10 posts tagged “children's books”

More Childhood books I remember really, really liking was Donald J. Sobol’s juvenile mystery sleuth ENCYCLOPEDIA BROWN series. The first book I read in the set was ENCYCLOPEDIA BROWN AND THE CASE OF THE SECRET PITCH, (a book I found buried within three filled spindles of paperbacks at the back of the school library as part of the honorback system) and at the time I wasn’t really aware that it was part of an ongoing series. But I liked that one book so much that I went down to the local library to see if there were any more, and was excited to find that there were about ten books in that set, and even now, I can’t  find the words to describe how COOL all those books looked together on the shelf! In any case, I immediately made it my mission to borrow each one, two at a time…til I’d read ‘em all!

One of the things that made Encyclopedia Brown stories so much fun was the way you were given all the clues to each case (read: chapter) and was given a moment to try and “figure it out for yourself”. Though some solutions were based on knowledge no average 3rd grader would know, (Ambergris floats? Who Knew?!) most of them were based on plain common sense, and these were the ones you could either solve yourself or at least go “Oh, yeah!! I shoulda known that!” (Like that story where the guy claimed to have hit his leg on the table, where there was a delicately stacked house of cards…!)

Besides Donald J. Sobol’s smart and fun storytelling, one of the BEST things about the book was the fantastic artwork by Leonard Shortall. Shortall illustrated in a very 1950’s suburban family style, perfectly suited for depicting Idaville, the “average American Town”. In the early books he drew with thick brush strokes, but as the series went on, Shortall’s work took on a very thin, spindly style (somewhat akin to  Roald Dahl’s drawings in his Charlie and the Chocolate Factory books.) and these were my favorite illustrations of them all!

And while we’re on the subject of Shortall’s artwork, a kind of a funny thing, but back when I was obsessively and voraciously reading and re-reading the Encyclopedia Brown books, I developed this strong attraction for Sally Kimball, Encyclopedia Brown’s tomboyish second in command!! Something about how Shortall was depicting Ms. Kimball invoked images of the my ideal American sweetheart a la Lisa Whelchel or Maureen McCormick in my mind, but unlike Marcia Brady, all I got from my friends when I made this confession was strange looks!!

I once mentioned to Car about my childhood attraction to Sally Kimball, and she looked at me like I’d gone off the deep end! “But she was only a drawing in a BOOK!” she exclaimed, and…well, I really didn’t have anything to back me up! To me it didn’t seem so weird, but then again, I’m the guy who regularly posts about crushes he’s had on comic and cartoon characters, so my opinion’s probably not that great!

For me, the “Golden Age” of Encyclopedia Brown was the books I grew up with, that is, from Book 1 (Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective) through to Book 12 (The Case Of The Dead Eagles), and It had always been my wish to someday get all those books so I could reproduce that wonderful sight of the complete set with matching spines that I’d seen back during those early library visits!! Alas, the paperback versions for sale at the bookstore had entirely different covers (and some not even illustrated by Shortall!) so it seemed an impossible task.

As I got older, I’d occasionally see stray copies of Encyclopedia Brown books at rummage sales and book fairs, and on those rare occasions one of the editions from the library turned up, I grabbed it up, and with the arrival of EBAY (great at finding ex-library copies of books you remember reading as a kid, I tell you), I was finally able to complete my 12 book series with the covers I remembered from the library- the same covers I've uploaded here...! I even came across some of the paperback editions that I remember seeing growing up, which I ALSO bought! Can’t have too much nostalgia!

Another one of my favorite books from my childhood was the supremely entertaining How To Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell, and illustrated by Emily McCully.

  The story begins with a boy named Tom relating how he got sent to his room the previous night  because he wouldn’t eat his Salmon dinner. When they find out he wouldn’t even try one bite, his friend Billy states that he’d try a bite of anything before he’d get sent up to bed.

“What about worms?” asks another boy, Alan who becomes the protagonist in the story.

“Sure”, says Billy. “Worms are just dirt, anyway”. So one thing leads to another, and before you know it, Alan has bet Billy fifty dollars that he can’t eat one worm a day for fifteen days.

