Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?

Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? was the ninth title in the Choose Your Own Adventure series, authored by the range's creator Edward Packard and first published in 1981. Its premise is exactly what the title implies: millionaire Harlowe Thrombey (president of Thrombey Plastics Company) is scared that someone is out to murder him and hires you (despite the fact the text heavily implies you're still a teenager), but before he can explain things further, he is fatally poisoned, leaving you to interrogate the four suspects -- his wife Jane, nephew Chartwell, niece Angela, and Angela's fiancé Robert.

Inside UFO 54-40

In February 1982, the twelfth Choose Your Own Adventure book, Inside UFO 54-40, was unleashed upon preteens all over the world. Written by Edward Packard, who not only created the CYOA range but arguably the entire genre of interactive fiction (with the originally standalone book Sugarcane Island, written in 1969 but not published until 1976, and later subsumed into the CYOA range as #62 in the series), the book's plot revolves around the search for Ultima, the fabled planet of paradise. And herein lies the book's big secret, which less generous readers may describe with quite a different word.

I CYOA What You Did There

Having been writing this blog for nearly three years now, it is perhaps surprising that this is the first time I've ever written something about the Choose Your Own Adventure series. It was a range that popularised the gamebook genre, to the point that its title is to this day used as a synonym for interactive fiction. Edward Packard, who wrote the first ever title in the series and went on to write nearly a hundred more of them, may very well have invented the idea of the gamebook with Sugarcane Island in 1969 - certainly that book was one of the very first gamebooks ever written. The historical importance of this series cannot be denied. So why has it taken me so long to get round to it?

Well, this series is absolutely fucking massive. There are 184 books in the original series alone, and once you include all the various spin-off series (variously aimed at younger and older readers, intended to be more 'educational' or scarier than the parent series, featuring licensed Disney characters, an Indiana Jones series, a Star Wars series, not to mention the early noughties revival with revised versions of the original books designed to bring them up-to-date) that number swells to well over 300. I devoured adventure gamebooks as a child, and I doubt I got through any more than a small percentage of Choose Your Own Adventure books.

And yet... many of them aren't remarkable by themselves. They generally run to just over 100 sections, there's no game system of any kind (no statistics or inventory to keep track of), and with so many entries in the series - cranked out (largely) monthly for the better part of two decades between 1979 and 1998 - it's hardly surprising that there are a fair few where the story just isn't very interesting, or there is little in the way of any real plot. You can't get anything hugely insightful out of many of the individual entries, yet trying to write a history of the entire series is an impossible task. Perhaps the most memorable feature of the books is the surprisingly gruesome and inventive deaths, and plenty of other people have had a go at archiving the best of those.

So for this post I thought I'd highlight a few of the more notable entries in the series - ones I have fond memories of reading as a child, or are notable for unexpected twists or interesting set-ups.