Ghost in the Light

"...there is evil everywhere under the sun."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun, 1941)

During the 1950s, the celebrated and incredibly prolific science-fiction author, Isaac Asimov, wrote "a series of six derring-do novels" about the ace investigator of the Council of Science, David "Lucky" Starr, which is a gig that brought him to every world in our Solar System – all of them colonized and inhabited by humans. As they should be!

The stories fall into the category of juvenile fiction and were initially published under a pseudonym, "Paul French," but the name was dropped when plans for a television series fell through. So the series always impressed me as an action/adventure stories in a science-fiction surrounding, but, according to Mike Grost, there's one Lucky Starr title offering "a fully fair play mystery." One that has clues and "a dying message delivered by a non-human character," which should give the observant reader a couple of strong hints as to who the culprit is. So how could I possibly resist?

Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury (1956) is the third book in the series and brings David "Lucky" Starr and his small, Martian-born sidekick, John Bigman Jones, to the smallest and innermost planet of the Solar System – a two-faced celestial body called Mercury. Since the planet is the next door neighbor of our Sun, it's not the most hospitable place for permanent human settlement. However, the planet had been mined in the past for precious metals, such as silver and platinum, and recently became the location of an expensive research project.

At the Solar Observatory at the Mercurial North Pole, they're testing a completely new branch of science, called Sub-etheric Optics, which would allow them to intercept sunlight, guide it through hyperspace, and spread it evenly over the Earth – effectively giving them full control over the seasons. The "distribution of sunlight" would turn the Earth into a "conditioned paradise," but, recently, the project is plagued by a series of accidents. And they're taking a toll on the engineer in charge of Project Light, Scott Mindes.

Upon their arrival on Mercury, Mindes tells Lucky and Bigman there are "two-legged ghosts" on the Sun-side of the planet. Mindes has been scouting the Sun-side in a small rocket-scooter and observed "something that moved under the sun," something wearing a metallic spacesuit, who was seen standing still in the Sun for minutes at a time – as though it didn't care "a thing for the heat and radiation." Something that would be even ill-advised to do in a special insulated spacesuit.

So is the metal-clad ghost a fragment of the engineer's unstable imagination? An unknown Mercurian life-form? Or a saboteur from the Sirius star system?

After the opening chapters, the red-thread running through the plot splits into several sub-threads, which are still tightly connected to one another, but allows for some of the spotlight to be shown on Starr's right-hand man. Bigman got himself into a feud with Jonathan Urteil, a "roving investigator" for Senator Swenson, who stands in opposition to the Council of Science. A dispute that would eventually lead to a duel fought in low-gravity to make up for the weight difference between both men and resulted in a simple, but original, murder involving a gravity lock.

However, the murder is committed relatively late into the story and before they dueled in low-gravity, Bigman and Urteil had a close brush with death in the dark, disused mines that has a backstory that could be used as the premise of a science-fiction horror movie.

Bigman and Lucky Starr

The mines were slowly being abandoned fifty years ago, when the observatory was constructed, but the only thing that never died down were the stories the miners left behind for the astronomers. Stories about miners who were inexplicably frozen to death in the shafts. In those days, the mine shafts were fairly well heated and the power units of their suits functioned normally, but miners kept dying from an inexplicable and intense cold – eventually only entered into the main shafts in gangs. Bigman and Urteil stumble across the answer to "the freezing death in the mines," but the answer in question is pure science-fiction. However, the problem gave the book some nice and imaginative scenes.

Yes, I realize this is the third mystery in row about a mine, having previously reviewed Tyline Perry's The Owner Lies Dead (1930) and M.V. Carey's The Mystery of Death Trap Mine (1976), but was unaware Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury had a sub-plot about an old, abandoned mine when picking the book from the big pile.

Meanwhile, Lucky is exploring the Sun-side of Mercury with an ergometer and comes across the tall, metallic figure glanced by Mindes, but all I can really say about this plot-thread is that Asimov had really stopped hiding his identity at this point in the series. Something is revealed in these chapters that makes no bones about the fact that these books take place in the same universe as (some) of his other science-fiction/mystery stories. And this figure gives Starr an incomprehensible dying message, "er—er," when asked who was behind the acts of sabotage.

