The New Three Investigators Series
An Overview
Introduction:
I’m the daughter of Robert Arthur, the creator of the Three Investigators children's mystery book series, and as I write this, my husband, Steven Bauer, and I are just finishing a four-and-a-half year project of co-writing twenty-six new Three Investigators books—one for every letter of the Roman alphabet.
In the new series, the titles of the books are not only alphabetical but also alliterative and metaphorical. The first book, The Mystery of the Abecedarian Academy, begins with the boys on the cusp of turning fourteen and the last book, The Mystery of the Zoroastrian Zodiac, ends just after their graduation from high school.
Since both the original and the new books celebrate the classic liberal values of freedom of thought and speech, individual agency and liberty, and equality of opportunity—but not outcome—and we are living through an era when those values are in genuine peril, the new novels have been written with that peril in mind.
Each new book is simultaneously a self-contained mystery and part of an overarching plot, and although the elements of the original series have been significantly updated in the new one, the new series remains true to everything important about the original one.
With the exception of certain German-language rights, all previously granted exploitation and character rights in the Three Investigators series, worldwide, reverted more than ten years ago now, and since then I’ve been exploring various options for a broad re-launch of the series.
I'm a novelist and a memoirist whose books have been published by Harper and Row, Knopf, Doubleday, and Bloomsbury U.K., and Steven is a children's book writer and a freelance editor whose books have been published by Putnam, Delacourt, and Simon and Schuster, and we've written the new series in such a way that it will be easy to adapt into four seasons of streaming television.
A Brief History Of The Original Three Investigators Series And The Evolution of The New One:
In 1963, my father, Robert Arthur, Jr., fresh from his work as a writer, story editor, and show-runner for the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents, sat down to write a series of mystery novels for young readers. Since mysteries need detectives to solve them, Dad created a trio of intrepid young boys—Jupiter Jones, the founder and head of The Three Investigators, inquisitive, logical, and brilliant; Pete Crenshaw, athletic, kindhearted, and courageous; and Bob Andrews, shy, smart, and detail-oriented—a natural researcher and record-keeper.
Unlike other children's mystery book heroes of the era, Jupiter, Pete, and Bob had to work for everything they achieved and had real obstacles to overcome. Jupiter was an orphan whose aunt and uncle ran a salvage yard. Bob had hurt his leg badly while climbing alone. However, the boys were lucky enough to live in the town of Rocky Beach, California, and even luckier to have a secret Headquarters in the heart of the Jones Salvage Yard.
The boys were a success from the beginning. They got around either on their bicycles or in a Rolls-Royce—the use of which Jupiter had won in a contest—driven by an English chauffeur. They handed out business cards with their names, their motto— "We Investigate Anything" —and the "trademark" of their firm—three question marks (???) —to their prospective clients.
The mysteries were complicated and often exotic, and the boys themselves were a winning combination of pluck, determination, resourcefulness, camaraderie, and humor. Their talents were complementary and the three of them worked together seamlessly—understanding and appreciating one another's strengths and compensating for one another's weaknesses. They were honest, fair-minded, and committed to justice. Individually and together they struck a deep nerve. Girls as well as boys loved the books; when a new book came out, there were waiting lists at libraries across America.
Before his early death in 1969, my father wrote ten novels in the mystery book series originally entitled Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators, and later re-titled simply The Three Investigators.
After his death, writers-for-hire working for Random House continued The Three Investigators series and Three Investigators books were translated into over twenty languages. Between 1964 and 1991, they were published in Australia, Bangladesh, Denmark, India, Indonesia, Italy, Lithuania, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, and other countries, as well as in France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Fans of the original series attest to the books having turned them into readers and thinkers, as a result of which they developed a lifelong allegiance to the boys and to their stories.
Because there remain millions of Three Investigators fans worldwide—many with children and grandchildren—in the last ten years I've been approached by any number of independent production companies or producers, as well as by a development team for a streaming network, wanting to acquire film or television licenses in the original series.
Although I found this gratifying and intriguing, in the end, I turned down everyone who approached me. Since I was aware that the original success of the series had been achieved solely through books, not through film or television or merchandising—and since I'm a writer! —I hoped the return of the series could begin with new novels.
I also had a clear vision of how the characters of Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews should be moved into the modern world, and I feared that if I put the essential elements of a series conceived and originally set in the 1960s into the hands of a large media company, the company's approach to updating it would risk the dilution, distortion, or destruction of the world my father had created.
