A personal story about how I got here

Dear Salvage Yard Subscriber,

I'm delighted to finally be connecting with my father's Three Investigators fans, through Substack. After my father died when I was just fifteen, my beloved and lovely Aunt Margaret - my father's aunt by marriage, with whom he lived for the last six years of his life - answered all the fan letters addressed to Dad - letters that continued to arrive in ever-increasing numbers.

Aunt Margaret was blind by then, but the woman who helped her after my father's death read each letter aloud to her, and Aunt Margaret dictated a response in which - as far as I can remember - she never mentioned that the reason my father wasn't writing the letter himself was that he wasn't alive any more.

After Aunt Margaret died, I inherited some of the letters she had gotten and answered, and I was touched both by the care with which she'd saved each in its proper envelope, and by the letters themselves. Some of them were probably written on assignment from a teacher - since they frequently contained a question like "Where do you get your ideas?" or "Have you always been a writer?" - but short or long, and written spontaneously or under prodding, I thought each of them was great.

Even so, when I first read them, I could never have imagined that the moment would come when I, too, would be trying to connect to my father's fans through the medium of letters.

After my mother had asked my father for a divorce when I was five years old, my father had left our house in Yorktown Heights, New York, and moved all the way to Hollywood in order to learn a living. I didn't see him for more than three years, but since he disliked Hollywood and missed his children, after Aunt Margaret's husband died, she invited him to set up housekeeping with her, and he moved back to her house in Philadelphia for a couple of months before they bought a house together in Cape May, New Jersey.

It was in that dark and Gothic house in Philadelphia that I first met Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews - and also learned that Dad was toying with the idea of calling his First Investigator "Genius". While I had nothing to do with any other aspect of the development of the original Three Investigators series, I think I can take a fair amount of credit for helping my father see that in the name "Genius" lay catastrophe.

Dad asked me which name - Jupiter or Genius - I thought young readers would like best. I wish I could say that I expressed my opinion of "Genius" by sticking a finger down my throat and making gagging noises. After all, that would have been an appropriate way for a fictional ten-year-old girl to convey or demonstrate or manifest her extreme displeasure at the idea of a character named Genius Jones.

Since I - most unfortunately, in my own opinion - was a real girl, not a fictional one, all I did was say, "Dad, you're kidding, right?" Maybe adding something along the lines of "Jupiter is a great name. Really."

Luckily my father thought so, too, and in August of 1964, he took a first edition of Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators in The Secret of Terror Castle, opened it up, and wrote some words on the page opposite the title page.
   
The words ran: "August 5, 1964, To Elizabeth. One of my most valued critics. Dad."

Although I couldn't be certain this was a coded reference to the Genius vs. Jupiter question, I was really pretty sure.

Getting that copy of The Secret of Terror Castle was actually the high point of my relationship with the series when I was a child, and it was only much later - much much later - in my life, that I really understood the magic of what my father had accomplished with The Three Investigators.

When I was younger, although I appreciated how much better Dad's Three Investigators books were than the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew books, I honestly thought that writing books especially for children was a misuse of my father's talent. I also didn't exactly appreciate the character of Liz Logan in The Mystery of the Fiery Eye.

Of course, I understood that she was a compliment, but that girl had a lot more freckles than I did, and although it was true that I talked pretty quickly, I didn't think I talked that fast. Most of all, I had no interest whatsoever in spies.

I did, however, have an interest in being a "girl operative," and I thought it was interesting that Bob Andrews - the one of the Three Investigators who seemed most like my father in his manners, and who also shared his nickname - was talking to a girl called Liz - as in "Bob and Liz were still talking, or at least Liz was talking, and Bob was answering when she gave him a chance."

I'm glad I gave him a chance again one day in November of 2018 when I was contemplating the way the world I'd grown up in was vanishing daily. At dinner that evening, I found myself saying to Steven, "If only we knew a writer who could be trusted to do a proper reboot of The Three Investigators series!"

Then I suddenly thought, "Well, I'm a writer - and so is Steven - and if I could think of a way to connect the way my father approached writing with the way that I do - "

It then occurred to me that since both my father and I had always loved alliteration - Dad's love for it preceded, by decades, The Mystery of the Green Ghost, The Mystery of the Silver Spider, and the names "Jupiter Jones" and "Liz Logan" - perhaps we could start to connect our different approaches to writing through that.