It's a rudimentary and simplistic dying message, but one that makes perfect sense when explained and beautifully complements the other clues pointing the murderer/saboteur. Asimov really showed his then brand new credentials as a part-time mystery novelist. Granted, the story does not translate into a genre-classic, or even one of Asimov's best hybrid mysteries, but the plot was sound and all of the plot-threads tied up satisfactorily. And the Mercurial backdrop was great.

Even though Asimov had to admit in his introduction, written for Fawcett editions, that "the advance of science can outdate even the most conscientious science-fiction," because his "astronomical descriptions are longer accurate in all respects." But that will only annoy readers who are well versed in astronomy, I suppose.

On a last, semi-related note: Ho-Ling, JJ and yours truly appear to be the only who occasionally review these science-fiction mysteries and thought a list of all these hybrid-mysteries, reviewed between the three of us, would be a nice way to pad out this blog-post.

My list: Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet (1942), David Reed's Murder in Space (1944), John Russell Fearn's The Lonely Astronomer (1954) and James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977).

Short stories: Miriam Allen Deford's Space, Time and Crime (1964; anthology) Isaac Asimov's "Mirror Image"(1972) Timothy Zahn's "Red Thoughts at Morning" (1988).

Ho-Ling's list: Poul Anderson's After Doomsday (1962) Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1954), The Naked Sun (1957), The Robots of Dawn (1983) and James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977).

Short stories: Sonoda Shuuichirou's "Dakara dare mo inaku natta" ("And That's Why There Were None").

Audio drama: Hiroshi Mori's "Meikyuu hyakunen no suima" ("Labyrinth in the Arm of Morpheus").

JJ's list: Peter F. Hamilton's A Quantum Murder (1994), Adam Roberts' Jack Glass (2012) and James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977).

As you can see, we all love Hogan's book!

Do Not Enter!

"Fear isn't in our vocabulary..."

- Jonny Quest (TRAJQ: S02E10: Ghost Quest)

Since 2015, I discussed nearly a dozen books from The Three Investigators series, mostly those written by Robert Arthur and William Arden, but also one of the many titles penned by M.V. Carey. Between them, they imagined countless alluring problems and tight spots to occupy those three lads from Rocky Beach, California, but rarely did they allow the boys to stumble across a body – certainly not a really well preserved one that could be a homicide victim.

Over their many adventures, Jupiter "Jupe" Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews uncovered long-hidden skeletons of people who died (e.g. The Mystery of the Moaning Cave, 1968) or were murdered (e.g. The Mystery of the Headless Horse, 1977) over a century ago. A past murder in a Cairo bazaar was mentioned in The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy (1965) and the boys dealt with the legacy of a dead man in The Mystery of the Shrinking House (1972), but Carey's The Mystery of Death Trap Mine (1976) places them squarely in Case Closed territory when they make an unsettling discovery in an abandoned mine-shaft.

The Mystery of Death Trap Mine begins when they receive a surprise visit in their secret headquarters from a character who previously appeared in The Mystery of the Singing Serpent (1972), Allie Jamison, who's the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Rocky Beach. Jupe, Pete and Bob helped Allie's family with getting "rid of a sinister house-guest" and "exposed a diabolical blackmail plot," but this time she wants to keep her uncle, Harry Osborne, from having "the wool pulled over his eyes" - which has, according to her, something to do with his suspicious next door neighbor.

Osborne has bought a Christmas tree ranch in Twin Lakes, New Mexico, which used to be a mining town. There's an exhausted silver mine, called Dead Trap Mine, because "a woman once wandered in there" and "fell down a shaft." Some say she still haunts the place.

So the mine is an extremely dangerous place and locals sealed the opening when a missing five-year-old nearly got herself killed in there, but Osborne sold the mine and a chunk of land to a returning local, Wesley Thurgood. One of the first things Thurgood did was to remove the iron grill from the entrance and bought a guard dog to watch the place. He also puttered around the site in brand-new jeans, a hard hat and manicured nails! All of this makes Allie mighty suspicious and deviously gets her uncle to offer Jupe, Pete and Bob a summer job, pruning Christmas trees, but their real task will be helping Allie getting to the bottom of the mine business.