I therefore set out to write a new book series myself. Since I was a cross between a bookworm and a tomboy in my youth; since most of my favorite books when I was growing up had male protagonists; since my closest friends have mostly been male; since I have a fascination with military history; and since I’ve always had a great admiration for and interest in activities like fixing things and hunting, I felt sure I could handle the boy part of the new series as well as any boy—especially with the help of my live-in boy-writer, Steven.
In our books, the Three Investigators story has jumped more than fifty years—up to the 2020s—but although Jupiter, Pete, and Bob use modern technology and live in a contemporary world, they remember their original ten cases as having occurred quite recently.
My Professional Background, and Steven's:
I am the author of five published novels—Beyond the Mountain, Bad Guys, Binding Spell, Antarctic Navigation, and Bring Deeps—and two memoirs—Island Sojourn and Looking for the Klondike Stone. My writing for adults has received fellowships, grants, and awards from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the Ossabaw Island Project, the Vermont Council on the Arts, and the Indiana Arts Commission. I've twice received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and I was the first novelist ever given an Antarctic Artists and Writers Operational Support Grant from the National Science Foundation.
In 1995 my novel Antarctic Navigation, written after my trip to Antarctica, and inspired in part, by Moby Dick, was chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book, received a Critics' Choice Award from the San Francisco Review of Books, and was chosen as a Best Book by A Common Reader. In 1996 it received the Ohioana Book Award For Fiction from the Ohioana Library Association.
Steven is also a writer, as well as a retired English professor and a terrific editor; we met at the Bread Life Writer's Conference, where he'd been given a fellowship for his young adult novel Satyrday. Subsequently, he also published The Strange and Wonderful Tale of Robert McDoodle, a picture book; a middle grade novel called A Cat of a Different Color; and Daylight Savings, a volume of poetry that won the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize.
In addition to fellowships from Bread Loaf and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Steven’s work has been recognized by grants and awards from the Ossabaw Island Project, the Massachusetts Arts Council, the Indiana Arts Commission, and the Parents' Choice Foundation. For almost twenty years he directed the creative writing program at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
I, too, was a teacher for a while, but I retired in the 1990s, and although my extremely early retirement was intended to let me devote myself full-time to writing, in 2003 my life became consumed by events revolving around The Three Investigators series, and the years between 2003 and 2008 were years when I got no significant writing done.
Still, over the course of the last fourteen years, in addition to writing twenty-six new Three Investigators novels, I’ve also completed two as-yet-unpublished adult novels—a second version of Bring Deeps and a sweeping Hungarian/American family saga which acts as a bookend to my epic Antarctic Navigation. I’ve also written a screenplay for Bring Deeps, and edited an as-yet-unpublished volume of my father's Collected Stories, for which I’ve written an introduction and story notes.
All of my books, including all of the new Three Investigators novels, are informed by my attraction to philosophy and are the product of a mind that finds feelings and ideas of equal interest. They are also all informed by my belief that freedom of speech and thought are paramount in any civilized society; that the best government is the smallest one; and that curiosity and skepticism are the primary safeguards of liberty. My yet-unpublished family saga deals, in part, with eastern Europe under Soviet rule.
Updated Characteristics of The Three Investigators Universe Created By My Father:
Ethnic And Family Background:
In the original book series, my father created a world that was quintessentially American, and readers all over the globe liked The Three Investigators series not merely because they liked Jupiter, Pete, and Bob, but also because the world they inhabited was a bustling and thriving America, full of immigrants from every country on the planet.
In the ten Three Investigators books my father himself wrote, there was almost always a boy character who was "foreign" in some sense, and Jupiter, Pete, and Bob's immediate acceptance of these characters was an expression of their foundational belief in equality of opportunity—which they would have called basic fairness.
In its ready welcome for, and interest in, such "outsiders," the world of The Three Investigators was ahead of its time in the realm of children's books. But although my father was descended from Irish immigrants who left Ireland during the potato famine, and my mother's father was a Hungarian diplomat who'd been permitted to defect to America in the middle of World War Two, when it came time to devise family backgrounds for Pete, Bob, and Jupiter, my father ignored his own experience of the American melting pot.
