I don't know if it's just me, but this one felt shorter and less substantial than normal. Maybe it's in a larger typeface. Certainly it's wider spaced on the contents page. Was there a reduction in word count at this point? Maybe it just feels that way because the pace is high and the scarecrow of the title is fundamentally a distraction rather than a key plot element. Otherwise, the real story isn't bad at all and M. V. Carey pulls a neat trick to keep it all surprising. I saw through the whole thing early, or at least I thought I did. It turned out I'd rumbled half of it but there was a second half I'd completely failed to notice. I liked that.

We're in the Santa Monica mountains when Hans blows a tyre and hits a tree. The boys are all in the truck because they were heading to a cabin to buy stuff from somebody who's about to move to Indiana. They never make it. Instead they find themselves looking at a cornfield, which isn't a typical sight in the mountains, and a barn with telegraph wires running to it. Jupe walks through the field to seek help and is promptly attacked by someone who believes that he's a scarecrow. It isn't surprising that he rather forgets about the cabin and concentrates on the mystery at hand.

The man who mistakes Jupe for a scarecrow is Dr. Charles Woolley, who's an entomologist doing a lot of experimentation in that barn. He has a lot of ants. Carnivorous army ants. Apparently, they were there first, for no reason anyone's aware of, and that's why he's there, to find out why. He's  studying their colony with the approval of the landowner, Chester Radford, who doesn't appear in this book. His wife Letitia, however, does because she lives there, much to the dismay of everyone else because she appears to be afraid of everything, starting with ants. She screams a lot.

From one perspective, Letitia can be a little much to take but, from another, there are reasons to explain why and they're good ones. Figuring them out is the first key to the puzzle at hand. Other characters bulk up the cast and busy up the story, which is more complex than it initially appears. One nice touch is to have the boys learn more from a character who isn't even on the scene. They have successfully made their way back to Rocky Beach and they're taking a break in a café, talking about next steps, when a stranger chimes in that he's seen the walking scarecrow up on Chaparral Canyon Road. He'd fit a burglar alarm on the Mosby museum nearby, which is full of priceless art, and he checks it weekly.

Otherwise, it's the people who live up there who we need to keep our eyes on and there aren't a lot of them, given that the Radford house and the Mosby museum are the only places within the immediate area. Letitia's in residence, nursing another broken heart at the hands of a European nobleman. Her companion is Mrs. Chumley, formerly her late mother's social secretary; she has a pair of broken hips from a fall into the swimming pool. They maintain a couple of servants, though Burroughs and his wife are relatively recent arrivals. The Mosby museum has a curator, Gerhard Malz, who pops over once in a while to play chess with Mrs. Chumley.

Oh, and there's a mysterious watcher secreted in the hills, someone who's keeping an eye on the Radford place. Other than that, it's merely ants and a sinister walking scarecrow, which get up to plenty of trouble. The scarecrow does a great job of scaring Letitia, not just by walking when such a creature shouldn't but because it dumps ants on her bed and hurls insects at her while driving. Given that, we can cut her some serious slack for the incessant screaming. Wouldn't you scream if a tarantula walked over your feet? We should give her some kudos for staying in the house, with a creature like that on the loose. She spends a lot of time abroad and Mrs. Chumley does suggest a new trip to get away from it all, but she stays, refusing to be scared out of her own house.

There are conveniences here, one particular ant migration serving to rumble a bad guy, but not as many as we might initially think. The bad guys are well informed and very deliberately tailor a lot of what they do to get the best advantage of the situation, so many details that initially seem like conveniences really aren't, except, of course, to them, by design. On the flipside, there are a suitable number of potential bad guys, the only character we can maybe discount being Woolley, who hires them to find out who's tormenting Letitia, of whom he's rather fond. The locations are fun too: an anomalous cornfield, an ant colony and an art museum. Art does come up a lot in this series, but then art theft is major crime that's appropriately polite for children.

What I keep coming back to is how short it seems. These have never been long books, but it seems like this one is shorter than usual. I wonder if that's one factor in why I remember the later books less fondly than the earlier ones and whether it'll play that way on this runthrough. I tend to think of the series in batches of ten. The first ten were mostly written by series creator Robert Arthur, who focused often on the horror adjacent material that I loved so much, and they've held up well, as I expected. Then the shift came to other authors and the William Arden and M. V. Carey books have stood up better than I expected them to, though the couple by Nick West didn't. In fact, the third ten may well be better than the second ten.

The final shift comes with book thirty-one, 'The Mystery of the Scar-Faced Beggar', which marks a crucial point in the series, the replacement of Alfred Hitchcock with Hector Sebastian. As a kid, I'd thought that Hitch, who I knew was a real film director, also wrote these books, along with all the crime and horror anthologies I saw everywhere in charity shops. Now I realise that he was just the hook to draw people in, the books being written by others. However, Hitch died in 1980, and thus couldn't continue to introduce the boys' cases. Sebastian took that role, safe from the same fate because he was entirely fictional. I remember the books with his name on being the least worthy of the series. Maybe that downslide really began here.

Let's find out if next month's book follows suit, Hitch introducing the boys for the last time as they uncover 'The Secret of Shark Reef'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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