The story is  more or less centered around the new and creative ways to prepare the worms to make them appetizing (hence the title), but the thing that I really loved about the writing was the way each chapter built up little by little, as each day went by and another worm got consumed, you started feeling the desperation building up in Alan as the prospect of having to pay off a silly bet  became more and more a of a possibility!

 When Alan first dares Billy to eat the worms, it is CLEARLY nothing more than an off-the-cuff comment that  he doesn’t expect to get too far: all he’s trying to do initiially is show up Billy for saying worms can be eaten with no big fuss. Then it becomes an issue, and the bet is formally made.

The four boys are divided into two teams- Alan and Joe against worm eater Billy and Tom. Tom is practical about the situation, and is the one who initially begins preparing the worms as fancy meals rather than the disgusting worms they are. "With Ketchup, Mustard or Cream Sauce, Worms can be good!" 

After Billy’s eaten the first worm and has shown he’s neither sick nor scared to eat more, it stops becoming a statement of whether Alan thinks Billy CAN eat the worms, but rather how to MAKE HIM STOP, and that’s when things start getting good! He begins trying every underhanded scheme to get Billy to lose the bet.

Psychological Ploy: The first thing Joe and Alan try to do is make subtle hints that they’ve heard worms are poisonous. They create elaborate tales of people dying from eating worms, and even fake a letter from the family doctor stressing the danger of consuming night crawlers, but Tom reassures Billy that they’re fibbing. A call to the doctor by both Billy’s Father AND Mother puts his doubts to rest, and he devours the worms wholeheartedly after that!

Overload Ploy: The conniving duo try to make Billy give up by the sheer size of the current worm they’ve prepared for him. After scraping off the cornmeal, Billy is incensed to find that they’ve glues TWO worms together!

Diversion ploy:  Joe and Alan pretend to make peace with Billy, and take him to see the Mets for an all-day event. Secretly they are planning to make Billy forget about eating a worm that day- they reason that even if he DOES remember, he’s not likely to find one at Shea Stadium! They make sure Tom, Billy’s voice of reason, isn’t invited on the trip just to be on the safe side. But after the long exhausting day, as he's just about ready to fall asleep, Billy remembers! He panics-it’s 15 minutes before midnight! If he doesn’t find and eat a worm  soon, he’ll lose the bet! He runs to Tom’s and they race around with flashlights to find a worm, then run to Alan and Joe’s to wake everyone up so they witness Billy downing the worm!

When all Alan and Joe’s sneaky plots fail, finally, in an explosive end, they resort to Physical Violence!

It’s come down to the brass tacks, and there isn’t any other lie or deception Alan can do to prevent Billy from eating the final worm and winning the bet, so just as Billy is about to down the last worm, Alan tackles him and locks him in a closet, making such a brawl that the parents intervene- Billy is sent to his room before he’s had a chance to finish eating the last worm!

Alan and Joe think they’ve finally found a way to prevent Billy from winning the bet, but Tom has other plans! Using a diversion, he gets his little brother to sneak Billy the final worm by throwing it up into his bedroom window in a basket. Joe and Alan come racing out, but It’s too late, and Billy gulps the worm down raw! Everyone is so excited about the victory, even Billy’s mom has to laugh!

Epilogue:

The ending to this nifty little story is so great: we see the boys a few days later, and they are admiring the motorbike Billy has bought with the money he won from the bet, and all is good. Then Tom asks what kind of sandwich Billy’s eating for lunch, and he finds  it’s…yep! WORMS!

Billy sheepishly admits that he’s developed a fondness for the worms, and is hooked!

  When I was growing up, my favorite stories to read were the ones centered around animals, whether it be Charlotte’s Web, Ribsy, Dominic or The Cricket In Times Square. Whenever there was a story featuring funny animal cartoons, that also was immediately snatched up.

