Dave's book review for The Secret of Terror Castle (3 Investigators #1)
Author: Robert Arthur
Pages: 224
Finished reading: 2026-06-10
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My Review
This series is special to me because I read them when I was somewhere around 8-11 years old. I’m not sure how many of these were in the "junior" section of my public library, but it was probably quite a few and I believe I read most of them, probably out of order because I didn’t care about that sort of thing back then.
Here’s the Wikipedia page. I thought it was interesting to learn that it was even more popular in Germany.
So I was delighted to be able to read this to my kiddo - to see how it holds up for kids today and see what I think about it now.
It’s dated, for sure! The writing is from 1964, but it’s got the "golly gee" style I tend to associate with the 1950s. For me, that’s fun and nostalgic because a lot of the fiction I read when I was younger was from the mid century. (Some of the comics and cartoons I read were from first half of the century.)
Luckily, the old style wasn’t too off-putting for my kiddo. The important thing is that the same things I liked still hold up because they’re never not cool:
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The Investigator’s headquarters is an abandoned trailer hidden under a pile of junk in a junkyard.
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Chapters often end on cliffhangers, which keeps young audiences guessing and asking for one more chapter.
There’s some culturally insensitive stuff by today’s standards - "old gipsy woman" and "the arab" and that sort of thing. I always make a descision on the spur of the moment when I’m reading older books out loud whether to leave out words, explain them, or just let it ride. I have complicated feelings about this and it’s really a case-by-case basis.
By the time I read this book as a kid, it was about 25 years old. So that’d the equivalent of my kid reading a book published in 2001. I wonder how antiquated a book from 2001 would seem to kids now? I was still on dial-up modem then and lots of people weren’t on the Internet yet.
The Alfred Hitchcock tie-in is a weird meta sub-element of its own. As a kid, I thought Hitchcock wrote these books. But he just penned the introduction and appears as himself in the story.
Robert Arthur Jr. […] believed involving a famous person such as movie director Alfred Hitchcock would attract attention.
Anyway, this was a blast from the distant past for me and a lot of fun to revisit with my own kid.