- Title: The Mystery of the Vanishing Treasure
- wiki: link
Way Back Wednesday takes us back to a mystery involving the Three Investigators whose mantra of “We Investigate Everything” leads them into a pair of cases involving a museum robbery in broad daylight and an elderly woman being tormented by gnomes. The museum robbery starts off the Three Investigators story as a large jeweled golden belt disappears, but that crime is put on hold for much of the book as Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews instead investigate the odd appearance of gnomes up to nefarious purposes scaring an elderly woman, while hiding their true purposes for tunneling under her home, which is brought to the trio by their old friend and mentor Hector Sebastian (Alfred Hitchcock in the original printing).
Both mysteries will end up having a common thread tying them together, with the gnome mystery taking up the larger chunk of the fifth mystery of the Three Investigators series. Jupiter, the leader of the group, is too late with his initial deductions leading to two of our three heroes being held by a group of bank robbers who reveal the truth about the gnomes (while making use some politically-incorrect language some may have trouble with today). However, the First Investigator more than makes up for this mistake by finding the missing museum piece (which never left the scene of the crime) and using it to lure the criminals into a trap in the Jones Salvage Yard.
The Three Investigators series, spanning over two decades written by multiple authors, featured a trio of teenage detectives in the deductive Jupiter Jones, the athletic Pete Crenshaw, and the knowledgeable Bob Andrews. Like the original Scooby-Doo TV-series, most of the adventures had a supernatural vibe involving ghosts, murmuring mummies, talking skulls, ghosts, haunted houses, and odd events, but each mystery turned out to have a logical human rationale behind it which the intrepid trio ultimately uncovered. Located in the fictional town of Rocky Beach, California, the Three Investigators worked out of a hidden base buried in the junkyard of Jupiter’s Uncle Titus solving 43 cases before their run came to an end.