   One day a 7 year old me wandered into the neighborhood KRESS store. I would frequently browse through the store’s toy section and then hang out at the magazine rack reading the coloring books and other kid books there, usually ones like Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny. This time, I spied a new kid’s book at the rack featuring a new character I’d never heard of called Top Cat. I picked it up, and began reading the story “Top Cat: Candidate For Mayor” right there on the tiled floor. It featured Top Cat and his cohorts, a mismash of colorful cats with intriguing names like “Spook” “Choo-Choo” and “Fancy-Fancy”.

  I totally DUG the characters, and ran home to fetch the change I'd saved in the top drawer of my dresser. The book cost about 42¢ in all, probably the best 42¢ I spent for all the times I read and re-read that storybook over the years. In fact, it is one of the few children’s books that I managed to hang onto all these years (most books I loved as a kid were lost or thrown out years ago and had to be re-purchased through ebay and whatnot) and the scans you see above and below are indeed from the original book I bought oh so many years ago.

   So I loved the storybook I had about Top Cat, but that’s about where my mania ended, for the Top Cat show was NOT a show that was airing anywhere on television at the time. I was only vaguely aware that it WAS a show since it was being sold alongside other Hanna-Barbera books like Flintstones and the Jetsons. I would flip through the TV Guide every so often, hoping to see that they’d start airing the show here, but to no avail. When Hanna Barbera released a TV show comprised of classic characters for a series called Laff-A-Lypics, I remember watching in hopes that they’d bring Top Cat and his gang onto the show, but if they did, I never saw them. Eventually I put the book away, and there Top Cat remained, regaled to be no more than a beloved storybook character.

   In the mid-eighties, this wonderful record series released by TeeVee Tunes came out. Dubbed “Television’s Greatest Hits!”, these double record sets featured themes songs of classic TV shows! I bought these mainly because they had fave TV theme songs of mine like “Love American Style” and “The Courtship Of Eddie’s Father”, not to mention the greats like “Mary Tyler Moore” and “My Favorite Martian”… 

Anyway, on one of these fine collections, they had a whole side of great Hanna- Barbera cartoons like Flintstones, Scooby Doo Where are You, Huckleberry Hound, and….yes- TOP CAT!

 I’d sit there and listen to the song, and the first thing that hits you is the style and vocals of the song, you can clearly tell this came out during the golden era of Hanna- Barbera because it sounded so much like the theme for The Flintstones. It was also pretty catchy!  A new facet of the show was grooved into what little I knew about the Top Cat Show, and that song became one of the more-played tracks on that side!

  OK, that was that, though. Now we move right up to present day. One day I’m flipping around the TV schedule because I felt like watching some “Good Times” on Nick at Night. Scanning the bars of the program guide, I see this channel called “Boomerang”, and it’s line-up consists of older classic Kids Cartoons. Then right there at 10:00 that night, I see the show “Top Cat” listed! Wow! So I FINALLY get to see the show that’d been a mystery to me practically my whole life!
 

The show started with the blaring horns of the Top Cat theme song that I’d gotten to know so well over the years, and it was a real treat to actually see Top Cat moving for the first time! I only wished the other cats were in the credits as well. Then the show started, and...well, where to start ?!

  Reading a book and looking at pictures of Top Cat and his “Intellectual Close Friends” is one thing, but MAN, actually HEARING THE VOICES along with the images…these voices really MADE the characters. In fact, I’d wager that until I’d heard the voices, I didn’t understand the characters at all, they provided so much in the way of “completing” the overall character.

  I’d pictured your generic cartoon voices for the show, but these REALLY had the feel of those old sixties TV shows, and I’d later learn that, like the Flintstones was based on the Honeymooners, Top Cat was based on real TV show Sgt. Bilko! It took me a while to get used to hearing the voices, but once I settled in, It was the best thing about the show- these voice actors were the real deal, pros who knew how to use their talents to really bring the characters to life.

 First off of course was Top Cat. With his Phil Silvers styled voice, he immediately became the shyster and con-artist he was supposed to be! Voiced by Arnold Stang, every line of dialog was like poetry to listen to- Top Cat really became the smooth talker he was!

The voices attached to the other cats in the gang really “fleshed out” the personalities as well. Reading my childhood book, they were merely members of Top Cat’s “gang”, but with distinct voices attached to them, they developed into cool individual characters with identifiable traits.

