A pleasant little mashup of Scooby Doo and Agatha Christie

 One of my go-tos for casual, decompressing reads is the Three Investigators books, a juvenile detective series from 1964 to 1987. I actually find them more engaging than the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, although the Three Investigators are not as fluid or as chameleon as those books. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew have been able to endlessly reinvent themselves while the Three Investigators are more grounded in their era and geography. 

And I normally don't feel the need to write about any particular book in the series. They’re fun, escapist fluff but few books in the series really stand out. And some of the ones that do stand out for the wrong reasons lol However, when I read the The Mystery of the Sinister Scarecrow, I was left thinking that it managed to be a fun mashup of Scooby Doo and Agatha Christie.

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While the Three investigators was using the trope of the Scooby Doo Hoax before the TV show came out (Indeed, the whole fake haunting plotline is an old one and there have even been some real life examples), iI can't help but imagine that, by 1979, Scooby Doo may have had a little influence on the series. But if you are going to steal from a children's cartoon, Scooby Doo is a good choice. Obviously the scarecrow of the title is someone dressed up to scare the emotionally unstable heiress (and the boys clearly never think its supernatural) but its still the trope in action. The book gets points for not insulting the readers intelligence.

However, where the book actually won me over was in the resolution. In a household of six different people, two thirds of them were in on three different crimes, all interlocking with art theft. I had to go back and make sure one guy was actually innocent. Honestly, it was one murder short of being able to pass for an Agatha Christie work. That was some nice mystery structuring.

Even by 1979, it wasn't too much to ask for a children's book to be well written. The Hobbit is considered by some to be a children's book and it's a masterpiece and was decades old by the time The Mystery of the Sinister Scarecrow rolled around. It’s still nice to get a work that doesn't talk down to its intended audience and has some good writing.