As a result, the boys lacked specific family backgrounds, and I’ve had a lot of fun coming up with those backgrounds for the new series. I started by understanding that the Three Investigators would need to retain not just their original temperaments, but also their original body types and hair color. In my father's books, Bob's hair was blondish, Pete's brownish, and Jupiter's blackish, while Jupiter was stocky, Pete athletic, and Bob small and slender.
In the new books, Bob is still small and slender and still has blondish hair, but although his father is also still a journalist from a family that traces its roots back to Scotland, Bob now has a Chinese mother, the daughter of a couple who managed to escape from Communist China in the late 1960s, at the time of the Cultural Revolution. Bob's mother is now an evolutionary biologist who teaches at a nearby college; Bob's blondish hair is due to a recessive maternal gene and the Scottish/Viking background on his father's side; and of the three boys, Bob is the only one who has occasional difficulty reconciling the complexities of his background.
In the new books, Pete is still the handsome, athletic boy he's always been, but now his brown hair and brown eyes are associated with the fact that his father's parents emigrated from Mexico to California in the 1960s—changing their original name of Crespillo to Crenshaw when they arrived. Pete's mother claims descent from the Spanish who arrived in California in the 1600s. Pete's father has an excellent job as a construction supervisor in the movies, and his mother teaches fifth grade at the Rocky Beach Elementary School.
As for Jupiter, on his father's side he’s descended from a Welsh coal miner who came to California during the gold rush, while on his mother's side, one set of grandparents came to America from a Serbian displaced persons camp three years after the Second World War ended, while a great-grandfather left Serbia for America at the end of the First World War. In the new books, Jupiter's hair is very dark, he has blue-green eyes, and although in the old books he was stocky, in the new ones he loses the extra weight he had in junior high school and gets a lot taller.
Please rest assured that as a child of the American melting pot myself, I had no difficulty whatsoever making sure that The Three Investigators’ new (and to my mind, very interesting) family backgrounds merely enhanced their already rock-solid—and very American!—personalities and characters.
Age Of The Core Characters In The New Series:
Unlike the significantly older characters in other children's mystery book series of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, The Three Investigators were conceived as twelve-year-old boys, and real twelve-year-old American boys who acted as independently these days as Jupiter, Pete, and Bob did in the 1960s would almost certainly land their parents in trouble for supposed or alleged child neglect.
It therefore seemed to me that in order to make their activities plausible in the current cultural climate, I had to make the boys somewhat older. In the new books, cases 1-6 take place the summer before Jupiter, Pete, and Bob's freshman year in high school, when they're all about to turn fourteen; cases 7-12 the summer before their sophomore year, when they're almost fifteen; cases 13-18 the summer before their junior year, when they're almost sixteen; and cases 19-24 the summer before their senior year, when they're almost seventeen. Cases 25 and 26 take place the summer before they leave for college, when they're all still seventeen.
Old and New Characters:
Jupiter's Uncle Titus and Aunt Mathilda are the same characters they have always been—the eccentric owners of the Jones Salvage Yard—but these days, Uncle Titus is only a half-brother to Jupiter's much-younger father, Claudius. The Joneses no longer employ the good-natured, brawny, and somewhat oafish Bavarian brothers Hans and Konrad—who have each gone off to get married—but have hired a new team of brothers, Leif and Magnus Haldorsson, highly skilled carpenters and recent immigrants from Norway.
The new books also include a girl character—one who begins as the "foreigner" who appeared in so many of my father's Three Investigators novels. The girl's name is Mallory MacLeod, and although she has lived her life to date in Scotland, after the death of her Scottish father, her American mother has brought her back to her own hometown.
Though Mallory never becomes an official fourth Three Investigator, from Book 6 on, that's really what she is. She's a highly observant introvert who enjoys analyzing herself, her peers, and the world around her, and one of her functions is to be a set of outside eyes which can reinforce the reader's observations about the Three Investigators. As an immigrant to a foreign country, Mallory is also well equipped to observe and comment on its culture.
She shares with both Bob and Jupiter certain qualities of character and personality. Like Bob, she loves reading books and doing research—and, again like Bob, has a real interest in history. In common with Jupiter, she has a lot of confidence in her innate intelligence, and decisions come easily to her. She also has a Jupiter-like drive toward planning things, finishing things, and getting results.
