I didn't remember the eighth 'Three Investigators' book with much fondness and re-reading four decades on underlines that. It's not a bad book, but it's not really a 'Three Investigators' book at all, whisking our heroes away from Rocky Beach once more and throwing them into what's less of a mystery and more of a spy story in a fictional European country, Varania, much further away for the boys than the east coast they visited in 'The Secret of Skeleton Island'.

The trigger for all this is a near miss on the road, because Worthington's skill behind the wheel of the gold Rolls Royce avoids an accident with the arrogant driver of a limousine. It's not a pretty encounter until Prince Djaro Montestan, a couple of months away from his coronation as Prince of Varania, climbs out and apologises on behalf of his men, even asking these local boys to show him around Disneyland. They have a ripe old time.

Beyond connecting the Three Investigators to Prince Djaro, naturally the latest in a long string of foreign boys to flavour a story, this scene sets two things into motion. One is the disconnect that's increasingly obvious as the book runs on between the young prince, who intends to run a country as a ruler should, with every one of his people in mind, and the people around him, who aren't as honest, generous or well-meaning. This escalates, of course, once we meet Duke Stefan, who's the regent of Varania until Djaro comes of age. He has his own plans for the country and I'm sure you can guess both what those are and how benevolent they aren't.

So far so good, but the other thing is Robert Arthur stretching credulity and that's far less good. Now, this series is about a trio of teenage detectives solving weird and wonderful mysteries from a base of operations hidden within a junk yard, travelling from location to location in a gold Rolls Royce and reporting their results to famed film director Alfred Hitchcock, so it's fair to say that he has been stretching our credulity from moment one, but this is the least believable story yet.

So we start out with the sort of unlikely encounter that my ten-year-old self believed happened in California every single day and then escalate from there. Hitch calls the boys to let them know to of an imminent visitor, who turns out to be Bert Young, who works for the U.S. government. Djaro, who had a wonderful time at Disneyland, has apparently invited them to his coronation in Varania and Young wants them to go so much that the government will foot the travel bill and pay pocket money. In fact, he wants them to act as junior agents, because something's stirring in Varania and they don't trust Duke Stefan. Who better to figure out what's going on than three tourist kids?

Of course, he gives them each a camera with a built-in walkie talkie and a tiny tape recorders with impressive range, so they're basically being recruited as spies at this point and he's both M and Q. All they need now is a briefing, but Bob takes care of that, telling both us and his colleagues that Varania is a fift- square-mile neutral country founded in 1335 that has been at peace since 1675. It also sits only a helicopter ride away from Paris, so it's Luxembourg and Switzerland wrapped into one. As we soon find, there's some Scotland in there too.

That's because Djaro's news when they get there is that the Silver Spider has been stolen. This is the national symbol of Varania, manifested in a piece of jewellery that every ruler must wear as they're crowned. With it gone, mysteriously replaced by a believable replica within the past week, doubt is cast on whether the people will buy into Djaro being crowned at all. The reason that it's a silver spider dates back to Prince Paul being saved by a spiderweb during the revolution, just like Robert the Bruce. It's worth saying that Scotland won its independence in 1328, only seven years before Varania.

Back to the modern-day story and naturally Djaro wants the Three Investigators to find the Silver Spider so that he can be crowned and all can be right again with Varania, an approach that would have been a worthy one for our heroes. However, while you're probably imagining that mystery in your heads already, that really isn't where we go. It soon becomes clear that the Silver Spider is a pawn in a game of chess that aims to trap our heroes into being seen as villains, foreign ones too.

And so the mystery diffuses and the intrigue bulks up, as this turns into a spy story, with the boys on the run within a huge palace built on a castle, with three hundred mostly unused rooms and a whole swathe of mostly forgotten secret entrances and stairways that Djaro knows from growing up there as a rather lonely but inquisitive child. It's a fantastic location for this sort of intrigue, a gift for a writer like Arthur who can fashion showcase scene after showcase scene.

The catch is that the Three Investigators are exactly that: investigators. They're not spies, secret agents or action heroes. What they do is to solve mysteries and they don't get to do much of that here at all, because the mystery is effectively solved for them. There is a secondary mystery when the Silver Spider, so carefully planted on the boys, can't be found where the bad guys left it, but it proves to be another odd mystery because Bob knows exactly where it is on the grounds and can't tell anyone.

That's because he hid it, so well that nobody can find it, and because he gets a rather convenient bump on the head that gives him short term amnesia. I've always hated that gimmick, especially when it's so blatantly done as here, when Bob can remember everything from any point in his life and especially this particular trip to Europe, except the one solitary detail he needs to remember right now. It's a cheap gimmick and this book is the worse for it. It doesn't help that it's not tough to figure out where it is, though I vaguely remember not grasping that on my first read way back in the day. Maybe this is a book that simply needs to be read by children, who, after all, were the target audience.

However, I don't think that's entirely fair because the biggest problem with this book for me isn't the lack of a primary mystery and the weakness of the secondary one. It's the fact that the Three Investigators are rarely the people who make anything happen. They're caught up by the intrigue and swept along by it, meaning that characters like Rudy and Elena, who I haven't even said word one about yet, are often the real protagonists. It reads rather like watching Jack Burton fighting the good fight in 'Big Trouble in Little China' and realising that he's just the sidekick, even if Kurt Russell is the obvious star. Wang Chi is the protagonist there and Rudy and Elena are here, along with Djaro, of course.

And so I should explain who they are. Rudy is Djaro's driver in Varania and one of the few people he knows he can absolutely trust. Elena is his sister, who sells balloons in the park. However, both are also part of the Minstrel Party, a party for the people who are good and honest and loyal and proud to be descended from those who helped Prince Paul during the revolution, not only because that exempts them from having to pay tax. They're the ones fighting for the future of Varania and our regular heroes are just caught up in the ride.

That means that how well this works for you is how well you get caught up in the ride. Arthur has fun with the intrigue, weaving modern day events into historical antecedents and setting up cool setpieces. While Rudy and Elena are relatively vanilla as characters, there are far more colourful ones too, like Anton the Ancient, a gypsy who may well be able to see the future, even if he talks about it in inevitably cryptic terms. That's as far as Arthur gets to the supernatural here, though the castle is a neat gothic location, especially once we get to visit the torture chamber.

I enjoyed it, but I'm also going to be happy next month to get back to Rocky Beach to unwrap 'The Mystery of the Screaming Clock', one that I remember very fondly indeed. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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