Book Review: Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators in The Mystery of the Green Ghost, by Robert Arthur, illustrations by Harry Kane.

OK, so this was a bit of a peculiar realization I had recently. This book was pretty much the book that made a reader out this humble typist. It was third grade, you see, and our teacher read a bit from a book every day before recess. She got halfway through this one when she suddenly had to transfer to another class, and the replacement teacher didn't do reading time at all. And this was a mystery. One simply *had* to know what happened next. So, it was in the library. I found it. I read it. And I became a Three Investigators fan. The thing is, over the past 30-odd years, I'd completely forgotten how "Chinese" this story is.

But I just found a copy in an antique store (?!) and had to buy it. Fifty cents well spent. But the more I read, the higher my eyebrow rose. This is a rollicking tale, yes, with stout, supercilious and cerebral Jupiter Jones deducing his way to the truth behind the strange apparition, witnessed by his cohorts Bob Andrews (the researcher) and Pete Crenshaw (the athlete), of a green ghost in an old mansion scheduled for demolition. As it turns out, the ghost is linked to old Mathias Green, a trader who set up shop in "old China" around the turn of the last century, married a Chinese woman, then fled back to America after stealing a priceless necklace - made of ghost pearls, of all things.

As the story progresses, we meet Charles Chang Green, the long-lost great-great grandson of Mathias, who came from Hong Kong to live with his long-lost great aunt, the current heiress to the Green fortune. Intrigue follows... CHINESE style. It's several steps up from Fu Manchu, and a few from The Talons of Weng Chiang - alluding in a kid-appropriate way to many of the challenges faced by Chinese immigrants in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and possessing, like, a fairly "real" main character in Chang.

But there's also a lot of weirdness around birth, abandonment and adoption. Like this passage on page 45, describing the birth of Mathias' son, Elija, whose mother died of a fever while accompanying her husband on one of his many voyages to the Orient:

Unable to care for the boy, Mathias had placed him in an American mission school in Hong Kong to be reared and educated. Then, a short time later, Mathias had gotten himself into trouble with the authorities for illegally taking the Ghost Pearl necklace, had married a beautiful young Chinese princess, and had hurriedly sailed back for America, leaving his son still in Hong Kong.

Elija Green, whose father never sent for him, had grown up to become an American medical missionary in China and had married a Chinese wife. When they both died of yellow fever, their son Thomas in turn had been brought up in the American mission school.

And Thomas and his wife (an English missionary's daughter) both die in a flood on the Yellow River, leaving Chang an orphan - the third in a row, more or less.

And THEN, when we have the big confrontation with the nefarious Mr. Won (who is a lot more like Fu Manchu than any real Chinese human being), he tries to win Chang's allegiance by offering to adopt him. It becomes a talking point for the rest of the book.

Some kids adopted from China might think this is the coolest thing ever. Some might not care one way or another. But some could get a little freaked out by the whole thing. It's a great story for voracious young readers, but a little peculiar around what we can call "the issues," you know? And who knows WHAT the story's been doing buried in my subconscious all these years.

It's available on Amazon over here, but is also still sold through the Scholastic Book Club, and (be warned) is thus readily available in classrooms across the continent.

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