The Secret of the Martian Moons

First published in 1955, you know this book is going to be fairly crude in its depiction of Mars. Now that we've landed probes on the Red Planet we know quite a bit more than was known at that time. But that's okay because Wollheim suggests right at the beginning that his description may be wrong. As he says "..whether Mars is as I have described it, is something that cannot be answered until the day that either the martians land on Earth or we go there. And I believe one of these events will surely come to pass within the next hundred years." So we have about 40 more years to see if he's right.

Where did the original Martians go? And who is interfering with our explorations of Mars? This is the one of the "Secret of" stories that holds together the best and presents a more cohesive, and believable, plot.