Monday, July 28, 2014
Xmas in July, Day 28: The Three Investigators
Well, we couldn't conjure up any actual living/breathing thrills or chills with the magic and occult in our last post, guess it's time to turn to the next best thing and immerse ourselves in awesome, fictionalized adventure! I pretty much devoured all of the Three Investigators books as a kid, tales of spooky castles, monsters, talking skulls etc captivated the imagination as vividly as the spellbindingly beautiful painted covered art. These suspenseful mysteries were always a welcome sight in my stocking. I do remember reading a few Nancy Drew mysteries, but I was more a fan of Pamela Sue Martin in the role of the cool ABC television series version! Let's not forget Pamela in Playboy too! (Montgomery Ward Christmas Catalog, 1971)
Ah, the Three Investigators. I LOVED those books as a kid. I read them all up until I started reading King and Koontz and Saul and all the other horror authors of the period.
ReplyDeleteI can probably still remember half the twists in them, as silly as some of them was. I think "Talking Skull" and "Dead Man's Riddle" were my favorites.
ive never seen those Alfred Hitchcock teen books. they look cool. i always got The Hardy Boys books for xmas
ReplyDeleteI have quite a few of them still: Terror Castle, Skeleton Island, Monster Mountain, Talking Skull, Haunted Mirror, and the Green Ghost to name a few that I can see from here over on my book shelf.
ReplyDelete@Carol: Hitchcock's name was only used as a host to these stories, he didn't really have much to do with them other than occasionally his spooky face wound up hidden somewhere in the cover art, see if you can find it here in this example:
http://books.freeplaypost.com/ThreeInvestigators_01_SecretOfTerrorCastle_10.jpg
A clever place to put Hitch's face on Mystery of the Whispering Mummy:
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The Stuttering Parrot cover has a cool Hitch bust on the shelf behind them too :)
ReplyDeletehttp://books.freeplaypost.com/ThreeInvestigators_02_MysteryOfTheStutteringParrot_10.jpg
and don't miss the gorgeous end papers:
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Maybe I should just do a Three Investigators post?
wow those are all realy cool - esp the end papers. thanks for posting them!
ReplyDeletePlease do a Three Investigators post!
ReplyDeleteStrangely, I've never read one, I don't think, and feel like I only ever really learned of their existence a couple of years ago. As a kid, I liked reading the Alfred Hitchcock short thriller anthologies, ghost stories and the like, but I don't remember ever running across these. I guess they are proto Scooby stories? I guess maybe I saw them on the shelves and just assumed they were Hardy Boys mysteries (I was never a fan)? Or maybe I read one or two of them early on and they just didn't stick in my memory? At the time--and frankly, at this time too--I tended to balk at seemingly supernatural stories that were revealed as boring old hoaxes perpetrated by everyday criminals at the end. I was better suited for witch school stories and stuff by John Bellairs. But I'd love to read a bunch of these now, and I would certainly love to see a post with a bunch of the covers.
I'l add it to the list of potential future posts :)
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