Surely, not long after arriving at Twin Lakes, Allie does seem to have grounds for suspicion, because Thurgood appears to have lied about something. And why did he fired a shotgun inside an empty mine?

Of course, they're going to do exactly what any kid or teenager would do in their place: ignore Osborne's warnings, trespass on Thurgood's property and descend into the forbidden mine, but, "about fifty yards into the mountain," Thurgood suddenly appeared behind them, while Allie started to scream in front of them, pointing to the bottom of a dark pit – where a body "lay strangely twisted on the rocky floor of the shaft." The well-preserved, mummified corpse belongs to a convicted criminal, Gilbert Morgan, who had been released from prison five years previously and then simply disappeared. So there you have two problems that may, or may not, be intertwined.

On the one hand, you have the strange behavior and protective attitude towards "a played-out silver mine" on Thurgood's part, while on the other you have the presence of a dead parole-jumper in that same mine.

Allie is rattled!

The problem of the dead body in the mine is tackled by going through some back issues of the local newspaper, Twin Lakes Gazette, which chronicles absolutely everything that happened in that small and remote town. And there they learn about the placing of the iron grill and the discovery of a stolen car near the mine. However, it is the accidental discovery of a five-year-old Phoenix newspaper that tells them about a crime that appears to have a connection with both the body and the abandoned car. The other problem has an interesting geological clue, the appearance of "a bit of gold in a played-out silver mine," which eventually explains the gunshots, the underground explosions and Thurgood's behavior, but not in the way you might assume. I liked this aspect of the plot the most.

In between snooping, Jupe, Pete, Bob and Allie have to dodge newspaper reporters, curiosity seekers, midnight prowlers, guard dogs, rattlesnakes and adult supervision. And the latter seriously hampered their movement on one or two occasions. However, they still got around to playing detective and they even visited a ghost town, called Hambone, which received a deathblow when their mine closed, but made for a great backdrop for an excellent and one of the more memorable scenes from the book – which will culminate in the obligatory spot of danger when a couple of criminals show up. Pete and Allie find themselves at their mercy and that of the scorching sun of a stretch of desert land, while a helicopter is desperate searching for them.

So, all in all, The Mystery of Death Trap Mine was a very readable, well-characterized and competently plotted entry in the series. Granted, the plot was not stellar, however, all of the plot-threads hang together coherently. They were just a bit commonplace. You could partially blame this on the author not daring to make the death of Morgan a full-blown murder. Carey said in an interview that they had not "any murderers in the series," but she could see "where the life-is-not-fair-so-I-think-I'll-hold-up-the-bank type of thinking can lead to murder." I think the plot of this book would have been a perfect vehicle to tell exactly such a story. And hey, she already supplied the body, so why not go all the way, right?

Secondly, Carey seems to have been a very character-driven writer and you can see this in how she treated all of the characters. Even the minor ones seem to be more than just background decoration, but the most eye-catching here is how Allie interacted with the boys. I got the distinct impression that Carey was setting Allie up as a counterweight to Jupe and planted the seeds of a potential romantic relationship between her and Pete, but the series publisher probably told her not to pursue this angle. Because Allie made no further appearances in the series.

Well, that brings us to the end of this review and I can already reveal that the next one also has a mining backdrop. So you can probably guess which mystery novel that's going to be.

The Sword of Cortés

"We won't let any headless horses get the better of us."

- Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention," from Lord Peter Views the Body, 1928)

The Mystery of the Headless Horse (1977) is the twenty-sixth recorded case of Jupiter "Jupe" Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews, "those maddeningly industrious young sleuths," but only the eighth novel a well-known pen-for-hire, Dennis Lynds, contributed to the casebook of The Three Investigators – all of them appearing under his penname of "William Arden." I think this was one of his stronger efforts.

Jupe, Pete and Bob hail from Rocky Beach, California, which plays a bigger role than usual in this semi-historical mystery-and adventure novel.

Surprisingly, The Mystery of the Headless Horse opens on the front-steps of Rocky Beach Central School, because the reader rarely gets a glimpse of their school activities. They always seemed too busy living the Jonny Quest lifestyle to hang around with classmates once the afternoon bell ended a school day, but Pete was asked by a fellow student, Diego Alvaro, to bring Jupe to the gate of the athletic field after school. Pete got the impression he wanted to talk about something important.

