Hector Sebastian

After the death of Alfred Hitchcock in real life, Random House apparently decided that they could not continue maintaining the character of Alfred Hitchcock in the Three Investigators series in the United States.   More than likely, this was a financial consideration, since it's been rumored that Hitchcock (and subsequently his estate) received a substantial portion of the profits from The Three Investigators sereis.  Therefore, they created the fictitious character of Hector Sebastian, beginning with "Scar Faced Beggar." Originally, Sebastian was a suspect in the case, but the boys eventually solved the case and asked Sebastian to take over the mentoring role that Alfred Hitchcock had played previously.

Sebastian is a former detective but was not written in the books with the same depth of character as Alfred Hitchcock. Obviously, Sebastian was younger and was written with a more contemporary feel, which changed the atmosphere of the whole series. When Random House revised the entire U. S. version of the series to remove all vestiges of Alfred Hitchcock, they introduced Hector Sebastian in "Stuttering Parrot," but they did not rewrite "Scar Faced Beggar" and "Blazing Cliffs," both of which refer to Alfred Hitchcock and his introductions of their previous cases.

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