- Title: The Secret of Skeleton Island
- wiki: link
Throwback Tuesday takes us back to a mystery involving the Three Investigators whose mantra of “We Investigate Everything” leads them to take a trip to the abandoned amusement park on Skeleton Island where a movie company’s attempt to film is being compromised by the appearance of a ghost.
There’s a personal connection for our trio as Pete Crenshaw‘s father is involved in the movie. That, and the idea of the three boys doing some scuba diving for a short film side project, provides cover for the Three Investigators. However, word about what they really to look into precedes them getting them stranded on a small island in a storm (the first of two times this will happen in the book) as there are those who will go to great lengths to make sure the secrets of Skeleton Island are never discovered.
Bob and Pete will get into trouble without Jupiter who gets sidelined by a cold for much of the case, but still manages to make several deductions. Taking his place in the boys’ scuba diving is a local Greek transplant who is disliked and distrusted by the locals (playing on themes of bigotry, profiling, and discrimination), but Chris proves himself a good friend to the boys on multiple occasions including rescuing them when they are stranded. His search for gold deplumes leads to a wealthy discover by the Three Investigators and gets Jupiter thinking on a different kind of buried treasure which coincides with the sudden appearance of the ghost ten years earlier and the intense effort to keep people away from Skeleton Island.
The Three Investigators series, spanning over two decades written by multiple authors, featured a trio of teenage detectives in the deductive Jupiter Jones, the athletic Pete Crenshaw, and the knowledgeable Bob Andrews. Like the original Scooby-Doo TV-series, most of the adventures had a supernatural vibe involving ghosts, murmuring mummies, talking skulls, ghosts, haunted houses, and odd events, but each mystery turned out to have a logical human rationale behind it which the intrepid trio ultimately uncovered. Located in the fictional town of Rocky Beach, California, the Three Investigators worked out of a hidden base buried in the junkyard of Jupiter’s Uncle Titus solving 43 cases before their run came to an end.