If you remember back a few years, the 'Three Investigators' series was created by Robert Arthur, who also wrote the earliest books, including the first ten. When he died, the series was continued by other hands, mostly Dennis Lynds (as William Arden) and M. V. Carey, with each writing one or two books and handing over to the other as a long running tag team. The only other author with any titles to his credit thus far was Kin Platt, who wrote books fourteen and sixteen as Nick West. Perhaps because those were the weakest in the series but Lynds and Carey were proving reliable, it took until this point, book thirty-five, for a further name to join the fray.

He's credited as Marc Brandel, to which he had legally changed his name from Marcus Beresford in the sixties. He was a prolific writer, though his hundred or so scripts for television, whether live play broadcasts, episodes of ongoing shows or TV movies, easily outnumber his fifteen novels, five for children. One of his adult novels, 'The Lizard's Tail', was adapted into the Oliver Stone feature film, 'The Hand', with Michael Caine. If that wasn't enough, he came from a writing family, as his father was J. D. Beresford, who wrote early science fiction; his sister was Elizabeth Beresford, the creator of 'The Wombles'; and he was briefly engaged to crime novelist Patricia Highsmith.

Given such prolificity, it shouldn't be surprising to find that this flows well, as if he'd been writing 'Three Investigators' novels for years. What's more, he impresses early with an introduction from Hector Sebastian that's longer and much more like something a writer might write rather than a film director. After that, he sets the stage early with setup for a story that's at once immediately recognisable as a 'Three Investigators' case but with a slightly different stamp of his own. It won't surprise that, even with the series closing in on its initial end, he would write two more books and another in the sequel 'Crimebusters' series.

The boys are on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean as we begin, watching the whales migrate north. One seven-foot calf finds itself stranded on the beach, so they rush down, dig a pool next to it and manage to roll it in, filling it with as much water as they can. Their hope is that this kludge is enough to keep it alive until the tide comes back in. The mystery is that they return to the spot to find it gone, not washed back out to sea and safety but loaded into the back of a truck. As that doesn't necessarily translate to foul play, they visit the nearby Ocean World to see if it was taken there, but employee Constance Carmel is suspicious of them and they of her.

If that sounds like a relatively flimsy excuse to spark a novel-length mystery, let me add that the boys receive a phone call at headquarters, promising them a hundred bucks to locate and return the whale to the ocean. And, if that isn't enough for you, then it doesn't take long for the boys to locate the whale, who's being kept in a large private pool, and discover that the kidnapper could well have been the same person who hired them. There can't be many people in the Rocky Beach area with such a distinctive southern accent!

What follows hits all the beats. There's suspense, beginning with Pete stowing away in the back of Constance Carmel's truck. There's a supporting character of a different ethnicity, in what I'd call an homage to the earlier books; Pancho is someone they helped out before, albeit perhaps not in an actual novel, and is now building weird hybrid cars. And I don't mean electric and gas hybrids; I mean he picks them up in a Ford Chevy Volkswagen! There's subterfuge; characters pretending to be other characters, only for the boys (or someone helping them) to see through the ruse. There's gadgetry; Jupe building a tape deck that'll work underwater so they can call Fluke if needed. And there's danger; some sabotaged brakes proving potentially deadly.

Of course, whatever layers Brandel piles onto the story, this remains a mystery and the high level mystery at hand—why someone would hire them to rescue a whale from themselves—eventually clears into a more down to earth one, but one as believable as it is mundane. What's more, while there's that nod to much earlier books, he also adheres to current requirements, including a visit to Hector Sebastian, where we find that Hoang Van Don is now serving plain brown rice, now that a television guru has convinced him that interesting food is bad for you. Sebastian proves useful here, using his connections to make calls for official information the boys can't get otherwise, not least to the Mexican immigration authorities.

There's even room for a little social commentary, though it isn't particularly blatant. Capt. Diego Carmel, who's as closely related to Constance as you might imagine, runs a charter boat company that takes clients out fishing. He lost his boat in a powerful storm, along with whatever cargo was on board, and ends up in hospital suffering from pneumonia for his trouble. The boys soon realise that he doesn't have insurance, either for his boat or for his medical costs. Either way, pneumonia is clearly the least of his worries and we can't help but look at the reasons why.

I liked this debut from Brandel, even though some aspects ring just a little familiar. In particular, there's much in common between Constance Carmel and Eleanor Hess, her equivalent in the prior novel, 'The Mystery of the Wandering Cave Man'. Is that mere coincidence or was Brandel playing extra-safe by plucking details from various earlier books to refashion into a new novel that works firmly to formula? I don't know; but, even if he did the latter, he refashioned well, so this feels like a worthy entry into the series. Let's see how he does with his second contribution, 'The Mystery of the Two-Toed Pigeon', coming in two months after the next M. V. Carey. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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