The Three Investigators Return

Welcome To A New Era!

Dear Friends of Jupiter, Pete, and Bob,

I’m thrilled to announce that the first three books in the new Three Investigators series are now available for pre-sale on Amazon as e-books. The paperbacks and hardcovers will be available starting March 3rd – the day they’re officially published.

The links to the e-books follow, and even if you aren’t an e-book reader and prefer to wait until you can hold a nice solid book in your hands, you might still want to check out the e-books now.

The Mystery of the Abecedarian Academy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0DTV5Z5ZC

The Mystery of the Brobdingnagian Beast: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0DTT9WWZZ

The Mystery of the Chimeric Cornucopia: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0DTV1GJYK

You should hit the “Follow” button next to my name on one of the book pages if you want Amazon itself to remind you of the pub date on the day the paperbacks and hardcovers are published.

While you won’t be able to read any of the text of the new books on the Amazon website until the physical books go live, I’ll be sending the book description and the first chapter of the first three books out to you myself, sometime before March 3rd.

(I’ve changed my mind about sending chapters out both before and after the every-three-months pub dates, and I’ve also changed my mind about sending more than one chapter. Once I really looked at the multiple chapters idea, I saw it had a lot of continuity problems.)

I do wish there were some way you could simply leaf through the book, the way people do in a bookstore. Maybe in future I’ll find a way to offer a sneak peek of excerpts from later on in the texts, but I’m still trying to figure out how best to give readers a taste of the new stories without giving away too much.

That said, I’m truly happy that the time has finally arrived when I can share what I’ve had to keep secret for so many years now – i.e. the way in which Steven and I interpreted our mission to reboot my father’s vision, and also how we fulfilled it.

You’ll find that each of the book descriptions begins with the following text:

The world has changed since the first time The Three Investigators went into action, but some things never go out of style. The persistence of truth. The power of perseverance. The importance of questioning everything.

Conceived and co-written by Elizabeth Arthur, the daughter of Robert Arthur, the creator of the Three Investigators universe, this exciting reboot of the classic series takes its iconic characters into a new age. They return reimagined, reinvigorated, and more relevant than ever.

On the text of the flyer below, some of the same sentiments are expressed in shorter form. And while it has occasionally been daunting to reflect on just how many people are counting on me and Steven to do a good job with this reboot, the part of the job that involved the actual writing of the books has mostly been sheer joy.

As I’ve mentioned to you before, I think – and as it says in the Amazon series description for my father’s ten Three Investigators novels – when Dad started writing the series, he was already fifty-five and he brought a lifetime of writing experience to the task of crafting mysteries for young people.

Well, starting in late 2018, I, too, did something completely new as a writer – and at an even older age than my father. After it hit me like a bolt from the blue that I myself could be the writer I’d hoped would come along some day, I had the chance to put everything I’d learned about writing in the course of forty years into new Three Investigators books – books I hoped would speak to a new generation of readers the way my father’s had to a now-older one.

With that in mind, please consider forwarding this post on to everyone you know. It’s been remarkably hard for me to get the word about the new series out, and at this point I could use all the help I can get from kindred spirits. I am eager to get the new series into the hands of the current generation of young people, but in order to do that, I almost certainly need to get it into the hands of their parents or grandparents first.

The flyer below can be downloaded and printed, so if you’re willing to help spread the word about the return of the Three Investigators, you might also consider printing a few copies and sticking them up on local bulletin boards. The flyer was designed by the amazing artist Pashur House. He's doing all the cover art for the new series, and I’m wild about it. I hope you will be, too.

Pashur has a very interesting background as a world-class body painter, and although he’s also designed a lot of other eye-catching posters, he’s never designed book covers before, so he, too, is branching out as an artist somewhat later in his life. (Pashur actually contacted me in the first place by using the chat feature of this Substack account. Pretty cool.)

Which reminds me. Here’s the official invitation to subscribe to The Salvage Yard, if you haven’t already:

The lighthouse on the welcome page is also Pashur’s work. It’s a close-up of the cover of a future book in the new series and portrays a Hellenistic lighthouse. If I were a different kind of person, I might set up a contest to see who could come closest to guessing the noun that follows Hellenistic in Book 8, but since I’m not, I’ll tell you – No, I won’t!

The crazy thing is, for all the obvious ways in which the new books do differ from the old ones, there are lots of times, when reading them, that you can completely forget that sixty years have passed since The Secret of Terror Castle was published. The boys are still the boys you’ve always known – just a little older, and a little wiser.

As it also says on the Amazon series description page:

“In these brand-new tales, Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews – three teen detectives with sharp minds, unwavering courage, and a knack for solving the unsolvable – embark on adventures that challenge their wits, determination, and native ingenuity. Operating from their secret headquarters at The Jones Salvage Yard in Rocky Beach, California, they dive headfirst into mysteries that span history, science, and the unknown, facing danger and intrigue at every turn.”

Let’s hope so, anyway! One way or another, I’m glad you’re going to be there with them.

By the way, there’s a new post pinned to the top of the landing page of this Substack that most of you haven’t seen yet. It’s titled Welcome To The Salvage Yard, and since it’s essentially the welcome letter that new subscribers are getting these days, old subscribers might want to check it out sometime.

With all best wishes,

Elizabeth Arthur

https://x.com/RockyBeach2019