The Secret of Terror Castle (Classic Three Investigators)

Robert Arthur was born on November 10, 1909, on the island of Corregidor, where his father was serving as an officer in the United States Army. For the first two years of his college career, he attended William and Mary College. He then transferred to the University of Michigan, from which he received a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Journalism.In 1931, he moved to New York City where he wrote mysteries, fantasies, and horror stories for pulp magazines throughout the 1930s. His work from those years appeared in Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Detective Fiction Weekly, Argosy Weekly, Detective Story Magazine, Collier's, Bluebook, and Black Mask, among many other magazines.Later, with David Kogan, he co-wrote and produced a radio show called The Mysterious Traveler that aired on the Mutual Broadcasting System between 1944 and 1952 and that won an Edgar Award for Best Radio Drama from The Mystery Writers of America in 1953.In 1959, Arthur moved to Hollywood where he worked in television, writing scripts for The Twilight Zone and working as a story editor, show runner, and scriptwriter for Alfred Hitchcock's TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He also started to ghost-edit a series of "Alfred Hitchcock" anthologies for adults and children.In 1963, he left Hollywood and moved to Cape May, New Jersey, where he created a mystery book series for young people. The Secret of Terror Castle and The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot were published in 1964 by Random House, and Arthur wrote eight more Three Investigators novels before his early death in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 2, 1969.After his death, his publisher arranged for other writers to continue writing stories based on his characters and setting. Three Investigators books were published in Australia, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand, Denmark, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, and Slovakia, as well as in France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and throughout the Spanish-speaking world.By the time the last English-language-original Three Investigators book was published in the late 1980s, there were forty-three titles, some of which had been translated into over twenty languages. Robert Arthur's own ten novels are being reissued in English on the 60th anniversary of the first publication of The Secret of Terror Castle.

Elizabeth Arthur is the author of five literary novels (Beyond the Mountain, Bad Guys, Binding Spell, Antarctic Navigation, and Bring Deeps) and two memoirs (Island Sojourn and Looking for the Klondike Stone.) Her books have been published by Harper and Row, Doubleday, Knopf, and Bloomsbury U.K. She has received fellowships and grants from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the Vermont Council on the Arts, the Ossabaw Island Project, and the Indiana Arts Commission. She twice received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and was the first novelist ever given an Antarctic Artists and Writers Operational Support Grant from the National Science Foundation. Her novel Antarctic Navigation was chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book.

Steven Bauer is the author of three books for young people, the young adult fantasy Satyrday, the middle grade novel A Cat of a Different Color, and The Strange and Wonderful Tale of Robert McDoodle, a picture book in verse. Bauer's writing has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He has also been given grants and awards from Prairie Schooner, the Ossabaw Island Project, the Massachusetts Arts Council, and the Indiana Arts Commission.