Perhaps I could come up with twenty-six alliterative titles - one for each letter of the Roman alphabet - and perhaps, if I joined a fairly common (but intriguing and forceful) noun with an unexpected adjective, the combination would point me in the direction of a suitable Three Investigators plot. I spent days making lists of possible titles - looking up unusual adjectives and common but forceful nouns. I got a list of twenty-six I liked, and thought, all right then. This might actually be doable.

And now it's done.

But even though Steven and I were somehow able to possess our souls in patience for over four years while we did nothing but write Three Investigators novels - and I'd been playing the long game with the rebirth of the series for a long time before that - now that the final book is finished, I can hardly stand the thought that it may take as long as a year and a half to put the first book into the hands of readers.

I'm also pretty worried about the things that are going on in publishing these days. In just the last two weeks, I've read newspaper articles about the censorship, by their own publishers, of both Anthony Horowitz - the writer/creator of the extraordinary "Foyle's War" - and Roald Dahl, whose books are currently being rewritten by Puffin.

Just like the pretense by the government and large corporations that "content moderation" is something good, rather than something wicked, the pretense by these publishers that they are improving the world by their censorship rather than destroying the art of writing, and infantalizing readers, makes me totally enraged.

One thing is for sure: I have no intention of subjecting the new Three Investigators novels to an editor who attempts to foist a "sensitivity reader" on me and Steven or who talks about "lived experience," or similar nonsense. Right from the start of this process, I was determined above all else to protect the best boy detectives ever created from any attempt to make them less intelligent, admirable, or masculine than they truly were.

The dire condition of our current culture became plain to me when a producer I was considering working with at the time reported that at a recent pitch meeting at Netflix, two female executives had suggested that they might be interested in a reboot of the series if the boys at the heart of it were turned into girls.

Suggestions like that one appeared in my life with amazing regularity and led to my realization that in a world in which American boys were quickly being made into second-class citizens, the only way to protect Pete, Bob, and Jupiter was to write their new stories myself.    

The new books, like the old ones, are about learning not to accept things at face value but to see the real behind the apparent. In the new books, it is also still quite clear that boys and girls are frequently different in important ways; that intelligence (and sometimes even talent) is heritable, though education is vital; that free inquiry is necessary for survival; and that America became the country it is because it was created through the assimilation of many different cultures.

In the new books, it is also clear that a boy like Jupiter Jones can only flourish in a meritocracy.

Be assured that I'll be publishing updates on the progress Steven and I are making right here on Substack as we figure out a plan for the new series, but I also want to share some of my father's wonderful old stories with you.

As some of you will already know, my father was a professional writer of mysteries, fantasies, and horror stories for adults, and with the exception of a handful of stories he wrote in the early 1960s, he had never previously written for young people before he wrote The Secret of Terror Castle.

In fact, after graduating from college and moving to New York City in the early 1930s, he quickly became a full-time fiction writer publishing in pulp magazines like Argosy, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Weird Tales. He had a radio show called The Mysterious Traveler, and in the 1950s, he also published in The Saint, Ellery Queen, and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

Before he died in May of 1969, Random House published two anthologies of his stories - Mystery and More Mystery and Ghosts and More Ghosts - but the books are long out of print, and since they were edited for a YA audience, I've thought for years that an adult anthology of his short stories was long overdue.

In the fall of 2020, I therefore took a month or two off from writing Three Investigators books to edit a volume of my father's stories. I hauled out old tear sheets and ancient copies of stories, read through them, and selected thirty-eight stories I thought stood the test of time. I wrote story notes for each story, and a Foreword for the volume.

Although I'm hoping to also publish The Collected Stories of Robert Arthur in a more traditional - and more physical - manner in a year or two, as soon as I can manage to do it, I'm going to start publishing the stories, one at a time, here on Substack.

Please also follow me on Twitter (@RockyBeach2019) if you're willing.

As perhaps you can imagine from this letter, Twitter, to me, is a foreign country - indeed, it's the part of the map marked Here There Be Dragons - but although, even now, I long for the country I grew up in to somehow magically reappear, it clearly isn't going to (except, perhaps in the new Three Investigators books...) and although I'll always treasure the childish handwriting of the ten- and eleven-year-old readers who first encountered The Three Investigators series, right now I'm pleased with the technology that permits me to connect to some of those very same readers, now that they've grown up.

With thanks to all of you for being out there somewhere,

Elizabeth Arthur