Another difference between the original books and the new ones is that Steven and I have assembled a cast of new secondary characters who appear in multiple books. My father's characters Chief Reynolds, Worthington, Miss Bennett, and Skinny Norris have all been retained, but a number of other ongoing new characters have joined them. Several of the new adult secondary characters emerge as mentors, over time, and a number of the new young ones become friends.
Technology:
In the original books, Jupiter, Pete, and Bob were all enamored of technology. In the new books, they aren't. Given the current state of technology—and the dangers to developing brains from becoming over-dependent on it—I felt it was essential to downplay technology in order to allow young readers to engage more fully with the process of thought instead.
While the boys and Mallory all have access to computers, and, except for Pete, use them regularly in their investigations, at the beginning of the new series they only have flip-top cell phones. Pete's and Bob's parents and Jupiter's aunt and uncle have all separately decided that the boys won't be permitted to have smart phones, tablets, or any other hand-held electronic devices until they're juniors in high school.
Also, the boys use their computers mainly to send e-mails, do research, and write. They almost never use social media, but do turn to it once or twice as a way of increasing the reach of specific investigations.
Transportation:
In the original series, my father solved the problem of how three twelve-year-old boys would get around southern California by having Jupiter win the use of a gold-plated Rolls-Royce, complete with chauffeur, in a contest. But while the Rolls worked well in the original series, it struck me as an element that had outlived its usefulness.
For that reason, after receiving a hefty reward in the first book of the new series, the now almost-fourteen-year-old boys use some of the reward money to buy a used car—distinctly American, stylish, unusual, and decidedly "retro" —but still driven by their friend Worthington, who they now can hire themselves.
For the first eighteen books, the Three Investigators and Mallory still use bicycles as their most important means of local transportation, but in the last eight books they have motorcycles in addition to their car.
Headquarters:
In the original series, the Three Investigators' Headquarters was located in an old mobile home in the heart of the Savage Yard. It had three secret entrances, and was seen by, and accessible to, only the boys themselves.
In the new series, the old Headquarters is still there, and still used from time to time— mainly when the team needs real privacy—but it has been joined in Book 13 by a new Headquarters—a redesigned and renovated Salvage Yard shed that is suitable for interviewing clients, and in which a wall displays mementos from past cases. From that point on, the original Headquarters is called HQ1, with the new and more spacious and accessible Headquarters referred to as HQ2.
The Salvage Yard:
This aspect of the original series has been retained exactly as it was written, though it's been imagined with more detail. The Salvage Yard that stands at the center of the Three Investigators' universe was created because my father was an instinctive recycler, and when he lived in California in the early 1960s, he was appalled by its wasteful approach to old buildings, old machines, and old goods.
As the world has caught up to this thinking, the Salvage Yard—which repurposes old items of every kind—has become a very contemporary element of the series instead of a forward-thinking one.
Settings:
In the original Three Investigators series, the settings were largely fictional. Rocky Beach is a fictional town, of course, but even when the boys traveled to a vineyard in what was clearly the Napa Valley, the Napa Valley wasn't named, and when they went to Europe, they arrived in a country that isn't on the map.
In the new series, fictional places still abound, but they are joined by many real ones. Books 17 and 23 are set in Wyoming, with Book 17 set on and around a fictional dude ranch close to the town of Dubois, and abutting the very real Wind River Indian Reservation, and Book 23 revolving around a fictional movie ranch used as a set for filming Westerns and located on the Green River, not far from the real town of Big Piney.
The other twenty-four books in the new series are all set in California, using as many real places as possible. A fictional Castle of Zenda, built by a cameraman who worked on the 1937 movie The Prisoner of Zenda, is located in a real southern California, and a fictional compound owned by a billionaire tech wizard is located in the San Jacinto Mountains, not far from the real town of Idyllwild. There's a book set in Pacific Grove on the Monterey Peninsula that uses the real but now-decommissioned Fort Ord and the still-thriving Spyglass Hill golf course, with its Treasure-Island-themed holes, as the focus of much of its action.
Another book is set in the real northern California town of Dunsmuir—near Mount Shasta—but it imagines a perfect replica of Tutankhamun's tomb having been built outside the town by the Egyptologist grandson of a railroad baron. The real Temecula Valley is used as a setting for the fictional Wizard of Oz Hot Air Balloon Adventures; the real Central Valley near Bakersfield is used as a setting for the fictional Golden Globe Citrus Grove; and the real city of Ojai is used as a setting for the fictional Tahiti Ojai Resort—established in honor of Charles Nordhoff, who really lived nearby, and who co-wrote Mutiny on the Bounty.
