Hey, a girl gets the first line in a 'Three Investigators' mystery and yet this wasn't written by M. V. Carey novel. It must be rubbing off and I'm not complaining. She's Winnie, or Winifred Dalton, and she's Pete Crenshaw's six-year-old neighbour. She offers him 50c to hire the Three Investigators to locate her doll, Anastasia, which she tells him flew away. Jupe takes note of that little detail and a discovery that there were a whole slew of thefts on the same block that same night. In fact, Pete's mum chases someone out of her yard, someone with a cape, a moustache and a pair of black wings. His dad's project is gone too. Naturally, they take the case.

This is a strong contribution to the series by William Arden, one that plays out relatively simply in a straight line but a straight line that's broken in a bunch of places, so it isn't trivial to follow. The boys have to do a lot of good old-fashioned detective work to figure this one out, all the way down to pounding the streets asking questions of anybody who might be able to contribute a detail that might help. It's good thinking that finds them a commonality between what initially appears to be a random set of objects. It's good detective work to set an effective trap and, just four chapters in, they solve the case, retrieving all of them for their owners from a room at the Palm Court Motel.

Except, of course, the end of the case is just the beginning of the mystery. In fact, it's now become an even deeper mystery because they meet a shaggy demonic figure with glowing red eyes and an array of jagged teeth that's adorned with bones and the skin of a wolf. That's unexpected enough in Rocky Beach, but it also vanishes, just like that, leaving only a small pile of ashes. Also, while the objects are all recovered and returned, the thief got away, so there's still an active thread even to that original case. Clearly whoever it is still wants something and they're not going to stop looking for it.

It's a pretty cool MacGuffin as such things go, an ancient statue that was gifted to the Great Khan of the Golden Horde in 1241. That wasn't Genghis Khan at the time, but his grandson, Batu Khan, not that that makes any difference to its value, which is incalculable. Not only does its owner, who lives in Rocky Beach, naturally want it back but the Chinese government do too, and the thief and whoever he's working for and, well, when it comes to something that unique and valuable, it would be easier to compile a list of who doesn't want it. One of these days I keep expecting to see Victor Hugenay back again. It isn't today.

What's more, the statue isn't of the Great Khan, but of a Mongol shaman called the Dancing Devil who looks eerily similar to the shaggy demonic figure the boys encountered earlier. This case may have begun with a six-year-old girl and her lost doll but it quickly escalated into Mongolian history and legend and, just like the Cockney rhyming slang in Arden's previous novel, 'The Mystery of the Dead Man's Riddle', I can totally buy into bright Californian high schoolers not knowing that much about the subject.

From a series perspective, there are similarities here to one of Arden's earlier novels, 'The Secret of Phantom Lake', which wasn't that old at this point, only six books earlier. Both revolve around a tasty MacGuffin, though the mysterious second journal of Angus Gunn is a very different artifact to Batu Khan's statue of a Mongol shaman. Both involve a serious amount of research on the part of the boys, in this instance with the help of Prof. Hsiang from the university. And both feature an avid young helper related to a key player in the story, in this case Jim Clay, the son of the statue's current owner. Well, before it was stolen.

And stolen again. And sold. And stolen. Or not. Maybe fake stolen. And… you get the picture. Again like 'The Secret of Phantom Lake', Arden has the Three Investigators work off a lot of calories this time out, as they figure out the chain of custody. Of course, it helps to know what the object is and where it was stolen from to begin with, but then they have to figure out what happened next. And next. And next. And, if they can follow this long and often tortuous trail, they'll find the statue. It isn't a complicated path, but it's a long one that takes a good deal of effort and perseverance.

And really, doesn't that describe every investigation of art theft? The research that Jupe—rather than Bob for once—conducts on the dancing devil includes a similar chain of documented custody. Forty years after Batu Khan took it home to Karakorum in Mongolia, Kublai Khan, who was also a grandson of Genghis Khan, conquered China and took it to Peking. It stayed in China for centuries but disappeared during the Japanese occupation in World War II. It reappeared in London in 1956 when it was bought by a wealthy art collector called H. P. Clay, who lives in Long Beach. No wonder the Chinese want it back.

I love how that history, well-documented in art reference books, mirrors what the boys have to put together afresh from the moment it was stolen from Clay. They literally have to flesh out the next steps in that chain of custody. They know when it was stolen from Clay. They know when it got into Pete's neighbourhood and they figure out how, which means they know who to ask about where it went next and so on down the chain. Quite a few books in this series, going all the way back to 'The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot', revolve around lost or stolen art, but never has the boys' work felt so much like what professional art historians do as it does here.

Other than that, the only other note from a series perspective is that there's a good use of chalk question marks again to mark a trail. They were a frequent tool in the Three Investigators toolkit early in the series but suddenly seem like they hadn't been used in a while. It's good to see them back and the boys even share some chalk with young Jim Clay. And, thinking about the series as a whole, I have to say that I'm enjoying the Carey and Arden books more than I expected to. Robert Arthur, the series creator, certainly provided its heyday, but Carey was a better writer and Arden is doing what he can to keep up with her. And he's up again next month with 'The Mystery of the Headless Horse'. See you then. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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