Diego comes from an old Spanish bloodline dating all the way back to the time when Europeans first came to the New World and one of his earliest ancestors, Carlos Alvaro, was a soldier with "the conquistador Hernando Cortés when he defeated the Aztec Empire" and "conquered southern Mexico" - which was all the way back in 1521. A century or two later, Rodrigo Alvaro decided to settle down in the area of present-day Rocky Beach and asked the provincial governor of California for a land grant. Governors of Mexico and California were allowed to give away grants on behalf of the King of Spain.

So the Alvaro family came into possession of five square leagues ("more than twenty-two thousand acres"), but the estate has since dwindled to a mere one hundred acres of land.

A barely profitable piece of land with a recent mortgage attached to it. However, the property is greedily eyed by their neighbor, Mr. Norris, who wants one huge ranch by buying up all the land surrounding it. Mr. Norris is also the father of the arch-nemesis of the three detectives, "Skinny" Norris, who makes his last appearance here, because, this time, his actions has consequences.

So, in order to keep their land, Diego and his older brother, Pico, need to raise money and they decided to sell the furniture, art, books, tools and such that the family has accumulated over several generations and the person who would gladly pay a good price for them is Jupe's Uncle Titus – who owns the Jones Salvage Yard that's famous along the entire coast of southern California. However, a fierce brush fire claimed the Alvaro home and the barn they used as a storage for their family treasures.

Jupe, Pete and Bob are left with only one, very remote, chance to help Diego save what's left of his family estate: solving a 130 year old family mystery about a missing, gem-encrusted sword that was lost during the Mexican War.

After the brush fire, the boys discovered that the wooden statue of Cortés on horseback, which stands on a ridge looking out over the land, had the head of the horse knocked off when a cylinder of fire-retardant chemicals was dropped from a helicopter or plane. But this accident led them to the discovery of a very old sword cover inside the hollow neck of the horse's head. A discovery that immediately brings the family legend of "the Cortés Sword" to mind.

According to the Alvaro family history, the previously mentioned Carlos, "the first Alvaro in the New World," once saved his fellow soldiers from an ambush and Cortés presented him with a ceremonial, gem-encrusted sword with a solid gold hilt as reward for saving their lives. The sword had been given to Cortés by the King of Spain. So the sword became a treasured family heirloom for hundreds of years, but went missing in 1846, at the start of the Mexican War, when Sebastián Alvaro was reportedly shot by American soldiers when trying to escape arrest and was seen falling into the ocean – with a sword in hand.

The case looks pretty hopeless and the trail has been stone cold for more than a century, but the boys do a marvelous job at reconstructing the past. Admittedly, they act here more as historians than as detectives. A good portion of their investigation is done at the Rocky Beach Public Library, Rocky Beach Historical Society and the County Land Office where they go over old newspaper articles, letters bound journals of local residents from the nineteenth century, US army reports and crumbling maps.

What they find are some interesting inconsistencies in the reports about Don Sebastián's death and the fact that all of the soldiers who were involved with the arrest deserted, and thoroughly disappeared, after they filed their report. They also astutely identified an apparently non-existent place, called "Condor Castle," in one of the old letters. Obviously, Arden attempted to impart a little bit of knowledge to his young readers. Not just by giving them some historical pointers, but also showing the value of proper research, critical reading of texts and to not always accept everything on face value, but to think for yourself – which is the best kind of advice any kind of mystery novel could give you.

I'm not sure how much the youngest readers of this series would appreciate the historical examination of the past, but, surely, the older readers will be able to enjoy it. I should also point out that Arden took a similar approach with the plot of The Secret of Phantom Lake (1973), but I think it worked much better in this one.

Well, The Mystery of the Headless Horse is not just about digging into old archives, studying even older maps and flipping through yellowed, brittle pages. They also have to deal with the aftermath of the brush fire, which gets Pico arrested, coming on top of the meddling by Skinny and the Norris' ranch manager, Cody. All of this leads to a tight spot somewhat reminiscent to the cave exploration from Arden's The Mystery of the Moaning Cave (1968), but the cherry on top is when Jupe figured out where Don Sebastián had hidden the sword. A solution that tore a page from Edgar Allan Poe's famous "The Purloined Letter," a short story from 1844, which was a nice revelation and a good way to end a long, exhaustive search. I do have to wonder if the sword could really have been hidden there, for a 130 years, without being found sooner, but that's really nitpicking on my part.

