And the treasure was hidden at 222b baker st. One of the parrots seemed to have a stutter when he said “To to to be, or not to to to be”.
Those were my favorite ones … the ones with an elaborate collection of clues that they had to piece together like the Case of the Screaming Clocks - the villain always turned out to be the international art thief who would elude the police at the last moment
My wife and I were debating what books to buy our seven year old. I guess we have an answer.
The first one, The Green Ghost I think, was cheesecloth over a balloon. The one where the thief hid the silver spider on the real spider’s web. The one where acrobatic midgets disguised as boyscouts (I kid you not) made a human ladder with the lights out to steal something from a museum (Jupiter remembered that one of them had a gold tooth which kids never have!) The one where the green stamp (representing hidden money) was under the 4¢ stamp and it turned out the guy had a speech impedement and couldn’t say the ‘L’ sound so the money was hidden under the “floor” not four! The screaming skull, where it turned out that it was just a mike & speaker but it was hidden in the base the skull sat on.
We didn’t have no fancy vid’yo games, and we liked it!!! (Actually, we did. I’m not that old!)
Read every one of them. Loved 'em. In fact, recently I used several facts from the series to create a baffling set of trivia questions on Pyroto. Very cool.
(One of these days I’ll learn how to do quotes and spoilers). Homebrew, that is a wierd coincidence…I’m assuming you’re female?
I didn’t know too many girls who read T3I, but from what I’ve seen in this thread, apparently there were! (Where were these chicks when I was a teenager and dating??)
Oh, and their arch-nemesis was:
SKINNY NORRIS…
and he went to military school at the end of the “Headless Horse” book.
I have a collection of old hardcovers. (15 at present count.) There are so many things that I first learned about from these books, like rhyming slang (“Dead Man’s Riddle”) and the fact that “corn” in Europe used to just mean grain (“The Dancing Devil”) and lots of other things… perhaps not all correct (the Port Out, Starboard Home thing is up for debate), but I still have a warm spot in my heart for these books.
My family was once playing our own version of “Scattergories,” where we each get to choose a letter and make up a category. One of our categories was “places that don’t exist,” and for R my brother and I both put “Rocky Beach.”
My middle school library had most of the original series. Once I ran through them, I dragged my mom to every bookstore within range of her station wagon to get the rest of them.
And I can’t remember a damned thing about them. I do remember that the first book was about a haunted house, and was great because it was really scary until you got to the end, and then it turned out that the “ghost” was a silent movie star with a speech impediment who’s career was ruined by the talkies. And he was actually a nice guy, so it wasn’t really so scary, after all.
And I seem to recall that Jupiter’s uncle had a fondness for the Blue Danube.
He, DirkGntly you will be interested to know that there were also fans who read those books in Spanish.
I was glad they decided not to change their names to more Spanish sounding ones.
I guess Spanish translators learned their lesson after having embarrassments like, for example, Flash Gordon being called for ages “Roldan el temerario”!
Embarrassing because when serials and movies came on TV* Flash Gordon was popular and I wondered what the heck was Ming the Merciless doing in a Roldan comic!
*[sub]Traduced, and shown on Central American TV in the 70’s, don’t think I am older that necessary :)[/sub]
Oh, and they do. Sadly. It almost inspires me to start a thread about things that were really cool then, but with hindsight suck. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. comes to mind, as does High Chaparall (sp?). Geez, when I stumble on a re-run of one of these shows today, it almost hurts.
The three investigators series got a bit mechanical after a while. I too devoured the books, up till #13 or 14. The it went downhill. Fast. And I could even see that, being 12 at the time.
For some reason which I can’t remember now, I either inherited or had bought for me at a yard sale or auction a box of old hardcover books when I was about 10. Besides the Three Investigators, there were also a few Brains Benson and Hardy Boys in that box. I devoured all three series.
