The Three Investigators

#23 The Mystery of the Invisible Dog by M. V. Carey, 1975.

Shortly after Christmas, a frightened man, Fenton Prentiss, calls the Three Investigators to his apartment to help him. Mr. Prentiss is an elderly art collector, and he says that he is being haunted. Things in his apartment get moved around when he’s not there, and he can tell that someone has been reading the mail in his desk. Sometimes, he even sees a shadowy figure when he is home, although he’s never gotten a good look at it before it disappears. He swears that it can’t be another person because he’s the only one who has a key to his apartment. He is also sure that there are no secret passages in his apartment building and that there’s no way for any living person to enter his apartment without being seen by someone. Mr. Prentiss could just be imagining the haunting, but Jupiter is intrigued, and if the boys don’t have a mystery to work on during the holidays, they know that Jupiter’s aunt will just assign them a bunch of chores.

They tell Mr. Prentiss that they need to talk over the assignment together before they accept his job, but Jupiter’s mind is made up when he also sees a shadowy figure that he initially mistakes for Pete just before they leave the apartment. However, Pete is not in the room where Jupiter saw the shadow. Did Jupiter just see Mr. Prentiss’s mysterious ghost?

When the boys get outside the apartment, they hear a loud bang and running feet and see a man in a ski mask running away. Pete tries to follow, and the police stop him, thinking that he might have something to do with a burglary that has just taken place. Fortunately, Mr. Prentiss speaks up for Pete, saying that the boys only just left his apartment and couldn’t have anything to do with what the police are talking about. The police think that the suspect who ran away could have gone into a nearby church, but he seems to have vanished. Mr. Earl, the janitor and caretaker of the church swears that he was in the church the whole time and no one came in, although the housekeeper at the rectory, Mrs. O’Riley, says that Mr. Earl is practically deaf and wouldn’t have heard anybody.

The place that was burgled turns out to belong to a deceased artist friend of Mr. Prentiss. His friend’s death is part of the reason why Mr. Prentiss is so on edge because it was very upsetting to him. The artist’s brother, Charles, hadn’t finished clearing out his brother’s house when it was robbed. He tells the boys that his brother was a sculptor, and his best piece was based on a legend of a ghostly, demonic hound from Eastern Europe. This is the sculpture that was stolen. It’s a bitter blow to Mr. Prentiss because the artist made this sculpture especially for him.

Jupiter believes Mr. Prentiss that someone has been sneaking into his apartment, so he sets a trap that will cause the intruder’s hands to be stained. Mr. Prentiss leaves for a while with the boys, and when they return, his nosy landlady’s hands are stained, indicating that she has been the intruder. Mr. Prentiss confronts her, and she admits that she had a spare key made for his door. The landlady has a long-term habit of spying on her tenants. Mr. Prentiss confiscates her spare key and thinks that his problem is over, but really, it’s just beginning.

Having seen the shadow in Mr. Prentiss’s apartment himself, Jupiter knows that the mysterious shadowy figure was not the landlady. For Jupiter to have mistaken the shadowy figure for Pete, he knows that the person is male and of similar size to Pete. Jupiter is not surprised when Mr. Prentiss calls them up to say that he’s seen the shadow again. The landlady was undoubtedly snooping, but there must also be a second intruder. At first, Jupiter thinks that he knows who the second intruder must be because there is another person in the apartment building who vaguely resembles Pete and who also seems to know about things that Mr. Prentiss owns when he’s supposedly never been in Mr. Prentiss’s apartment before. However, this person is accounted for when the intruder makes another appearance. Jupiter investigates the nearby church when he sees a light there, and he has a frightening encounter with a figure that Mrs. O’Reilly believes is the ghost of the former pastor.

Mr. Prentiss soon gets a ransom demand from the person who stole the sculpture. Then, strange misfortunes start to befall Mr. Prentiss’s neighbors. Some of these misfortunes look like accidents while others are direct attacks. Someone is apparently attacked by the thief, someone else is poisoned, someone’s apartment catches fire, and someone else’s car is sabotaged, and people are ending up in the hospital. It seems like someone who is close to these people is responsible for sneaking around Mr. Prentiss’s apartment, stealing the valuable sculpture, and harming the neighbors, but who is doing these things and why?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

I enjoyed this mystery because it has many different facets. First, there is a wonderful cast of eccentric characters. All of Mr. Prentiss’s neighbors/suspects are eccentrics. There’s the nosy, sneaking landlady and a guy who takes care of stray cats. Mrs. O’Reilly at the church believes that the church is haunted by the ghost of a former pastor, adding another haunting figure to the mystery. Another resident of the apartment house works nights at the local market and is saving up money so he can go to India and find a guru to help teach him the secrets to life. His father wanted him to be a dentist, but instead, he wants to study meditation so he can see through life’s illusions and be truly awake, achieving the ultimate level of consciousness. It’s ironic because he’s so tired from working nights that he often falls asleep while meditating. The mystery somewhat resembles a classic old dark house mystery in the sense that it takes place in a contained area with a very definite set of suspects who are also either victims or potential victims.

Second, I enjoyed the layers of the mystery. We have a mysterious intruder (or intruders), the theft of a valuable sculpture, a possible haunted church, and a series of mysterious accidents or attacks on residents of the building. Are these things all connected or are some of them unconnected incidents that confuse the issue? Readers have the feeling that there are at least some connections, but it’s not clear for most of the story what the connections are and who’s responsible for what. On the one hand, books with several different mysterious happenings can feel a little cluttered and confusing to readers, but on the other, figuring out which of these incidents are connected to the main issues provide clues to the identity of the real villain.

There is a surprising supernatural element to the story that the Three Investigators discover when they consult a parapsychologist at a university. There was a strong interest in parapsychology during the 1970s and 1980s, which is why the subject of psychic abilities and people who study it appears in children’s books and tv shows around this time period. (Spoiler) It seems that the guy who is studying meditation has some psychic ability, and the things he experiences while meditating aren’t just him falling asleep and dreaming, although it seems like that at first. Because he really wants to get away from his boring life and dead end job when he meditates, he’s actually been using a kind of astral projection without being fully aware that’s what he’s doing. The characters realize this because he knows things that he shouldn’t really have any way of knowing from places where he shouldn’t have been and how he can sometimes appear in certain places when he’s actually somewhere else. Some of the strange things that people see around the apartment building at due to his astral projection, possibly including the ghost in the church, although part of that is left unclear at the end. However, there is a real thief and villain in the story who is unrelated to the psychic phenomena, and incidents that harm people in the building are related to the thief’s attempts to keep people away from the hiding place of the stolen sculpture. I thought both the psychic angle and the solution to the theft were clever, and I kept guessing all the way through the book who was responsible for what.