 Spook had sort of a beatnik demeanor, usually peppering his dialog with “That’s like, outta sight, man!”  slang and, along with Fancy Fancy (who seemed to be channeling Cary Grant somehow), were the “normal” cats, usually depicted hanging out or wooing some Gal Cats until T.C. calls them in, and it always made me laugh to think that they were so loyal to Top Cat that they’d drop a romantic interest in a second if he beckoned.

 Choo-Choo is another one whom I just love hearing talk. Choo Choo’s got one of those traditional Hanna Barbera voices, slightly dippy and lispy, but so animate that almost every line he says is hilarious! Choo Choo's voice was provided by Marvin Kaplan, famous as Henry the Telephone Repairman on ALICE.
 
 One thing that shocked me was that the character of Brain. I guess his name was supposed to be a joke of sorts as he’s the most clueless of the gang, but whoever wrote "Candidate for Mayor" must have took his character at face value, because in that story, he was really written as the “brains” of the outfit! So it was a bit of adjusting for me to see him as such a space case!

 And then there’s Benny, probably my favorite character in the show. Reading the book as a kid, I couldn’t have imagined him with such a Joe E. Ross type of voice, but once I heard Benny as voiced by Maurice Gosfield, I knew that that was the only way he could have sounded! With his raspy voice and Barney Rubble-ish naivete, every scene he’s in is a joy to watch. Someone uploaded a short clip that I think captures Benny  pretty well- The unsure  right hand man who nonetheless totally trusts Top Cat no matter what the situation.

Checking up on the stats of the Top Cat show, I was shocked to discover that Top Cat had only a one season run of 30 episodes! Heck, no WONDER I never got a chance to see this show when I was growing up…in the annals of Hanna Barbera, the series practically made a nosh in the HB canon.

 But I’ll ultimately tell you one thing that I’m positive of: If Top Cat HAD been on the air when I was growing up, there is no doubt in my mind that this would have been my favorite Saturday Morning Cartoon. This show REALLY delivers, lovable characters and terrific storylines, all made during the heyday of Hanna Barbera when they absolutely could do no wrong! This show is as great as I’d imagined it would be my whole life!

I’ve also discovered that TOP CAT had gotten the DVD treatment some time ago, and I'm moseying my way over to Amazon to grab that DVD box set while it’s still available! But until then, I’m gonna keep tuning in every night to Boomerang at 10:00 to enjoy what I’d waited to see for almost 35 years!
 

The Blue-Nosed Witch by Margaret Embry
Illustrated by Carl Rose

 Well, here's the story of a little witch named Blanche who is constantly getting into trouble because of her youth and carefree attitude (re: always arriving late for the meetings). She belongs to an order of responsible, adult witches, and is only a member because of her ability to turn her blue nose on and off!

The Tale begins on the eve of Halloween Night, where the witches have big plans to perform a flight formation later that night. Afraid of being late, Blanche sets her alarm clock extra-early, and, ends up flying out much, much too early for the coven meeting. She meets up with children her own age who teach the young witch how to have fun trick-or-treating on Halloween Night!

I first read Margaret Embry's story of Blanche The Blue Nosed Witch in a "Collier's Junior Classics" Collection entitled "Harvest Of Holidays".  I was completely taken in by the imaginative story and the characters you immediately fall in love with. It also has a timeless quality to it that all great stories seem to have: a "Once-upon-a-Time" feeling.

One day browsing the neighborhood Library I came across a bound library copy of The Blue Nosed Witch. As a child it never crossed my mind that the story might have been excerpted from an actual book! Quickly leafing through the pages I discovered to my surprise and excitement that the version I had read in the Collier's Junior Classic series was only an abridged excerpt of a longer, more detail story! Quickly leafing through the pages, I found a complete story chock-full of beautiful illustrations by Carl Rose on almost every page. Oh, the Joy!

  Whereas the Collier's version had Blanche getting up to early for the Witches' Meeting and meeting up with kids who take her to one house for treats, in the actual book, Blanche and the kids go on to many more houses and have a few adventures on the way as well! Then when the kids decide it's getting late and go home, Blanche roams around by herself (and her cat Brockett) before realizing that because of all her adventures, she's going to end up being late for the Coven meeting, after all!!

