The New Three Investigators series

I have previously posted on the excellent juvenile series starring The Three Investigators. Created in 1964 by Robert Arthur Jr., a former pulp author, this series had Jupiter Jones, Peter Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews, all living in California near Hollywood. They formed their own detective agency. While their age was not given, they were about 13 or 14, as none were old enough to drive.

Robert Arthur Jr. wrote 10 of the first 11 books, with others taking it to a total of 43 volumes.

Originally, the series was called Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, with the boys meeting the movie director and telling him of their latest case. When he passed, he was replaced in the books with fictional mystery author Hector Sebastien. Random House, the publisher, would have the earlier books updated to replace Hitchcock with Sebastien. They reprinted the whole series two or three times up to the early 2000s.

However, recently the daughter of Arthur, Elizabeth Arthur, has gotten the rights back on the series. Through Hollow Tree Press, the 10 novels by Robert Arthur Jr. have been reprinted and are available from Amazon and the like in both print and ebook format.

And a new series of 26 novels has begun, written by Elizabeth and her husband. From March 2025 through March 2027, they will be published in hardback, trade paperback, and ebook format. We have the following so far:

• The Mystery of the Abecedarian Academy
• The Mystery of the Brobdingnagian Beast
• The Mystery of the Chimeric Cornucopia
• The Mystery of the Dramaturgical Dagger
• The Mystery of the Existential Envoy
• The Mystery of the Factitious Falconer
• The Mystery of the Galilean Grindstone
• The Mystery of the Hellenistic Hoard
• The Mystery of the Indefatigable Ink
• The Mystery of the Janusian Jackpot
• The Mystery of the Kaleidoscopic Keychain
• The Mystery of the Labyrinthian Legacy
• The Mystery of the Manichean Mask
• The Mystery of the Nebulous Nemesis

As you can see, all the story titles use the letters of the alphabet, though I wish they all weren’t “The Mystery of…” In the original series, there were a few that were “The Secret of…”

I have only read the first few books and liked what I’ve seen. The style seems similar to the originals, though there are some updates and changes, most of which are to be expected.

The stories are set during the summer before the boys go to high school, and it’s hinted this is after the original stories. Hector Sebastien shows up in the first book, but is “written out” of the series by having him move to Montana to research his next book. There are some new characters, the most important being Mallory Macleod, a young Scottish girl who moves into the area with her mom. I was afraid that she was some attempt as a sort of “fourth” female investigator, which has happened in too many boys’ series, but that doesn’t seem the case so far.

We may not see much of Worthington, who had been their chauffeur at times, but that remains to be seen. After the first book, the boys got a reward and plan on using some to purchase a car, but they will need someone to drive them at this point. And we see the use of various modern technologies, like websites, smartphones, and the like, but thankfully not too much. This is probably necessary for “modern audiences” as they would expect this.

There also seems to be a subplot regarding Jupiter Jones’s mother, which there doesn’t seem to be much known about her, but Jupiter learns she was Serbian. I assume this will be a mystery that will be slowly solved through this new series, though I’m not sure how long they will have this run. It’s one of several ways to make connections between the books. I would recommend reading the series in order, as there are callbacks to prior stories, it seems.

I would like to see the rest of the original series reprinted as well, but I’m uncertain if that will occur. And I’ve heard that the 44th book in the original series, The Mystery of the Ghost Train by M.V. Carey, which was never published, has been recently published in Germany, but in German. There’s no word as to an English-language version, unfortunately.

So if you enjoyed the original Three Investigators, do check out this one. I see on Amazon that a few other such juvenile series are getting new works, which I haven’t checked out, but I think this one is a winner.