The Hypersonic Secret (#135)

Plot: When the plane flown by the father of Frank and Joe’s new friend, Jamal Hawkins, disappears from radar, the brothers investigate.

I make fun of most of the Hardy Boys books I write about. The Hypersonic Secret is just as worthy of mockery as any, but instead, I want to talk about something else. Frank and Joe induct a new friend into their circle in Hypersonic, which is noteworthy on two levels: one, Frank and Joe haven’t made any new friends since The Tower Treasure, and two, the friend in question — Jamal Hawkins — is black.

African-American characters and black characters of other nationalities are not new to the Hardy Boys series; in particular, William Ellis made an impression on Joe in The Mysterious Caravan, and Peter Walker, a classmate and basketball teammate, served as Frank and Joe’s client in The Voodoo Plot. (If you want to extend this to all characters of color, Jim Foy went into a business partnership with Frank, Joe, and the other chums in The Mystery of the Chinese Junk, and he shared in a sizeable reward with them.) But because of the series’ resistance toward new characters, none of these characters have stuck. They were all one-and-done characters.

Although Hypersonic gives no indication Jamal will be a recurring character, he actually does appear in several other mysteries I’ve recapped on this site: Slam Dunk Sabotage, Danger in the Extreme, The Spy That Never Lies, Speed Times Five, In Plane Sight. And who knows? I haven’t read all the digests. He might have appeared in even more books. No matter how many more books he’s been in, though, those few books represent a step forward, acknowledging the world has changed since the series started in 1927. At this rate, Frank and Joe will meet their first gay person by the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

A new character should ideally have a unique role to give that character an excuse to appear in more books. Jamal’s a pilot, and since his father owns a plane service, he can provide Frank and Joe access to planes. Since the Hardy family owns a plane and has a pilot on call, that’s not the best role for a new chum — unless Simon & Schuster is trying to change the status quo to make Frank and Joe seem less privileged. Whether Frank and Joe still have consistent access to a plane is not made clear in Hypersonic; Frank and Joe seem to have piloting skills, although not necessarily pilots’ licenses, and no mention is made of the family plane or Jack Wayne. Jamal does seem to be Frank and Joe’s superior in the cockpit.

Carving that niche from something Frank and Joe could previously do themselves is not the best way to endear him to the reader. There might be something to be gained from Jamal not being from Bayport — Frank and Joe seek him out after he and his high school beat Bayport in football — but the importance of Jamal’s outsider status isn’t clear in Hypersonic either.

If only the author had concentrated on Jamal more — or even the mystery around Bayport. After Jamal’s father’s plane goes down, Mr. Hawkins is missing, and Frank, Joe, and Jamal investigate around Bayport for suspects to the plane’s malfunction. Logically, finding Mr. Hawkins should be the climax of the book. Instead, it’s just another plot point, one that occurs less than halfway through the story. After that, the plot is done with the Hardys’ new friend, and Frank and Joe get to be privileged young white guys again — although this time they get their special treatment because they’re friends of Jamal, who is the son of a real cool ex-USAF guy. They get flown across the country in F-16s, Joe doesn’t get beaten to the ground and arrested when he gets too close to top-secret materials at Palmdale Air Force Base, and they even get to watch a hypersonic jet at Dreamland.

Dreamland! The military base also known as Groom Lake and Area 51! Good grief.

In the second half of the book, the author gets too wrapped up in flying hither and yon, putting Frank and Joe into those F-16s and having them fly around the American southwest with the villain and Jamal. If Jamal’s role was an attempt to make the boys’ experience more relateable, it doesn’t work.

I really like that Hypersonic picks up where the previous book leaves off — Cross-Country Crime is set during Thanksgiving, and Hypersonic takes place in December. However, the book tries to drive home a joke about Frank and Joe not having bought Aunt Gertrude a Christmas gift, but there’s no payoff — no joke about something being Gertrude’s real gift or Christmas arrive without the boys finding a present. Maybe that happens in the next book?

I suppose I’ll find out next time.