Neil vaguely recalled that the Three Investigators series was
"By Arthur
???." The creator was an old-time pulpster named Robert
Arthur. There is a solid hard-boiled PI connection with this
series because later entries were written by a writer signing
himself "William Arden," a pseudonym of Dennis Lynds, known
to many of us as "Michael Collins" the creator of
Edgar-winning, one-armed PI Dan Fortune.
While we're on the subject of kid detective series I'd like
to put in a plug for one of my favorites, the Tod Moran
series by Howard Pease. Tod Moran was a young officer in the
Merchant Marine who solved cases all over the world. He went
from cabin boy to First Mate of a tramp steamer called
*The Araby*. Pease was a merchant seaman himself and knew
whereof he wrote. Great titles in the series like *The
Tattooed Man*, *Heart of Danger*, *Hurricane Weather*, and
others.
One of the great things about this series was that, unlike a
lot of kid mysteries, there were actual murders in the Tod
Morans. Moreover these were kid's books written in the '20s,
'30s, and '40s, populated by sailors who actually talked like
sailors. For books published in an era in which David
Selznick had to fight tootah an nail to be able to have Clark
Gable say he didn't "give a damn," seeing comparatively frank
use of profanity in a juvenile novel, that I borrowed
moreover from the school library of my Catholic elementary
school, was amazing!
NOTE: *I'm* not that old. I read the books *years* after they
were published. But I knew something about the era.
JIM DOHERTY
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