Another former big fan who’d forgotten about them. I remember a few details like the stuttering parrot and midgets and the former actor whose house was connected to the haunted house by a secret tunnel through the hillside. Very cool memories being awakened by The Case of the Zombie Thread!
Getting a new The Three Investigators book was like a junkie getting a fresh dime-bag of the good stuff—I mean I LOVED those books, and must have had over 40 of them as a kid…
I can’t remember many of the specific plotlines anymore, but they were always good for a few little tidbits of info (subsonic sounds can induce feelings of nausea and discomfort?) that were cool for a youngster to learn.
Okay, I just got freaked out. I loved The Three Investigators, so I opened this thread and read everyone’s posts, until I got to one by…me! Then I realized it was a zombie thread.
I realize that this is a soon-to-be-locked zoooooombie, but, I just had to add my name to the list. I devoured those books as a kid! None of the other detective series – Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden – did a thing for me, but the Three Investigators were like written crack.
I’ve been trying to collect the original “Alfred Hitchcock and…” hardcovers for while now, but those things just never turn up at used bookstores – it’s amazing really. And yeah, I know I could just use Amazon, but hunting for them like buried treasure seems more in the proper spirit.
Everyone’s mentioned their kick-ass junkyard hideout, but I also think Jupe’s “Ghost-to-Ghost Hookup” was a really cool concept. [On preview, I see that Loneraven also mentiones it]. Really prescient too!
(Oh, and if it matters, I’m another female fan. Jupe was always my favorite – I was fascinated by his child-actor backstory. Loved that later book that had him appearing in a game-show reunion of his former co-stars.)
Should I start this as a new thread? I’m pretty new to SDMB, and never really understood the big objection to thread resurrection.
The “No Zombies” rule is probably enforced the most lightly in Cafe Society, because a) there’s rarely any massively contentious stuff being posted and b) certain entertainment entities go through annual or multi-annual cycles (the most famous certified approved zombie thread being the late Poopah Chalupah’s Rudolph thread).
Count me as another one who devoured them. Like a perfect combination of The best parts of Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown.
I sadly can’t remember plots, just tidbits of things. Like on of the bad guys was going to be arrested and he kept sleeving out of it, and They were going to arrest him for impersonating an officer, but then he pointed out he was wearing a NYPD badge, not a local badge, so they had to let him go.(I remember that because even at ten it sounded pretty damn fishy to me)
Huh. You don’t happen to be me, do you?
No, turns out I was doing something else when your post was added.
I was always intrigued by the concept of the Ghost-to-Ghost Hookup too.
Me too!
like some brain-dead AOL’er
I read Talking Skull when I was probably too young to have been reading it–as others have said, it was the coolest title–but I was still fascinated by the junkyard, the investigations, the business cards… pretty much everything. On the next trip to the library, I picked up another book from the same shelf (Moaning Cave, I think) and was blown away to discover that these are the same people! I’d never considered that there might be an entire series of books out there.
Needless to say, I read every one that our local libraries had. My cousins and I made up our own business cards, carried colored chalk, and tried (failing miserably) to build a junkyard clubhouse of our own (my dad made us haul all that junk back to where we found it…)
Afterwards, I tried reading The Hardy Boys, but they just never did it for me.
Yep, count me as another addict. In fact, a few years ago I started collecting the original hardbacks on eBay. I’ve got at least 25 of them.
And yes, I read them all again. They actually hold up pretty well.
I know-I’m a complete nerd.
I loved 'em and now my 9yo daughter loves them too. We’ve found several still hiding at the local library, and some paperback reprints from the 90’s. They’re still fun to read.
YES! The Three Investigators (? – What’s the question mark for, boys?) were just about the only books I checked out of the school library when I was in about the 5th grade. Loved 'em, but never could find the updated versions.
Before my first daughter was born, I found several copies of T3I in a used bookstore, and bought them, but they’re in a box somewhere now I think. I’ll have to dig them out sometime. Great, great stuff.
(I also liked Two Minute Mysteries.)
Loooooved that series, much more than The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, probably because they had the best kid’s fort ever – an entire trailer hidden under junk, with multiple secret passages leading off the property.
Entirely appropriate that the ghost to ghost hook-up should be in a zombie thread 
I remember our teacher as a kid encouraging us to read them.
But I remember one story which depended for its resolution on a parrot which stuttered “To-to-to be”. As I recall, everyone was assuming that the parrot was doing Hamlet’s Soliloquy, but it was actually a reference to 222B Baker St, Sherlock Holmes’s canonical address.
Except that it wasn’t. Holmes lived at 221B. As a kid, I had also read Sherlock Holmes and was really confused about this. With a kid’s logic, I was trying to make it all reconcile, but of course now I realise that the author was playing fast and loose with the details to make the story work. When I twigged as a kid to the real explanation, I had one of those growing-up eye opening experiences that I still remember.
I haven’t read through the whole thread yet (but I will!) but I was a major, major 3 Investigators thread when I was a kid (I still enjoy the books now–I reread some of the occasionally). I wanted their Headquarters so bad, and I was envious of their ability to go all over the place on their own (either on their bikes or in the limo).
I tried reading one of the newer ones when they were older, but I didn’t like it. It didn’t seem to fit the spirit of the other books. I also preferred the Alfred Hitchcock versions to the Hector Sebastian ones, though Sebastian was pretty cool as well.
Add my voice to the choir. I only had a few of the books, but I loved them. I’d sometimes get one when we went to Gimbels’, once or twice a year.The school library didn’t have them, and the local public library was all the way down at the end of that long street (I was young). I guess I’d forgotten about them, or ‘outgrown’ them, by the time I got a library card.
The junkyard hideout was the coolest hideout in all of children’s literature. Or at least in the lit I knew at age 8. I always loved the, “month’s use of a limo” argument as well.
I devoured all the ones in print from 1971-73; after that, I was in junior high and YA literature was looked down upon. Ah, well.
In college, we learned about the theory of somatotypes (Ectomorph, Endomorph and Mesomorph) and I immediately thought of Bob, Pete and Jupiter. I guess they also represented ego, id and superego on some level, but that would be pushing it.
Did you know that Secret of Skeleton Island and Secret of Terror Castle were made into movies? German language and filmed in South Africa, but this was within the past three years. Apparently they sucked and lost a boatload of money. But this would be great on Nickelodeon or some such!
I loved the “Three Investigators” books, as well as the “Danny Dunn” series. I read every “Danny Dunn” book I could get my hands on, starting with “Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine” in 3rd grade.
I remember reading the “Three Investigators” books from 4th to about 6th grade.
I tried to get my son interested in these series, but never had much luck. The Danny Dunn books were hardest to find, because I checked most of them out from libraries years ago, and they are now out of print.