This wonderful story has become a tradition for me and must be taken out every Halloween. I believe this book belongs in company of Charles Shulz' classic cartoon "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" and Robert Bright's "Georgie's Halloween" as essential Halloween Treats!

 

The first Beverly Cleary book I read was “Ribsy”. This was because in 4th grade, I was only interested in stories that featured animals in it, books like Charlotte’s Web and Trumpet Of The Swan or funny ones like Olga Da Polga. This book was displayed at the “featured titles” table, and upon seeing a dog on the cover, I snatched it up!

I was introduced to Ribsy, his owner Henry Huggins and the whole Huggins family for the first time. Ribsy had gotten lost, and this story told of the adventures he experienced as he tried to make his way back to his home. Generally speaking, Henry has only a supporting role in it, but I could feel how much he loved Ribsy, and I immediately wanted to read more about them.
 
The next time I was at the library, I checked out more of Beverly Cleary’s titles and was pleased to see another one called “Henry and Ribsy”!

 
The story is about Henry’s dream of going salmon fishing with his father.
   Henry’s father tells him he can come along if he can keep Ribsy out of trouble! Henry thinks this is a good deal, but things don’t work out as planned, and Henry finds keeping Ribsy out of trouble turns out to be an enormous task!
  The latter half of the book is about the fishing trip that they just barely are allowed to attend. Henry has high hopes of catching himself a salmon like older boy Scooter McCarthy always boasts about, but it is dashed when Ribsy disrupts the boat, and the boy and his dog are deposited back on the shore. Henry decides to make the most of it, and enjoys himself playing with Ribsy at the beach.
  At some point he hears Ribsy barking at something, and Henry discovers it is a huge Chinook Salmon, struggling in the shallows of the river leading to the ocean. With Ribsy frantically barking, Henry wades in and attempts to catch the fish with his bare hands!

 This book just totally captivated me. I’d never read a book that was so exciting to read.
The scene with Henry struggling with the Salmon just blew me away! I remember reading and re-reading that chapter over and over! This was it for me, and I knew I had to read EVERY Beverly Cleary book featuring Henry and Ribsy!

 Next came the book that I guess I should have STARTED with, the first book in the series, simple entitled “Henry Huggins”. It was really cool to read this, though, because I knew Henry and Ribsy so well by now, and it was neat to actually read in “real time” about Henry just finding Ribsy as a stray for the first time! By the time I finished reading this one, I loved every one in the neighborhood, including Beezus and of course Ramona!
This led to me reading ALL of the Cleary books about Henry Huggins, including Henry and The Clubhouse, Henry and Beezus, Henry and The Paper Route, and even Ramona The Pest and Beezus and Ramona, which Henry makes brief appearances.

From then on I progressed to all of Beverly Cleary’s other wonderful series like The Mouse and The Motorcycle…but that’s for another post!

Esther Averill’s stories about Jenny Linsky and The Cat Club was an early obsession of mine!

   The introduction to the series started innocently enough… Like most kids growing up in the 70's,one of the first books I read was THE FIRE CAT, Esther Averill’s contribution to the “I-Can-Read-Book” series. This story featured one of the major supporting members of Jenny’s cat Club environment: Pickles the Cat, and you can even see Jenny with her brothers sitting in a fire truck with Pickles at the Fire Station!

The “Trick” Book Series...another favorite children’s book series of mine, written by Scott Corbett.
 
  Scott Corbett’s Trick Books centered around the adventures (and misadventures) of a young boy named Kerby Maxwell, his friend Fenton, and his dog Waldo.
  Kerby stops to help an eccentric old woman with her heel stuck in a drainage grating. Her name is Mrs. Graymalkin, and she is so grateful to Kerby for saving her shoe that she later rewards him with a mysterious old chemistry set that belonged to her son when he was a boy. But this is no ordinary chemistry set- when the mysterious chemicals are mixed to Mrs. Graymalkin’s instructions, they have the powers to create many wonderful, exciting effects!
  Trouble hitting a home run at the game? A drop of a special mixture onto the ball will solve that! Your dog run away? A special concoction will make his whereabouts appear in the beaker! And so on and on. For every problem, there’s a potion to fix it!
  Mrs. Graymalkin’s potions create such magical results, Kerby believes she is a witch, whereas levelheaded Fenton believes she is a genius scientist who happens to be extremely eccentric!
And who knows…? Maybe they’re BOTH right!