In addition, the real Maritime Museum of San Diego—which restores, maintains, and operates historic vessels—and the real 24-gun frigate Surprise—the frigate Jack Aubrey captained in Master and Commander—both feature in a book in which the Surprise is lent to the town of Rocky Beach for its 150th birthday celebration, while the cities of San Francisco and Sausalito appear in a book that uses both the famous Sausalito houseboats and the equally famous Chartres-style labyrinth in San Francisco's Grace Cathedral as settings for important scenes.
Just a few of the new novels are set entirely in Rocky Beach and its environs. One of those books is partly set in Los Angeles, where a pharmaceutical company named Big Dragon Labs has set up shop in a fictional Arts and Crafts Building near Chinatown—where it sponsors a fictional Dragon Boat Festival—and one is partly set in Santa Barbara, where a Greek shipping magnate has built what he calls Little Mykonos, which has an Aegean-style lighthouse.
Actually, almost all of the books have a distinctive fictional building in them.
Literary Techniques And Subject Matter In The Original Books And The New Ones:
My father wrote the original Three Investigators series in the omniscient point of view. His tone and narration maintained a certain emotional distance from the characters, and he very rarely entered anyone's individual consciousness. In this way he kept the stories moving quickly, emphasized action over thought, and created a consistently exciting world. At the same time, he deprived himself of one of the most powerful techniques fiction writers have for creating sympathy between their readers and their characters.
The new series makes extensive and explicit use of the interiority and flexibility afforded by multiple third-person limited-omniscient narration. Each chapter reflects the point of view of one of the four main characters, and each novel has a primary point-of-view character whose personality helps shape the themes and ideas around which the book revolves.
Since the first book in the original series, The Secret of Terror Castle, began with Bob Andrews bicycling home, then heading off to the Salvage Yard to join his fellow Three Investigators, I felt that Bob should be the primary point-of-view character in the first book of the new series, and The Three Investigators in The Mystery of the Abecedarian Academy begins and ends in Bob's point of view.
After the first book, it became an easy matter to parse out primary points-of-view for the rest of the new series. Pete got the second book, with Jupiter getting the third, and the cycle started over with Bob in the fourth book, Pete in the fifth, and Jupiter in the sixth. Because there are twenty-six books, the last two books (YY and ZZ) are Bob's and Jupiter's, with Pete playing an unusually important role in both.
Still, because each of the novels is written in the multiple limited-omniscient point of view, in each book, after the first chapter announces the controlling or primary point of view, the narration moves on to the points of view of the other two boys and Mallory.
Because I felt I should introduce Mallory slowly, she has just one point-of-view chapter in the first book, and two in the second, third, and fourth books. In the fifth book, she gets two and a half chapters, and in the sixth book, she finally gets three. From there on out, she has either three or four point-of-view chapters, out of fifteen or sixteen chapters total.
Another technical change from the original series involved the length of the books; the original novels were 40,000 to 45,000 words, while the new ones are 60,000 to 66,000. The new chapters are longer and denser than the originals—and also aimed at a slightly older audience. I think the original books would probably have been categorized as Middle Grade, while the new books would probably be categorized as YA.
Also, although the original books did have some story lines that carried forward, they were mostly self-contained, while the new series has multiple long-term story arcs, in addition to having self-contained mysteries.
For example, over the course of the new series all four main characters become adept at a sport or sports. Bob and Mallory take up rock climbing; Bob studies taekwondo; Jupiter fences; Mallory joins a gun club; and Pete, in addition to his longtime interest in baseball and soccer, takes up archery.
Each of the four main characters also becomes interested, over time, in two particular branches of human knowledge—Bob in history and writing, Jupiter in political science and philosophy, Mallory in architecture and archeology, and Pete in education and religion.
One final difference between the original series and the new one goes to the degree of detail about the underlying subject matter of any given book. History and culture tend to be important to the plots in the new series in a way they weren't in the old ones.
The first book deals in part with immigration—particularly Chinese immigration— during the California gold rush; the second involves westward expansion and the role in it played by John Frémont; the third touches on the plight of vineyard (and other business) owners during the runaway inflation of the 1980s, while other early books involve Shakespeare, Bollywood, animal smuggling, the art world, Greek culture, Galileo, the Russian diaspora after the Bolshevik revolution, etc.
