book in the series, in my not-so-humble opinion, 'The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot', as well as 'The Mystery of the Vanishing Treasure'. The difference here, at least initially, is that the artwork has already been recovered before we begin. It's a set of modern paintings stolen from a house in Beverly Hills that were found by the police under the kitchen linoleum at Mr. Hadley's house when they looked into Harry's father, Ralph Smith, an insurance agent who had tried to sell their owner some life insurance and saw the pictures in the process. That's why he's serving five years. And it's why Harry offers up his fifteen bucks of savings if the Three Investigators will take that case.

And so we have two mysteries, which are inevitably going to end up connected, and two are better than one. Another plus point here is that the connection comes when Jupe decides to visit Alfred Hitchcock, who introduces all of their cases. After all, Hadley apparently used to be an actor, so it makes sense to ask a Hollywood director if he knew him. However, Jupe only manages 'We started out to investigate a screaming clock" and Hitch already has the answer. "Screaming Clock! What's happened to him, anyway? I haven't heard that name in years."

So Mr. Hadley is Albert Clock, known in the industry as Screaming Clock, because he screamed for a living on radio shows, priding himself in having more different screams than anyone else. Then television arrived and screamers weren't needed any more, so Bert Clock faded into the type of obscurity that critics like me shine lights on whenever we stumble on the fact that people of this level of interest existed and follow a trail just like Jupe and his colleagues. And that's why I adore Arthur's contributions to this series, I guess, because I never felt more kinship with the boys than when their mysteries take them into cultural territory in ways the ten-year-old me wished that he could do and the fifty-year-old me is blissfully to do on a regular basis.

And, having finally reached that point after nine paragraphs, I'll stop fleshing out the synopsis as you should read this yourself and try to solve the puzzle that Jupe stumbled so memorably upon before the Three Investigators do. I'll just add a hint that there's a returning character this time out, who I won't name but you may well guess, and, if memory serves, he doesn't return again, a fact that I still regret because I'd love to read another novel in which Jupe matches wits with— ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles this series click here