There is one book in the series that sticks out, though. It is THE MAILBOX TRICK, and there’s no trick in it. In fact, Mrs. Graymalkin isn’t involved with the story at all. Which is kind of weird when each dust jacket writes on the inside “Mrs. Graymalkin! No TRICK book is complete without her!” They should have taken their own advice!
   In this story Kerby’s cousin Gaye mails out letters he wrote only to blow off steam and never meant to send out. So the whole book he’s trying to get the letters back before the recipient can read it. I remember reading it and WONDERING when the heck he was going to call Mrs. Graymalkin for help, and was pretty disappointed when the story ended with nary an appearance of her!

Back in 9th grade, I sat behind this kid in English class who came in every day reading books in a series called Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators. He would come in with a new book every two or three days, and as I saw the different book covers, I began to get pretty curious about just what was up with the series!
  “They’re a bit like The Hardy Boys…but way more modern,” is the way they were described to me. Contemporary might have been a more appropriate word, but I got the message. Whereas Hardy Boys had the look and feel of fictional 1930’s America (and why wouldn’t it? That’s the time-frame the series came from!), the Three Investigators was a product of the Sixties- kids who resided right here in California, kids who had their own hidden headquarters and secret codes-I was instantly drawn in!
 The series revolved around three boys who had their own junior investigator services.
There was Bob Andrews, a thin boy who worked at the library and was in charge of records and research, Pete Crenshaw, the athletic “brawn” of the group, and Jupiter Jones, the stocky intelligent brain behind the partnership. They had all the cool gadgets any kid would love to have, secret headquarters, walkie talkies, their own phone and even a Rolls-Royce at their service! Each case was introduced and neatly wrapped-up by movie director Alfred Hitchcock. (The reader was led to believe Alfred Hitchcock really wrote the introductions, but in fact, creator Robert Arthur was using only the name in his stories. I guess the same way the Three Investigators were using it-as a name to get mystery-lovers interested in the series.)
   With this information I finally decided that I wanted to start reading the series on my own, and asked if I could borrow the book he had just finished reading, which, if memory serves, was “The Mystery Of the Dead Man’s Riddle”. He said that I could if I wanted to, but the book was No. #22 in the series, and I might be better off starting “from the beginning”.
 So it was that afternoon I made my way to the public library and checked out books #1 and #2 in the series: “The Secret Of Terror Castle” and “The Mystery of The Stuttering Parrot”. Terror Castle was great, spooky and fun, but it was the second book “Stuttering Parrot” that blew me away. It was about these parrots that all spoke fragments of a path to a treasure, and they had to collect ALL the parrots and THEN deduce what each clue meant! Really intriguing!
 
From then, I tried to borrow a couple of books every week, and was constantly amazed at how great the stories were. Faves that soon followed were MYSTERY OF THE VANISHING TREASURE(#5) where the boys get hired to catch gnomes, and MYSTERY OF THE FIERY EYE(#7), another great treasure hunting story! Each one got better and better!
    I tried to read the books in order, but there were a few problems. One was that my library didn’t carry ALL of the titles in the series, and another thing that made it hard was the fact that the books were written by FOUR different authors, and so they were placed under each respective author: Robert Arthur, MV Carey, Dennis Lynds and Nick West! What efforts had to be made to find them all- I remember bicycling to different libraries all over town! But the searching bore fruit, and I was eventually able read every book in the series!
  Robert Arthur was the creator and author of the first 10 or so books, and when he passed on, the series was continued by MV Carey and Dennis Lynds, with two books by Nick West.
 Arthur’s take on the boys is the defining portrait of the Three Investigators, and his stories are undeniably the best of the series, but Lynds and Carey  also brought new and interesting elements to the books as well. Lynds tended to write more historical/politically motivated stories, and Carey tended to lean towards the supernatural, although this may be generalizing a bit, as both wrote equally as well in the other styles. I have favorites from Arthur’s books, Carey’s, Wests’ and Lynds, and have decided to use this wonderful forum to let “those who may care” know my favorite picks of the series!

