Plot: A new training center for combat Olympic sports opens in Bayport, and if you’ve read a Hardy Boys story, you know that means accidents are going to happen, and Frank and Joe will investigate.
“Borrowing” from the past: Combat sports, baby! Joe takes part in a judo exhibition, and Frank experiences both archery and the biathalon (skiing and target shooting). In the past, Joe has displayed judo experience in four different books, most recently in The Jungle Pyramid (#56, 1977). Frank has been trained in the proper use of firearms by his father — as has Joe — and killed five wolves with a pistol in Hunting for Hidden Gold (#5). (Joe’s the better target shooter, having won a contest in #29, The Secret of the Lost Tunnel.) His skiing ability was on display in The Cabin Island Mystery (#8), The Yellow Feather Mystery (#33), and Cave-In! (#78). Oddly, neither Hardy has shown any inclination toward archery, with Chet being the best archer of the group (selected to represent Bayport in a state archery competition in #61, The Pentagon Spy.) The training center also offers fencing, which both boys studied intensely in The Clue of the Broken Blade (#21).
Just what Bayport needs: Bayport gets the new Olympic Combat-Sports Training Facility, which trains young people how to excel in inflicting possibly lethal damage on one another. Given Bayport’s high crime rate, that seems unwise. Just think: it’s like a thug training center, in which all the washouts can be hired by local gangs for muscle!
Hospitals? Who needs hospitals?: Both Joe and Iola are hospitalized — Joe after being stabbed by a sharpened fencing rapier and Iola after experiencing a severe electric shock. Hospital stays are rare for the Hardys, despite the scores of concussions they’ve experienced over the years. As far as I can tell, Frank has never been hospitalized during a mystery, with Joe being sent to the hospital for “shock” after finding himself in a tailor’s shop at the same time it was exploding in The Secret Warning (#17). Iola’s injury is extremely unusual (except in the Hardy Boys Casefiles, in which she blew up real good in the first book). She’s only been knocked out once, which, around the Hardys, should qualify her for some kind of award. Well, it would, except Callie’s never been hurt. That is nothing short of astonishing, and perhaps is a sign she is Unbreakable.
Fine upstanding citizens, those Hardys: Trying to find out who is causing all the accidents at the training center, the Hardys wander into one private office and break into two more. I know Frank and Joe aren’t agents of the government and so aren’t bound by the Bill of Rights, but geez, haven’t they ever heard of breaking and entering, or is being accused of that something that happens to other people?
Opinions: Training for Trouble is an atypically violent Hardy Boys book, with Joe and Iola ending up in the hospital, Joe even requiring stitches. One might expect that sort of result when the criminals are trained in judo, fencing, and archery, but if you do expect that, you haven’t been reading the Hardy Boys for very long. I expect nothing worse than Frank and Joe getting knocked out, even if they were investigating the Homicidal Gun Collector Convention and Target Shooting Championship.
Evidently, Laura expects the same thing, because she genuinely gets worked up when Joe is hospitalized. For some reason, Laura wasn’t allowed to show much emotion during the, oh, I don’t know, Cold War. Perhaps to keep herself numb from the constant threat of nuclear war, she seemed as if she were heavily dosed with Valium from 1946-1990, and therefore didn’t have much emotion to spare when her husband and sons went out to catch violent felons. I can imagine her home, alone, humming to herself quietly as she picked out a dress just in case she had to go to the funeral of a loved one.
We’re invited to feel OK that the woman who stabs Joe (albeit accidentally) skates on assault and that the police are going easy the kid who caused several severe accidents because he turned himself in. (That he’s a juvie pressured by his father and coach should get him the easy treatment.) Perhaps the Hardys are struggling with the purpose of the criminal justice system, whether it should be to rehabilitate or to punish. Or perhaps they think that incarceration of any kind is only for mature adults, not people their age. Go to jail, old man!
Grade: B-. Really would have fit better as a Casefile.
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