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| Jupiter, Pete & Bob. My best friends in childhood. |
I had an exchange of views on
Twitter last week. No, not one of those I-can-scream-louder-than-you, or
My-outrage-is-better-than-your-outrage exchanges so popular on that Hellsite.
This one was about a particular series of books and why they -The Three Investigator
Novels – were the most successful gateway drug in history. And finding out I was not alone in my love for these books, or in my firm belief that they made me a better person and helped create the writer I am today made me very happy.
And since I figure there aint enough happy or simple joy in the world these days, please forgive me a thousand words or so of complete Stanning...
I was a quiet kid, with an
obsession for books of all kinds.
I loved the anthropomorphic cats
and bears in Richard Scarry’s works, read the Famous Five books, enjoyed The
Hard Boys and Nancy Drew, and then something amazing happened:
My Dad bought me one of the Three
Investigators books. It was The Mystery
of The Laughing Shadow (Book 12 in the series).
My dad and I loved Alfred Hitchcock
movies, and the books – in an early approach to celebrity endorsement /
branding – were introduced by the Auteur, who often featured as a character in
them. By the time I was introduced to Jupiter Pete and Bob, the series had
already been running for 13 years, having commenced in 1964 when Robert Arthur
– who had previously edited several short story collections attributed to
Alfred Hitchcock – sold the idea of a series of teenage mysteries to Random
House.
Over time, other writers had
contributed to the series, principally William Arden (who wrote The Laughing
Shadow amongst others), Nick West, and Mary Virginia (MV) Carey, who wrote many
of my personal favourites.
The head investigator, Jupiter
Jones, lived with his Aunt and Uncle in a vast salvage yard, and had built –
amongst the scrap and salvage – an operations centre with hidden entrances; a
true boy’s den. The boys, too young to drive, were driven around – thanks to a
competition win – in a chauffeur driven limo, while the animosity between the
boys and their sworn enemy, the perma-cocky Skinny Norris, whose bullying
attempts to spoil their plans felt, so often, like a replay of my daily life,
resonated with me.
But unlike my life, the boys got to
hang out with Alfred Hitchcock; they seemed, permanently, to be on some
extended school vacation; and they lived in Southern California.
Many of the normal mundanities of
life – school, homework, the general depressions of a childhood in 1980s Dublin
– could simply cease to exist for as long as my nose was buried in a Three
Investigator book.
I stopped buying them in 1986 when
I moved to London and began working. I guess I figured I was grown up now, and
it was time, as they say “To put aside childish things.”
But some years later, on a visit
back to Dublin, I packed my entire collection into a suitcase and brought them
back to London with me, their presence in my flat symbolising the fact that I
had settled, that where I was – now that The Three Investigators were there
with me – was finally home.
The investigators are lead by
Jupiter Jones, a chubby, smart mouthed intelligent kid, who is a former child
actor named "Baby Fatso” (although he hates it when people mention this). Jupiter
is a prolific reader, often rubs his peers up the wrong way and is driven by
his own morality and belief in the power of logic and creative thinking (So:
not much psychology required there to figure out why I fell for this series).
Jupiter was joined by Pete
Crenshaw, the athletic leg of the trio, more likely to be the one who tackled
the escaping criminal to the ground, though Pete was never drawn as being pure
brawn without brains; he was as capable of challenging assumptions and of
suggesting possible motives or viewpoints as the lead investigator.
Bob Andrews made up the trio. The
researcher, who – in pre-Google days – would scour newspaper morgues, school
libraries, and interview witnesses face to face, produced, often, the killer
clue that Jupiter and Pete would then extrapolate into a solution to the
mystery. Bob did all of this, in the early books, while wearing a leg brace to
heal multiple leg fractures, thus – in late 60s / early 70s fiction –
presenting a differently abled person as a positive independent and equal contributor
to the endeavour, and doing so in a way which never felt shoehorned in.
In fact, the boys also faced off
against menaces which, whilst entirely present in much of today’s YA market,
were definitely unique at the time.
I can barely imagine any of Enid
Blyton’s detective gangs facing down someone trying to swindle a Mexican family
out of their ranch purely because of their race, let alone the Secret Seven
dealing with obsession or the supernatural (Whispering Mummy), and in “The
mystery of The Magic Circle,” Carey dealt with the sad isolation of faded
Hollywood Fame in the same stark fashion as ‘Sunset Boulevard.’
The books were written by the
various authors in a style that could be described as Pulp-Lite. The story
started almost on the first page (if not the first line), the writing was
snappy and direct. There were outlandish titles (“The Secret of Skeleton
Island,” “The Mystery of The Moaning Cave,” “The Mystery of The Headless Horse”
to name a few) designed to pull the readers in, and reveals that – at the end
of the book – made absolutely perfect sense in light of what had been planted
through the plot up to that point.
Chapters ended, mostly, on
cliffhangers, and the danger was real. In “The Magic Circle,” for example, Bob
is bashed on the head, knocked unconscious, dumped in the trunk of a car in the
middle of a scrap yard in Southern California, and left to die of heat stroke.
Beat that, Hardy Boys.
And now I write books. Mystery
books. Books peopled with characters who run the gamut from loveable to quirky
to monstrous, and who are all (or mostly) comfortable in their own skins.
I owe Robert Arthur and MV Carey
particularly a great debt, and one I hadn’t fully realised until recently.
The books have been somewhat bogged
down in legal wrangles in recent years, but I still firmly believe they have a
place in the pantheon of great often overlooked crime writing and can’t imagine
my life – as a kid, as an adult, or as a writer of crime fiction that
entertains and celebrates life in all it’s difference – without The Three
Investigators.
So: What are the books that made you? Which childhood favourite has stayed with you til today, and which parent, relative, librarian teacher turned you on to the sheer joy of a brilliant story well told? I'd love to know.
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| A small selection of my most treasured posessions. |
