This was Dennis Lynds a.k.a. William Arden's fourth novel in the 'Three Investigators' series, but it already seems like he needs to up his game after only two from M. V. Carey. His books were clearly better than the two by Nick West but Carey upped the standard with hers, so he had to follow suit. For the most part he does, because this is a decent book, even if it bears some telling similarities to 'The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot', which is a better one. It does find its own way.

Uncle Titus and the boys visit Prof. Carswell, who teaches languages, to pick up the belongings left by Old Mr. Cameron when he passed away in the professor's cottage a month earlier. He lives in a place called Remudo Canyon, which is fictional but supposedly located near the boys' home base of Rocky Beach. I like looking at maps, because they highlight how easy it was for people like Robert Arthur and Dennis Lynds to conjure up mystery stories in locations with wild names, because many such exist for real. A quick glance at Rocky Beach on Google Maps shows me names like Skull Rock, Solstice Canyon and the Hidden Hills. It also tells me that the whole area is currently burning, due to the Palisades Fire.

It isn't burning in this book, but there is danger. On arrival, Jupiter Jones sees a figure in black on the outside wall of Carswell's house, and it soon attacks Hal, the professor's son. It gets away but is injured from a fall into the gorge, this being mountainous territory, and Carswell is shocked, as he has nothing worth stealing himself while Joshua Cameron only had a couple of suitcases to his name, along with twenty paintings by his own hand. Maybe it ties to what Cameron was babbling about when he died of a fever, something to do with canvases and zigzags.

Of course, Uncle Titus happily buys all the painter's belongings, but, when a countess shows up at the junk yard to buy them, they've all been sold except for a few clothes. She claims to be Joshua Cameron's younger sister who married into nobility and wants his stuff for sentimental reasons. She even hires the Three Investigators to track it down and retrieve it, which naturally prompts a Ghost to Ghost Hookup. Bizarrely, they neglect to include their phone number this time, so every kid in town descends on the junk yard with hope for the reward. They get a bunch of the stuff back but no paintings, at least until Skinny Norris walks in with one.

As you might imagine, with Skinny Norris and a Ghost to Ghost Hookup, this is an old-school sort of 'Three Investigators' novel, but there's no supernatural element and the kid is from right there in town rather than from some exotic clime. I miss that trope that Robert Arthur mined so well in the early books in the series. What I appreciated here was that Skinny gets plenty to do here, for once. He tended to be a cheap one-note wannabe villain in Arthur's books, but he's given more chance in this one. His involvement makes sense and we visit both his home and his place of employment, in mysterious circumstances, of course.

I guess the exotic angle here ties to adult characters. I'm not sure that we learn the Countess's full title, but she has an air of elegance to her that stands out in Rocky Beach. She's driven around in a long yellow Mercedes in the company of her estate manager, Mr. Marechal, who bows to the boys and wields a cane with a silver head. Soon, we'll meet a Dutchman, Mr. De Groot from Amsterdam, who also has an interest in the case, and Skinny Norris turns out to be working for Maxwell James, a noted painter. The leopard from the various British paperback covers, but oddly not the literally-minded American covers, is taken from a scene at James's house, where he's drawing it from life.

Much of this unfolds roughly how we expect for a 'Three Investigators' novel, but there are a few important things to note. One is that the mystery within a mystery is that Hal Carswell recalls the guest in the cottage joking that he's the "most expensive painter in the world", clearly untrue in a literal sense but surely a phrase with real meaning. A smaller mystery, easier to figure out, is the one about why a noted painter would buy other people's paintings in a junk yard. I liked the detail in the scenes at Maxwell James's, because I fell into some of the same mental traps as the boys. Another thing that happens at James's house and studio counts as a locked room mystery. It isn't the deepest such in the history of crime fiction, especially as we ought to be able to figure it out a little ahead of the boys, but Lynds handles it well.

The best note to make, though, is the fact that Bob is a godsend in this book. Of course we know that Jupiter Jones is the brains of the outfit and the majority of worthy moments afforded to the Three Investigators go to him. We also know that, if a particular moment doesn't go to Jones, it's going to go to Pete Crenshaw instead, as the most physical of the trio. I've always wondered why Bob Andrews, the researcher of the team, doesn't get more opportunity, his gathering of crucial information at the library often less useful than whatever his dad says off the cuff. Here, Lynds is happy to redress the balance a little.

Initially, it seems like he's going to fail at a crucial moment, because Jupe and Pete are kidnapped at knifepoint and driven away. Bob has a homing device that should lead him to them, but it soon proves to be nonviable at the distances that a car soon generates. However, he figures out a way to get round that, not by magically enhancing the gadgetry but through good thinking. Soon he's figured out where they are and also comes to their rescue, freeing them to continue with the job at hand. Which, not un-coincidentally, begins with research which is naturally done by Bob. It's his moment in the spotlight and he doesn't disappoint.

The worst thing about this book is that it echoes 'The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot' a little too closely. Of course, if you're going to copy a book, then that's the one to copy because it's the best of them according to my childhood memories and is certainly the best of the first eighteen in my adult estimation. However, there's no need to actually copy anything and, while this does find its own way in the end, the explanations being at once simple and worthy, it's lesser for the fact that some of it is rather obviously borrowed.

I'm not sure what the best thing about the book is. Maybe it's just how consistently it plays out, a few borrowed moments aside. I can't call out this moment or that, beyond Bob's stellar showing, but it's all of a consistent level of quality that kept me turning pages, even as a supposed grown-up, decades on from my first time through, trying to figure it all out again because I'd forgotten how it went. It isn't quite up to M. V. Carey's two books thus far but it's worthy nonetheless and it bodes well for the future. Lynds would get the next title too, 'The Secret of Phantom Lake', before it's back to Carey for another couple, one of which I'm particularly looking forward to revisiting. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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