Category: Drei Fragezeichen

The Drei ??? Fragezeichen (Three Investigators) is an American juvenile detective book series first published as “Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators”.

The original series was published from 1964 to 1987 and comprised 43 books. Books number 1 to 9 and 11 were written by the creator, Robert Arthur, who also specified ideas for a few of the other stories. Arthur had been an editor for several book collections attributed to Alfred Hitchcock.

For the original series, the specific ages of the investigators were never revealed, but contextual information indicates that they were likely 13 or 14 years old.

The investigators were typically introduced to a mystery by a client or by finding something unusual accidentally in the scrapyard of Jupiter’s Uncle Titus Jones and Aunt Mathilda, who had a salvage business.

While the American authors’ novels in the series have been published there, German writers have added more, contributing about six new novels per year, with the count being 179 books during 2014. Taped radio dramas (Hörspiele) of the novels have been especially popular in Germany with most of them having been certified Gold or Platinum by the German Federal Association of Music Industry. In total, the radio dramas have sold more than 45 million copies and the books about 16 million copies in Germany (2013).

A study conducted by the series’ publisher Europa suggests that nowadays, most fans are between 20 and 40 years of age.