The Chase for the Mystery Twister (#149)

The Hardy Boys mysteries are usually set in fictional places — Bayport is fictional, the small towns around Bayport are fictional, and the small towns across the world the Hardys wend their way to are fictional. They do spend time in real places, of course; New York has always been a staple of Hardy Boys crimesolving. But mostly the Hardys are not visible from the world outside your window.

For many years, I rarely thought about this practice, but lately it has been bothering me. Bayport and its fictional environs are fine, I’ve decided: The milieu created for the absurdly powerful crimefighting family could hardly be mixed up with the real world. But when they wander into some fictional town in an identifiable part of the real world, it feels strange. The Hardy Boys books aren’t the most subtle and incisive observers of humanity, and these fictional places give leave to the authors to abandon reality and make somewhere real into something unreal, where stereotypes and bizarre characterizations dominate.

Take, for instance, Lone Wolf, Okla., where most of The Chase for the Mystery Twister takes place. Allegedly, all these things are true about Lone Wolf:

• It is large enough that a television station is located in the town.
  
• The TV station thinks its audience is learned enough but also bored enough to care about atypical tornado debris patterns.
  
• It is small enough that the town’s sheriff also holds a full-time job as a barber.
  
• It is large enough that people remark about how long it takes to get from one side of the town to the other.
  
• It is small enough that there is only one motel in a 25-mile radius of Wolf Gap.
  
• It is the self-declared Tornado Capital of the World, even though it is part of “Twister Alley,” rather than “Tornado Alley.” This title seems to bring no tourism to the town, as evidenced by the one motel.
  
• The air is so clear and the land so flat that vehicles can not only be seen more than a mile away (and their relative size distinguished), they can be seen despite the lessened visibility created by storms and tornados.
  
• Somehow a Hispanic man who introduces himself to newcomers with a hearty “Buenos dias” has been elected sheriff in the largely white community in rural Oklahoma.
  
• The early spring corn in Lone Wolf is tall enough to block Joe’s view of a thresher, despite corn being barely shoe-top level until some time in May in most of the Northern Hemisphere.
  
• Joe is able to practice bilocation, being at a bank and a barnraising at the same time.

The most amazing fact about Lone Wolf, though, is that it’s a real place. Or at least the Lone Wolf in Mystery Twister is based on a real place — the 500 people who lived in the real Lone Wolf in 2000, two years after Mystery Twister was published, wouldn’t have been able to support the two rival insurance agents / scamsters that are at the heart of the book, let alone have a television station or a sheriff.

(I was also shocked to learn that the National Severe Storm Laboratory is a real thing. I mean, National Severe Storms Laboratory just sounds fake. But no, it’s a real part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.)

The real Lone Wolf also presumably doesn’t expose homoerotic urges like this book suggests. When Joe grabs Phil with his “muscular arms,” “Joe knew there was no time to be delicate”; there’s also mention of Phil being “roughly yanked” and of putting body parts in hole (54). The scene is supposed to show Joe rescuing Phil from a fire, but you have to read between the lines. I think Joe is carrying Phil to the fire … in his pants. Later, when an attacker pins Joe against the dirt, words like “wriggled,” “bucked,” “tried every move he knew” and “got a hold of the man’s hair” are used (88). Sure, it’s supposed to be a fight, but it seems ... charged, you know? By the time Phil urges, “Get it up, Joe!” (127), I was blushing at the explicitness.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. Lone Wolf is a place and a state of mind. What is The Chase for the Mystery Twister?

****

It’s a bad book, that’s what it is.

I’m not going to suggest an editor slid a worn-out VHS copy of Twister to this book’s Dixon, said “Go wild,” and then belched instead of giving the author an outline — heavens no. But if you’d like to make a little bet on the matter without letting the authorities know, then you know how to contact me.

During Spring Break, Frank and Joe fly to Lone Wolf — fly commercial, mind you, like peasants — to meet up with Phil Cohen. What’s technophile Phil, who was complaining about going out in the cold in the previous mystery, doing in BFE Oklahoma? Why, he’s working for a team of stormchasers, a pursuit he has never showed any interest in before. Phil has been in Oklahoma for a while, much longer than a mere spring break internship would allow — has he already graduated high school, or are his grades good enough that he doesn’t have to show up for classes?

