For years I’ve tried to remember the name of those mystery books I used to read as a kid. Now thanks to Anything You Ever Wanted To Know, I get to ask KERA’s listeners if any of them have ever heard of the series.
A woman at the radio station answered the phone and asked for my first name and whether I was asking or answering a question. I told her my name, and then she asked me what my question was going to be. Then she put me on hold.
I wonder if they screen callers; maybe they have to. Whether or not it was for screening purposes, I’m glad she asked because it gave me a chance to practice what I was going to say before going on live.
Have you ever called a call-in radio show? This one was on a delay, so there would be no way for me to listen to the radio and ask my question. After she put me on hold, I was able to listen to the show through my phone.
Now I waited--patiently and anxiously. Since I didn’t know how many people were in line before me, I had no idea when the host was going to say, “We have Jason on the line.”
Several callers were introduced while I waited. Then, suddenly, there was a click and brief audio dropout on the phone. What was that? Oh, maybe I’m next. Yes I am!
Now instead of describing this next part, I thought it might be fun to listen to it. I hope this is okay to excerpt. If it’s not and I have to take it down, I’ll come back and rewrite the on-air conversation.
Click the video below to hear both my question and someone who called a few minutes after with a possible solution to the mystery.
Attention Facebook friends: The application that imports blogs into Facebook Notes does not import the video correctly. To see it, you should read the rest of this at my blog.
The Three Investigators. Huh? That rang no bells for me. At least I did get an answer before the show went off the air.
The Three Investigators. Hmm. Well, at least I had a name I could search.
So a little later I typed the name into Google and a Wikipedia article showed up. Now I know a lot of people think Wikipedia should be avoided at all costs, but there are smart ways to use it. More on that subject in a future post.
As I read the
Wikipedia entry for The Three Investigators, nothing really started jogging my memory until I read the name of one of the characters: Jupiter Jones. Yeah, that sounds familiar.
Alfred Hitchcock was one of the characters?! Wait, that sort of sounds familiar, too. It has been more than two decades since I read these stories.
What really confirmed it for me was the description of their headquarters. It was a trailer in an old salvage yard that was practically hidden from view by all the other junk, and there were several secret entrances to it.
That’s it! Mystery solved!
After all these years, I finally know the name of the mystery series I used to read as a kid.
Turns out the books were very popular, especially in Europe. And apparently they revamped the series in 1989, but I’m more interested in the older ones I would have read at my school library.
By the way, here is one (of several) of the useful ways to use Wikipedia: Follow the links. Three of the links in The Three Investigators article were to the
T3I Reader’s site, another site by
Seth, a self-described Three Investigators enthusiast, and
TunnelTwo.
I sent a Facebook message to my wife and shared this story with her, as well as some of the links. As I mentioned in
Part 1, she is a librarian. Well, she did some searching and found a few copies in the
Fort Worth Libraries. Now we just need to take a trip to the library and check them out.
[
Click here for the Epilogue to the Mystery of the Mystery Books.]
