The Mystery of the Talking Skull

by Robert Arthur, Elizabeth Arthur (Editor), Steven Bauer (Editor)

Overview

At the beginning of Robert Arthur's tenth and final novel in his classic mystery series, Jupiter Jones buys an old steamer trunk at an auction. The trunk originally belonged to a magician who has gone missing and contains a skull named Socrates, which is reputed to talk. But the boys soon discover that others want the trunk, too - including Three-Finger Munger, Maximilian the Mystic, and a mysterious woman named Zelda. Does the trunk hold the clue to the Great Gulliver and the money that has gone missing? What does Socrates have to say about that?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798331433888
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble Press
Publication date:	07/20/2024
Series:	Classic Three Investigators , #10
Pages:	194
Sales rank:	160,911
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.45(d)

About the Author

Robert Arthur is best known today as the creator of The Three Investigators mystery book series for young people, but by the time he dreamed up Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews, he had been a professional writer of mysteries, fantasies, and horror stories for adults for over forty years.
  
At the time he was conjuring The Three Investigators, he also served as the ghost-editor of a number of anthologies purportedly edited by Alfred Hitchcock - iconic anthologies like Stories Not For The Nervous, Stories For Late At Night, and Stories My Mother Never Told Me.

Previous to that, he had written mysteries, fantasies, and horror stories for pulp magazines throughout the 1930s. His work from those years appeared in Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Detective Fiction Weekly, Argosy Weekly, Detective Story Magazine, Collier's, Bluebook, and Black Mask, among many other magazines.

Later he co-wrote and produced a radio show called The Mysterious Traveler that won an Edgar Award for Best Radio Drama from The Mystery Writers of America in 1953.

In 1959, he moved to Hollywood where he worked in television, writing scripts for The Twilight Zone and working as a story editor, showrunner, and scriptwriter for Alfred Hitchcock's TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

In 1963, he moved to Cape May, New Jersey, where he created The Three Investigators. The Secret of Terror Castle and The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot were published in 1964 by Random House, and Robert Arthur wrote eight more Three Investigators novels before his early death in 1969.

Elizabeth Arthur is Robert Arthur's daughter and the author of five novels (Beyond the Mountain, Bad Guys, Binding Spell, Antarctic Navigation, and Bring Deeps) and two memoirs (Island Sojourn and Looking for the Klondike Stone). She and her husband Steven Bauer have edited and written end notes for all ten of Robert Arthur's classic novels. They have also co-written twenty-six new Three Investigators novels, forthcoming from Hollow Tree Press.
 
Steven Bauer is Robert Arthur's son-in-law and the author of  books for young people entitled Satyrday, A Cat of a Different Color, and The Strange and Wonderful Tale of Robert McDoodle. He also runs his own editing business. He and his wife Elizabeth Arthur have edited and written end notes for all ten of Robert Arthur's classic novels. They have also co-written twenty-six new Three Investigators novels, forthcoming from Hollow Tree Press.