One similarity between the original books and the new ones is that not all the villains are equally villainous, and that even the more traditional villains may have redeeming qualities—and perhaps even have understandable reasons for acting as they do.
However, given my belief that the best government is the smallest one and my distaste for almost all politicians, a prospective reader of the new Three Investigators can rest assured that in the books in which a character is using his land speculation as a platform from which to run for governor, or is retired from a position at the State Department in which she promoted foreign wars, or is working for just about any branch of the government, that person is likely to be a villain!
Educational Potential Of The New Three Investigators Books:
While I don't think the original book series was ever taught in schools, I want to make a push from the start to get the books into the hands of educators who want to use them as teaching texts. The challenge I've most enjoyed tackling in the new novels is that of crossing exciting adventures with interesting historical and cultural information.
As I've already mentioned, the titles of the new books are alphabetical, alliterative, and metaphorical, and I believe that young readers will be drawn to the idea of reading twenty-six "alphabetized" novels. Since the titles each contain either a possibly puzzling word or a possibly puzzling concept, the books also announce themselves as educational as well as entertaining.
In fact, the titles operate on three levels—a literal one, a thematic one, and a metaphoric one. In the first book in the series—The Mystery of the Abecedarian Academy—Bob Andrews comes to understand the connection between a small one-room schoolhouse where a Chinese/Irish boy learned his ABCs, and the idea that the world itself is a one-room schoolhouse in which we are all daily engaged in the process of self-education, while in the second, The Mystery of the Brobdingnagian Beast, the three boys together come up with a title for Bob's case notes that refers to the immensity of the human desire to be part of a tribe—and the dangers attendant on that desire.
Moreover, since the overarching metaphor in each of the novels is inextricably linked to (and derives from) the mystery plot, the metaphor suggests the linking of plot and theme. In my experience, very few mystery novels even have a theme—or, rather, they mostly all have the same theme, that apparently inexplicable events actually all have a logical explanation, or that bad guys get punished in the end.
Even so, theme is the subtext of all experience, and since these particular mystery novels have been constructed to educate as well as to entertain, I hope that young people who read the new Three Investigators series will find its subtexts/themes fairly easily.
In any event, since Jupiter, Pete, Bob, and Mallory act maturely and responsibly, in case after case they model what used to be called critical thinking— the establishment of a complex question and then its rigorous examination—and I'm convinced that the current generation of young people will respond as well as previous ones have to stories that celebrate reason, skepticism, and individualism in the context of exciting mystery/adventure stories.
Old And New Marketing Of The Three Investigators Detective Firm By The Three Investigators Themselves:
From the very first book in the series, my father was aware that he would need to find a clever way to introduce a new children's mystery book series into the market, and through his personal connection with Alfred Hitchcock— very popular at the time as a cultural icon—he was able to convince him to license his name and image to The Three Investigators.
In addition to this "real world" branding idea, Dad created characters who also wanted to brand themselves, so to speak. In fact, one of the far-sighted and forward-thinking aspects of the original series was that Jupiter decided, early on, that the firm of The Three Investigators would need to advertise their talents, and he came up with the motto "We Investigate Anything" as well as their "trademark"—three question marks—and their business card—a surefire way of getting a conversation started in both the old series and the new one.
In the new one, the business card has retained its iconic look, but "Jupiter Jones— First Investigator" is now printed on the card in red; "Pete Crenshaw—Second Investigator" is printed in blue; and "Bob Andrews—Records and Research" is printed in green. These colors mirror the colors of their bicycle helmets, and also the colors of the chalk they use to draw question marks. (Jupiter's color has been changed from white to red.) When Mallory MacLeod is added to the card at the end of book 12, her name and title—Special Consultant— are printed in teal, and she's given a new bicycle helmet and her own box of chalk.
The updated business card now also lists Bob Andrews's cell phone number, the number of the landline in the Three Investigators' Headquarters, and the URL of the new Three Investigators' website that Bob—as Records and Research—has been given responsibility for. In the new series' first volume, Bob comes up with the idea of drawing attention to his planned online blog by describing Three Investigators cases both alphabetically and alliteratively, just as the novels do.