Phil and the other stormchasers work for Lemar Jansen, who apparently doesn’t have a doctorate in meteorology or anything else (everyone calls him “Mr. Jansen”). His team is opposed by Greg Glover, a former colleague who has his own team. Glover’s team has corporate sponsorship, but Janson’s doesn’t because he “doesn’t want anyone pressuring him or telling him what to do” (109). This raises questions: What kind of businesses sponsor stormchasers? What do they get out of the deal? What do they pressure stormchasers into doing? And why — why sponsor people who drive after tornados?

No — asking “why” never gets anyone anything but a headache. We’ll press on.

(NOTE: I apologize for not knowing the evil rival tornado chasing team comes from the movie Twister, which Mystery Twister is obviously based on. I should have done the research, but I thought Twister was an excuse to watch wind destroy buildings and pick up cattle and didn't bother with a “plot.”)

Jansen and Glover’s teams are fascinated by a house that a tornado has leveled near Lone Wolf; the debris left by the tornado has been strewn in an atypical pattern. Jansen and Glover have seen this anomaly once before, but like the previous time, they find no clues as to what caused the strange pattern — all the local weather radars were jammed, and evidently NOAA has no interest at aiming its weather satellites at a probable tornado event. Poking around the house’s wreckage, Joe finds a piece of the owner’s “Ming vase” (35), but the shard is stamped “Occupied Japan” (40). Bayport’s education system must be lacking severely if Joe thinks a vase labeled “Occupied Japan” could be a genuine Ming.

Anyway, Frank, Joe, and Phil find other clues that the homeowner was defrauding his insurer, which is poised to pay out more than a million dollars, although the homeowner’s insurance agent doesn’t seem too concerned. At the same time, Lone Wolf’s other insurance agent disappears, causing suspicion to fall on the Cherokee grandfather of the absurdly named Snowden Parlette. While investigating the fraud and disappearance, Joe pressures Phil into breaking into every place with a locked door. Frank performs a Buster Keaton impersonation at a barnraising, then Joe has his sexually charged fight before fleeing from a thresher that corners like a rally car. (Joe ends up hiding under a tractor rather than climbing over or through the tractor. What a farm noob!) When the man with the destroyed Ming vase shows up with the sheriff in tow, accusing the brothers of “slander and threatening him in public” (90), Frank and Joe are nice enough to not point out that slander is a civil crime, outside of the purview of a sheriff.

A videotape of the tornado that left the weird debris patterns — dubbed the “mystery twister” by Frank — shows up without provenance or credit; Frank and Phil debunk the video after Frank steals it from Glover. While Frank is realizing the homeowner and his insurance agent are colluding on their scam, Joe gets Phil into trouble by breaking into the villains’ semi; Phil is knocked out, and when yelling for help while the truck is roaring down the highway predictably fails, Joe manages to knock down the rear door with a “huge” tractor (118). (If you think a huge tractor will fit in a semi-trailer, you too are a farm noob, sadly uninformed about tractor sizes.) The tractor is part of the fraudsters’ insti-tornado kit, which they used to knock down the house with the weird debris pattern; I think the amount of damage the kit would have to pull off in a short time is only a little more believable than a supervillain keeping his lair secret when it has been constructed by a crew of hundreds.

Even with the tractor, Joe can’t get the door down until the semi is going over a cliff; Phil and Joe implausibly jump free of the trailer and tread water in the quarry pit until they are rescued hours later. In the last ten pages, the boys are chased by an F5 tornado on the way home, capture the fraudsters, prove the missing insurance agent was in on the scam, exonerate their friend’s grandfather, and recover most of the money stolen by both corrupt insurance agents. Also in the last ten pages: Joe runs at a monster truck that is driving toward him, leaps on its hood, and subdues the truck’s driver, so it’s pretty clear the Dixon just threw up his hands, said “Screw it,” and crammed everything he needed to into the last few pages without regard for pacing or logic.

It's a poor ending, but then again, it’s a poor book.