So, all in all, another fun, amusing and even clever entry in this series and would even place the book among my small list of favorites, which is currently made up of The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy (1965), The Secret of Skeleton Island (1966) and The Mystery of the Shrinking House (1972). Guess that makes The Mystery of the Headless Horse number four on that list and that's not bad considering I read about a dozen titles from this series.

I'll probably return to this series before too long, but the next blog-post will be of a good, old-fashioned Golden Age detective. I'm just not sure yet whether it'll be a regular whodunit or a locked room mystery. Only time will tell, I guess.

The Ghost of Rustling Ridge

"I don't believe in ghosts, anyway."

- Holmes Hamilton (Manly Wade Wellman's The Sleuth Patrol, 1947)

Capwell Wyckoff was an American lay minister in the Presbyterian Church and an author of children's fiction, known primarily for a series of juvenile mysteries about the Mercer Boys, but he also wrote short stories for Boys' Life and Open Road for Boys – using the royalties to bankroll his missionary work. One source even claims Wyckoff "sold his Mercer Boys manuscripts for a flat rate of two hundred dollars without royalties." In any case, the money went towards missionary work.

I came across Wyckoff when scouring the web for a series, or standalone, similar to The Three Investigators books by Robert Arthur and William Arden. The Mercer Boys appeared to fit the bill. Although the title I picked turned out to be a whole lot closer to the boy scout mystery that provided the opening quote for this blog-post.

The Mercer Boys in the Ghost Patrol (1929) originally appeared under a more mundane book-title, The Mercer Boys in Summer Camp, which was the sixth book about Jim Mercer, Don Mercer and their close friend, Terry Mackson – who made their first appearance in The Mercer Boys' Cruise on the Lassie (1929). Yes, most of the books in this series was published in that years with a handful of additional novels appearing over the next couple of years.

During their second adventure (related in The Mercer Boys at Woodcrest, 1929), Jim, Don and Terry enrolled into Woodcrest Military Institute and became cadets. So this makes them slightly older than the protagonists from the other juvenile detective-and adventure stories I've read. I suspect they're somewhere in their late teens, around sixteen or seventeen, because a character mentioned the uniformed cadets were "too young-looking for regular soldiers," but they were allowed to carry side arms with permission – which happened towards the end of the story.

Otherwise, the plot is very similar to other juvenile mysteries, such as The Sleuth Patrol, which also has a story-line that's almost pure Scooby Doo. But the book-title probably gave that part away.

The Mercer Boys in the Ghost Patrol begins in early July and "the summer encampment was at hand," but opening of the book takes place in the school supply room where everyone was getting their camping uniform. Terry also picked up a feud there that would come to dominate the first half of the story. Cadet Dick Rowen gets into a tussle with the good-humored Terry, but ends up getting publicly humiliated and, spiteful as he is, tries to extract revenge on the three friends – such as messing with their bayonets, attempting to hurt one of their horses and placing several charges against one of the Mercer boys. A true pain in the ass for the three cadets.

However, this story-line slowly recedes into the background as the plot-thread about "the mystery of the ghost of Rustling Ridge" began to emerge from the shadows of the camp ground.

Colonel Morrell found a new camping ground, called Rustling Ridge, because the old camp spot was being encroached upon by the modern world and the colonel wanted "to get as far away from civilization" as possible. And the new ground certainly serves this purpose.

The fire rises!

However, the place is not entirely bare of human settlements. The arrival of the cadets is definitely welcomes by one of the local farmers, Carson, because "business is mighty poor" and having to feed an entire regiment of hungry, young cadets is a much needed financial boost – which has been suffering under the frightful reputation of the local legend. A ghost prowls the ridge and has been chasing people away for several years. Soon enough, this spectral inhabitant of the ridge pays a visit to the camp.