Thereafter, Bob—in consultation with Pete, Mallory, and Jupiter—crafts appropriate titles for Three Investigators cases, then posts narratives about them on The Three Investigators' website. The business card, motto, and three question marks are retained throughout the new series, but Bob's alphabetical and alliterative titles (and his posted case notes) join them as internal marketing devices of the firm.
Another new branding idea is Pete's. When Pete is the first to catch sight of the used car The Three Investigators eventually buy, he's drawn to a decal on its back window. At the time he first sees it, he doesn't know it's a representation of a chimera, but he's struck by the fact that three fierce animals—a dragon, a lion, and a bighorn sheep—have been drawn as one. Pete feels oddly delighted by this drawing and sees it as representative of The Three Investigators themselves. He proposes that they adopt a chimera logo in which Jupiter is symbolized by a golden eagle, Bob by a bobcat, and himself by a bighorn sheep.
Although I knew that many old fans would be dismayed if the three question marks were shuffled completely aside, I introduced the chimera as a new visual symbol for the boys because it seemed to me that, with the advent of the Internet, the question mark had become all too common, and also because I wanted something visually new for the new series.
Plans For Book Publication and Streaming Series:
Although traditional publishing companies generally still adhere to a schedule in which books are published in three seasons ending with the spring season, I believe that having all twenty-six books in the new Three Investigators series completed before even one of the books has been published presents a unique opportunity.
What I have in mind is publishing one book a month for twenty-six consecutive months—updating the concept of serial publication used so successfully by the Victorians. I envision the first book in the series being published sometime in 2024.
As for the streaming series, given the sheer number of inquiries I have received in the last ten years from Hollywood producers interested in acquiring rights in the original Three Investigators series, I think it is almost a certainty that Netflix, Amazon, NBC Universal, or a similar media company will be eager to acquire the streaming television rights for the new one, and my hope is that four seasons of streaming television can begin the summer following the publication of The Mystery of the Zoroastrian Zodiac.
This might be a good place to note that once I'd had the idea of a series consisting of twenty-six books, I also realized that if the boys solved six mysteries a summer, and they grew from almost-fourteen years old to almost-eighteen years old over the course of the series, it would be easy to adapt the twenty-six books into four seasons of a streaming series without having the boys who play Jupiter, Pete, and Bob grow too old by the final episode.
Casting actors who are fifteen years old to play almost-fourteen year olds in the first season seems like an excellent idea—not only because fifteen-year-old actors can (apparently) work longer days, but also because it will make it easier to predict what they might look like by the time their characters graduate from high school than it would if the boys were younger at the start.
To be clear, I'm hoping we can use all twenty-six novels as the basis for four seasons of ninety-minute episodes of streaming television—with the last two novels acting as the basis for a two-hour special after the four seasons are completed.
Conclusion:
I have taken the time to write this detailed overview of the new Three Investigators series not just to describe the major changes Steven and I have made to the Three Investigators universe, but also because I want to be as clear as possible about my aims, my feelings, and my history, going forward. I believe that such honesty and directness will help me find future partners in sympathy with the new series’ underlying ethos.
As I hope I have suggested, although the elements of the original series have been significantly updated in the new one, Jupiter, Pete, and Bob remain boys who might as easily have been born in the 1950s as in the first decade of the new millenium. Unconstrained by overprotective parenting and born into families that applaud enterprise, they are boys who share the sense that no mystery is too tough to crack if approached with the can-do spirit.
Those who read the Three Investigators series in its original iteration know that the world it envisaged was one in which young people could not only be given a tremendous amount of freedom to explore the world but could be trusted to use that freedom wisely. It was also a world in which it was generally accepted that whatever didn't kill you made you stronger; a world in which feelings, while undeniably powerful and interesting, were not considered the only reliable guide to proper actions; and a world in which respectful conduct was expected even toward people with whom one disagreed.
In the new series, that world is still very much on view, but although Jupiter, Pete, and Bob are still the same boys they always were—tenacious, ingenious, courageous, creative, curious, and hardworking, knowing the value of both self-reliance and interdependence—they've been joined by a bright and interesting girl with whom they are journeying toward adulthood.
Together, the four of them inhabit new books that are not old-fashioned but simply classic, and at a time when boys throughout the western world are feeling increasingly confused and disenfranchised, there is every reason to expect that the new Three Investigators series will present the proper creative partners with a tremendous opportunity to speak to those boys—and their girl counterparts—by making everything old brand-new again.
Elizabeth Arthur February 2023