For his next novel Bellairs jumped from Dial Publishers to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, who released The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn in 1978. This adventure was the debut of a new set of characters including Anthony Monday, a more slightly more older and more mature character than Lewis, and elderly librarian Myra Eells. Based in the rural Minnesota community of Hoosac, country familiar from Bellairs' days in Winona, the book was a rare departure in that the author used no supernatural elements.
"Treasure was John's attempt at a Hardy Boys kind of book," says Brad Strickland. "I think he sort of planned a faux Gothic series: apparently supernatural mysteries would turn out to have mundane explanations but given his interests and reading, perhaps inevitably they became true Gothics as he went along."
The story, of Anthony and Miss Eells slowly unraveling the mysterious puzzles of the philanthropist title character, would later be adapted for television as The Clue According to Sherlock Holmes. The House with a Clock in its Walls also got the television treatment, as one of the three books highlighted in the Vincent Price-hosted anthology, Once Upon a Midnight Scary, airing in 1979.
Bellairs remained unpublished for the next five years, as domestic issues became the main concern and he fell into a writers block period about the time he and Priscilla separated. While writing became somewhat difficult, perhaps it eventually became therapeutic for him since he would go on to have two books published in 1983, two in 1984, and one each in 1985 and 1986. Now earning enough money to live off of with his writing, his new-found parade of publishing was kicked-off with his return to Dial and the release of 1983's The Curse of the Blue Figurine, the first book in the popular and long-running Johnny Dixon series.
Just as John's boyhood town of Marshall was transmogrified into New Zebedee, John's adoptive New England became the setting for his latest adventures. Dixon is similar to his Michigan-based counterpart Lewis Barnavelt, left to live with older relatives (this time his grandparents) when his mother dies of cancer and his father is called to serve in the Korean War.
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Throughout the series, the young, shy protagonist is paired up in true Bellairs fashion with easily one of the author's most popular figures, the kind but crotchety Professor Roderick Childermass. Loud, self-opinionated, and set in his ways – arguably like his creator – the professor is also a kindly soul, who befriends Johnny, eventually helping him overcome a terrible curse involving a former priest at the local church.
Interestingly, Bellairs reintroduced some of his Catholic upbringing into the Dixon series including nefarious Father Baart and St. Michael's Church, both of which were modeled or influenced in creation by Marshall's St. Mary's and the much-respected Father Peter Baart. While the Barnavelt and Monday series casually referenced Lewis' role as an altar boy and the associated Latin prayers or some lesser-known saints, Johnny attends a parochial school taught by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and interacts regularly with the priest, Father Thomas Higgins, who goes on to become another long-running and popular character in the series.
In the sequel, The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt (1983), Byron "Fergie" Ferguson was introduced as a friend closer to Johnny's age who befriends him while at Boy Scout camp as they come uncomfortably close to a millionaire's lost will.
