The Mystery of the Flaming Footprints

This is a relatively late and inferior entry in the Three Investigators series. The series was created by [a:Robert Arthur|50291|Robert Arthur|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1207672247p2/50291.jpg], a woefully neglected author who did a great deal of work with Alfred Hitchcock; Arthur wrote the first nine and the eleventh book in the series. Unfortunately M.V. Carey was no Robert Arthur!

I recently read the book to my son. We've read many of the books in the series together. In this one, there were several ways in which the book simply didn't work. Oh, Carey included the usual iconic elements of the series; Jupiter Jones' family, and the hidden Headquarters (a trailer buried under a pile of junk), and Pete, and Bob. But there are show more several false notes.

One that was particularly annoying was the use of Jupiter's name. Arthur usually referred to him as "Jupiter" or "Jupiter Jones". Once in a while his fellow Investigators, Pete or Bob, would refer to him as "Jupe". But in this book, he is almost always called "Jupe" - not just by other people, but by the narrator. I'm not that picky, but seeing "Jupe" repeated over and over in paragraph after paragraph just got weird! It started to become a meaningless sound - you know how some words get when you say them over and over? I ended up auto-correcting it to "Jupiter" when I read it aloud, except when it was said by Pete or Bob.

The mystery itself was just...okay. Nothing particularly clever or memorable about it. If anything, the resolution was rather anticlimactic. I won't bother to give it away, though.

But another thing that was quite irritating was a dramatic change in a long-standing supporting character, Police Chief Reynolds. In the early books in the series he was supportive and friendly to the Three Investigators, even going so far as to give them official cards identifying them as Junior Deputies or something like that. In Flaming Footprints, he has been completely changed. He's sneering, abusive, hostile, and sarcastic. The change was so extreme that my son remarked on it. Personally, I found the recasting of Chief Reynolds as a stereotypical negative adult authority figure so irksome that I couldn't resist editorializing: "'What do you want now, Jones?' snarled Chief Reynolds, while busily stomping on a cute kitten and simultaneously farting on a helpless old lady."

My son is more generous and/or uncritical than I am. He gave the book 4.5 stars. I feel I'm being generous in giving it three.

Oh, as always I should note that there are probably two different versions of the text extant. Older versions feature the character of Alfred Hitchcock. For legal reasons newer editions have been rewritten to replace Hitchcock with a lame-ass ersatz version. If you decide to pick this one up, try to go for an older edition. But if you're new to the series, I strongly recommend starting with the original nine books by Robert A. Arthur. show less

This one had some promising elements, such as a mysterious old potter who goes missing and the convenient arrival of his grown daughter and her teenage son, who is just the right age to throw his lot in with Jupe and the boys to solve the mystery. That's all fine, but the answer to the mystery lies in yet another fictional Eastern European country (this is at least the third, I think, in the first 15 books of the series, no doubt reflecting the Cold War era in which they were written). The biggest irritation, however, was that the boys never actually solve the mystery of the flaming footprints! I mean, they find out who was doing it but the extreme handwaving around the explanation of how they were created was supremely unsatisfying. show more "It's chemicals!" just isn't the bingo the author seems to think it should be. show less

The Three Investigators search for a missing local artist. Flaming footprints are involved, and as nearly always, the mystery turns out to involve some lost or hidden treasure, in this case the jeweled crown of a small European country. I really remember nothing else of the plot, which is fine. They are nearly all interchangeable, and equally satisfying to my sense of nostalgia for a series I enjoyed immensely as a boy.

THE MYSTERY OF THE FLAMING FOOTPRINTS(1971)
I’m not sure why I love this story so much. Perhaps it’s the inclusion of so many interesting new characters, or the way the story keeps building up, but this one has so much going on. A slightly political story, I keep thinking Lynds wrote this one, although it was in fact a Carey yarn...

A slower read as the mystery was weighted down with too much talk of fictional history -- the country of Lapathia.

A great and eas-to-read book.

I loved this series when I was a child, and am looking forward to reading them sometime soon with my son.