THE MYSTERY OF THE STUTTERING PARROT(1964)
The boys start off discovering a Parrot that quotes Shakespeare, only to find that there are as many as seven birds out there, each with a different quote to speak. They deduce that the parrots together recite a coded message, and as they get deeper into the mystery, they realize the message may lead to a great treasure-or their demise!

THE MYSTERY OF THE VANISHING TREASURE(1966)
 The boys are hired by an old lady to investigate sightings of gnomes in her yard at night. At the same time, a golden belt is stolen from the Museum. Little do the boys know there may be a connection with the two!
An awesome story here- the scenes where the boys stake out the old lady’s house at night…really scary!
I’m surprised the cover artist didn’t depict the gnomes on the cover, opting rather for the Golden Belt.

THE MYSTERY OF THE SCREAMING CLOCK(1968)
The Boys come across an old electric clock that has been programmed to scream instead of ring. Jupiter’s curiousity of “Why would somebody rig a clock to scream?”leads them onto another great case.
  I remember reading this in one sitting. It was such a gripping story, one exciting scene leading to another  til it’s over!

THE MYSTERY OF THE FLAMING FOOTPRINTS(1971)
I’m not sure why I love this story so much. Perhaps it’s the inclusion of so many new characters, or the way the story keeps building up, but this one has so much going on. A slightly political story, I keep thinking Lynds wrote this one, although it was in fact a Carey yarn.

THE MYSTERY OF THE SHRINKING HOUSE(1972)
Like the “Screaming Clock”, the story moves because of an interesting centerpiece, in this case a series of paintings that depicts a house slowly shrinking out of sight. A nice bonus is watching troublemaker Skinny Norris get his come-uppance!

THE MYSTERY OF THE HAUNTED MIRROR(1974)
Wow, one of the scariest supernatural themed stories in the series, written by MV Carey. The Boys investigate a strange old mirror that is reputed to show the face of an ancient magician at night. There was one scene that I thought was really creepy- A Boy was in the house alone at night, and he could hear the sound of the mirror laughing down the hall…YIKES!

THE MYSTERY OF THE INVISIBLE DOG(1975)
Another supernatural-themed one by MV Carey again. Lots of interesting characters, (Burnout hippy Sonny Elmquist and cute over-eater Gwen Chalmers, for starts!) and a few spooky things to think about like astral projection and phantom priests! This is one I re-read most frequently, for some reason.
By the way, there really isn’t any “Invisible Dog” to speak of as depicted on the cover, but to explain more would be to give away the plot...!

THE MYSTERY OF THE SINISTER SCARECROW(1979)
Possibly my favorite Three Investigators story. Everything about this one works for me. The settings (farm field out in a valley), the footwork (I love the scene where Pete pretends to be someone's nephew), the suspects( A whole plethora of house guests!), and even who the culprit turns out to be!
 A scarecrow is following a girl around and causing her anguish, and the ploy of having the scarecrow appear “only at dusk” is wonderfully spooky! The Boys are talking about the case at a restaurant, and an electrical repairman relates that he saw the scarecrow running around a corner of the Mosby Museum...creepy!
All this plus lots of nice details about the world of Museum curators and Entomologists.

 After years of borrowing and RE-Borrowing the books,I made it my goal to acquire all the books in hardcover, a task that would take me YEARS to fulfill. At the time, the series was up to #28, so I had quite a bit to catch up- but it was all worth it! Although the series was discontinued in 1987, the 43 books in the series have stayed with me, and the cases that blew me away then are STILL great reads, and I have to indulge myself at least once every few years!
And with news of a possible Movie on the horizon, who knows?

The Three Investigators might be back!