Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators in The Secret of Terror Castle
The Secret of Terror Castle
- published in 1964 in the USA by Random House (hardback)
- written by Robert Arthur
- 179 pages
Introduction
NOTICE TO THE READER: You are under no obligation whatever to read a single word of this introduction.
I SEEM TO BE constantly introducing something. For years I’ve been introducing my television programmes. I’ve introduced motion pictures. And I’ve introduced books of mystery, ghost and suspense stories for my fans to shiver with.
Now I find myself introducing a trio of lads who call themselves The Three Investigators, and ride in a gold-plated Rolls-Royce, solving mysteries, riddles, enigmas and conundrums of all kinds. Preposterous, isn’t it?
Frankly I would prefer to have nothing to do with these three youths, but I rashly promised to introduce them. And I am a man of my word – even though the promise was extorted from me by nothing less than sheer skulduggery, as you will see.
To the business at hand, then. The three boys who call themselves The Three Investigators are Bob Andrews, Pete Crenshaw, and Jupiter Jones, all of whom live in Rocky Beach, a small city on the shore of the Pacific Ocean some miles from Hollywood.
Bob Andrews, who is small but wiry, is something of a scholarly type, although with an adventurous spirit. Pete Crenshaw is quite tall and muscular. Jupiter Jones is – well, I shall refrain from giving you my own personal opinion of Jupiter Jones. You will have to decide about him for yourself after reading the pages that follow. I shall simply stick to the facts.
Therefore, though I would be surely tempted to call Jupiter Jones fat, I will simply say, as his friends do, that he is stocky. As a very small child, Jupiter Jones appeared in a television series about a group of comical children – a series I am happy to say I never encountered. However, it appears that as an infant he was so fat and comical in appearance, he was known as Baby Fatso and made millions laugh at the way he kept falling over things. This gave him a deep aversion to being laughed at. In order to get himself taken seriously, he studied furiously. From the time he could read, he read everything he could get his hands on – science, psychology, criminology, and many other subjects. Having a good memory, he retained much of what he read, so that in school his teachers found it best to avoid getting into arguments with him about questions of fact. They found themselves proved wrong too
often.
If at this point Jupiter Jones sounds rather insufferable, I can only agree with you heartily. However, I am told he has many loyal friends. But then, there is no accounting for the tastes of the young.
Now I could tell you a great deal more about him and the other boys. I could tell you how Jupiter won the use of the gold-plated car in a contest. I could tell you how he established a local reputation for finding lost articles, including runaway pets. I could – But I feel I have done my duty. I have more than lived up to my promise. If you haven’t skipped all this long ago, you are probably even gladder than I am that this introduction is ended.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
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