The first brush with the ghost was a secondhand encounter: a number of nighttime sentries around the camp saw a wagon, with a man and a young boy in it, race past them like a bat out of hell. They later learn they were a father and son who saw the ghost. On the following night, the sentries have an encounter with "a white shape," but the apparition gets a more solid form when it eventually enters the camp ground.

Jim has a brief brush with "a tall white shape" in the woods where the horses are corralled, but the figure manages to escape by causing a stampede and this lands Jim in hot water. The figure is also held responsible for an arson case and the brief disappearance of the small daughter of the farmer. So the colonel decided to form a ghost patrol to put a stop to the specter's reign of terror over the scarce population of the ridge.

As said earlier in this blog-post, the story-line about the ghost is firmly planted in Scooby Doo territory and one of the villains is even overheard saying "those meddlesome cadets again." So you really shouldn't expect a ratiocinative detective story. For example, I strongly suspected the unpleasant, blustering sheriff of being the ghost, which I based on what I assumed was a genuine clue. The sheriff used a turn of phrase ("keep your nose out of the affairs on this ridge") that was similar to a warning left by the ghost on a piece of cardboard at the camp ("KEEP YOURE NOSE OUTN THE GHOST BUSINESS").

However, there's a short scene in which they attempt to follow a trail of footprints and the identity of the ghost is deduced based on perspiration and wet socks on a least-likely-suspect after the ghost was seen running away, but that was a minor and late element in the story. The Mercer Boys in the Ghost Patrol should primarily be read as a fun, mild-mannered adventure/mystery story that can (plot-wise) be classified as an ancestor of Scooby Doo. So that's definitely a point of interest for a juvenile mystery novel. Personally, I loved the backdrop of a summer camp of a military academy. A background that would also lend itself perfectly for a straightforward murder mystery. I wonder if there are any...

Anyway, I might try one or two more books from this series in the future. They seem like good material to intersperse with the ones about the previously mentioned Three Investigators and Case Closed. Speaking of the latter, I posted a review of vol. 59 a few days ago, but it got a bit snowed under since then. So you might want to take a look at that post.

That's it for now, but the next review will probably be of good, old-fashioned Golden Age detective story. So stay tuned!

Scouting for Danger

"It is the unofficial force – the Baker Street Irregulars."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four, 1890)

Manly Wade Wellman was an old-fashioned "fictioneer," known in some quarters as "the dean of fantasy writers," but he also wrote detective stories, science-fiction, westerns and juvenile fiction. A versatile writer whose bibliography encompasses a wide sweep of (sub) genres and this is reflected in the two books and short story reviewed on this blog, which comprises of a hybrid-mystery (Devil's Planet, 1942), a private-eye novel (Find My Killer, 1947) and an impossible crime story - "A Knife Between Brothers" collected in The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries (2014).

The subject of this blog-post is one of Wellman's lesser-known novels, which, once again, belongs to a completely different sub-genre than his previously reviewed work. One that can be placed in the category of juvenile mysteries, but also, very snugly, fits into the niche corner of boy scout fiction and scouting literature in general. A peculiar field of fiction now only of apparent interest to collectors.

Holmes "Sherlock" Hamilton is the sixteen-year-old protagonist of The Sleuth Patrol (1947) and the son of the police chief of Hillwood, who wants to follow in his father's footsteps, but for the moment he's still in the scouts and the opening of the book finds him in his basement den – one that resembles "an outlaw hide-out." The walls are decorated with crossed fencing foils, a couple of grim looking "Most Wanted" posters and tacked-up certificates of Scout achievements. A corner table functions as forensic laboratory were fingerprints can be taken with ink, ground pencil lead or white talcum.

Sherlock is eager to help his father, who's also the chairman of the Troop committee, by using his den as a gathering place for the formation of a new Troop. A handful of boys show up: Pete Criley, Harry McMurray and Chuck Schaefer (who reads Ellery Queen), but the three Scouts taking center-stage are Sherlock, "Doc" John Watson and the wisecracking Max Hinkel. So this makes the book really feel like a predecessor of Robert Arthur's The Three Investigators.

One thing this group of boys have in common, besides being Scouts, is that they love detective stories ("we're all Hawkshaws at heart"), which makes it a logical decision to become Scout Detectives. They call their newly formed patrol the (sleuth) Hounds. The second chapter, entitled "The Case of the Bean Burglar," provides Sherlock with his opportunity to shine and quickly solves the case, but his interference will come back to haunt the young detective. A month later, during a school holiday, their Scoutmaster takes them on an outdoors camping trip and this provides the Hound Patrol with a number of problems and challenges – from a friendly rival with the Eagle Patrol to a rundown, reputedly haunted, house in the middle of the woods.

First of all, the car of the Assistant Scoutmaster, Mr. Brimmer, disappears in the middle of the night and this provides the plot with a borderline impossible theft, because how was the (noisy) car started without anyone waking up? Why did they fail to find any of the tracks with the distinctive zigzag pattern? I should probably have tagged this blog-post as an impossible crime, but this was really a slight and easily solvable problem without any real emphasis on the apparent impossibility of the situation. To be honest, the entire plot, what they call, waver thin and relies heavily on the Scouts showcasing their physical-and mental prowess to solve problems and get out of tight situations. A part of the middle section tells of a competition between the Hounds and Eagles, which, for example, showed them using their wits to try and win a swimming race.

I was strangely reminded of Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning, both the manga and animated series, which also had physical battle-of-wits and logical (survivor) games. Of course, they were a whole lot less deadly in The Sleuth Patrol, but they're definitely related. And, yes, the combination of the camping trip and the criminal angle of the abandoned house in the woods recalls some of the disastrous camping trips of the Junior Detective League from Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan).

The haunted house

But the plot-thread of the haunted house, tied to both the burglary from the second chapter and the car theft, is far from complex and only gives Sherlock an opportunity to showcase his skill set when he finds himself trap at the place – alongside a couple of gun-toting criminals. I got the impression this book was written with the idea of showing young teenagers the advances of taking their homework and physical exercises seriously. For example, when Sherlock finds himself trapped in the dark cellar he deduces, using math, that "the basement of the haunted house was a deep one," once inch short of ten feet, by simply counting the number of stairs and estimating their height. He also showed how his physical fitness allowed him to sneak around the criminals and escape from their clutches unscathed.

So the book really is closer to adventure stories and boy scout fiction than to the juvenile mysteries of The Three Investigators.

Finally, The Sleuth Patrol ends with an interesting and somewhat unique event, in which hundreds of Scouts, from different groups, are summoned to help the police comb the swamp for a wounded man. So you can also view the book as a recruitment tool for the Scouts, because Wellman painted an attractive and exciting picture of the life of Scouts. Even if you eliminated the presence of the criminals. It reminded me of the traditional school-camp droppings. So one can only imagine how attractive this must have looked to children and (young) teenagers from the pre-1950s (i.e. last generations before TV-and internet).

So, plot-wise, The Sleuth Patrol is a very thin detective story, but still a well-written and fun read, which told a boy scout story on top of the premise of a juvenile mystery. Admittedly, that was not entirely without interest. Probably not to everyone's taste, but worth a shot to readers of juvenile (mystery) fiction.

The Chumash Hoard

"But knowing you boys, nothing would surprise me – not even your finding treasure where there isn't any."

- Mr. Crenshaw (Robert Arthur's The Secret of Skeleton Island, 1966)

The Mystery of the Laughing Shadow (1969) is the twelfth recorded case of those three young lads, Jupiter "Jupe" Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews, who established themselves as The Three Investigators in their native stomping ground of Rocky Beach, California – where cases are (literally) for the picking. And this entry in the series is a case in point.

It was the second novel penned by Robert Arthur's handpicked successor, Dennis Lynd, who adopted the penname of "William Arden" for this series, which first appeared on the book-cover of The Mystery of the Moaning Cave (1968). He also put this name to one of the most classically-styled case for the three detectives, The Mystery of the Shrinking House (1972). However, the book under review today is more of an adventurous yarn, with criminal elements and long-lost treasure, than a proper detective story. One that was practically thrown into their laps.

Bob and Pete are pedaling home on their bicycles, after spending a day in the mountains, when they pass the high wall enclosing the Sandow estate and are startled by a sudden cry, "HELP," coming out of the night – followed by an object being thrown over the enclosure. They hear several voices and eventually a shadowy figure emerges from the iron gate in the wall: a "tall, twisted and humpbacked" entity with "a long, beaky nose and a small head" that "jerked about in an erratic way." A wild laughter came from the tall figure and this unnerved the boys.

They observed all of this from a thick growth of bushes near the wall and high-tailed out of their once the gate closed behind the laughing shadow.

Jupe was unable to accompany his friends on their mountain excursion, because he had to work in his Uncle Titus salvage yard, but "the stocky First Investigator of the trio" makes up for lost time by finding a hidden compartment in the amulet that was thrown over the wall. The amulet is a golden figurine of a sitting Indian with a feathered headdress and a hidden compartment in the bottom contained a small of piece of paper, which was covered in strange writing and the ink looked as if it might be blood!

Their famous mentor and promoter, Alfred Hitchcock, referred them to a friend of his, Professor Meeker, who's an expert in American-Indian languages and from him they learn about "a mystery that is almost two hundred years old" - namely the long sought after Chumash Hoard. Between 1790 and 1820, the Spanish were trying to cope with a dangerous band of marauding Indians, the Chumash, who were given gold to leave the settlers alone. By the time they were finally beaten, they reputedly hoarded a King's ransom worth of gold, but their last leader, before dying, only hinted that "it is in the eye of the sky where no man can find it." So how's that for a dying message?

However, the truly baffling part is that the writing, in blood, they found inside the amulet was Yaquali, which is the language of a Mexican-based tribe, known as the Devils of the Cliff, who have "a long record of shunning civilization." So that makes for a nice historical mystery, but the problem for the trio began en route to the home of the professor. A dark man in white, brandishing "a long, wicked-looking knife," took the amulet from them. Dark men in white, carrying knives, are constantly roaming in the background of the story, but they're not the only ones posing problems and potential dangers to the boys.

Jupe, Pete and Bob want to snoop around the Sandow estate, which belongs to the reclusive Sarah Sandow, but before they can piece together a plan one of her relatives turns up at the Salvage Yard. A young boy, named Ted Sandow, who tells them he's staying with his Great-Aunt Sarah and she has barn full of a old junk from years ago – which she wants to dispose of. But what worries the boys is that Ted got to them through their arch-nemesis, "Skinny" Norris. There's also a friend of Sarah Sandow, one Mr. Harris, who is the president of the local Vegetarian League and was attacked during a lecture by the previously mentioned knife-wielding victims.

So, all of this, provides more than enough trouble for the trio and they find themselves in a number of tight spots, like getting locked up inside an empty house, which for a fun, fast-paced and very quick read. The fact that this is not as much of a mystery novel, like The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy (1965) and the previously mentioned The Mystery of the Shrinking House, makes it easier to forgive some of its spots.

One of biggest weak spots was pointed out and mocked by the "Puzzle Doctor." He reviewed the book, exactly one year ago (!), pointed out (and spoiled) the ridiculous explanation for the misshapen, laughing shadow Bob and Pete saw in the opening chapter. Even for a novel geared towards younger readers it was a bit, uhm, silly. I appreciated a famous detective story was used as, sort of, a clue, but that part of the plot was hilariously bad. 

Speaking of clues, Jupe and Pete see the laughing shadow in front of a lodge, inside the Sandow estate, where they witness how the figure ushers, what appears to be, four small figures through the front-door – none of them seems to have a head! The answer to this is pretty simple, but relevant to the treasure hunt and made for a nice little set-piece.

Some parts of the ending can be, as said before, rather silly, but the only real problem I had was with the hiding place for the hoard of gold, which makes you wonder why nobody bothered to look there. I mean, there's a local legend of an Indian treasure and hints referring to "the eye of the sky." Yet nobody, locally, thought to take a look there? You know, the culprit was right: most people there must have been "stupid" or "the Chumash Hoard would have been found long ago."

So, yes, a very quick, fun and amusing read, but, plot-wise, not one of the strongest or cleverest story in the series. As a consequence, I can only really recommend The Mystery of the Laughing Shadow to readers who already enjoy tagging along with The Three Investigators (i.e. fans of the series). Otherwise, I would recommend looking for one of the other titles mentioned (and praised) in this blog-post.