The Sky Blue Frame (#89)

Logic is a truly wonderful creation of our minds. We manage to construct arguments that support our ideas; we use evidence to support the arguments. Our evidence can be likened to bricks, building our arguments to be strong and withstand the attacks against them. Like the strength of a wall made of bricks, the strength of those arguments is linked to the quality of our evidence and our skill assembling them together.

But it is all too easy to miss the flaws in an argument, somehow not seeing a shoddy or even missing brick. Worse yet, we might grow accustomed to shoddy materials and not even blink when they are used to construct an argument we have heard many times before — or a story we have read many, many times.

I was struck by this early in The Sky Blue Frame. Frank and Joe are hired to put on a mystery weekend at the Sky Blue Inn, and before they can even begin, Iola is grabbed by some thugs, tied up, and tossed in a van while a brick with a warning wrapped around it is hurled at Frank, Joe, and Chet. The van turns out to be Frank and Joe’s, but the readers are still confronted with the idea that Iola was in great danger and could have been hurt or killed.

So how do the teenagers react to this threat? Ah, trick question; they don’t react to it at all. They don’t change their plans or take any action to protect themselves. The note told the boys to stay away from the Sky Blue Inn, but they still plan to go there. They don’t hand over the physical evidence to the police. They don’t notify the Bayport Police Department or the owner of the Sky Blue Inn. They don’t even investigate by themselves. They continue with their mystery weekend planning, and the attack makes Iola even more determined to help Frank and Joe.

What is wrong with these people? What kind of person blithely shrugs off that sort of threat without a response of any sort? Have the ever-present threats presented by Bayport dulled their sense of danger, to the point where anything short of direct bodily harm is ignored?

Well. We may have quantum theory to blame. In another universe — the Casefiles — Iola is dead at this point. Perhaps some awareness of that event has passed between universes, giving Digests Iola either the knowledge that death is not to be feared or a determination to live her life however she sees fit.

So what goes on at a mystery weekend? I don’t know, personally, since I’ve never been to one. What happens at this one is that Frank and Joe stage a robbery of Iola’s cheap (but expensive-looking) necklace, and then — after planting clues that implicate a few of the guests and Chet — hope their fellow guests figure out they were supposed to think Chet was the thief. In other words, a mystery weekend isn’t much different than the usual Hardy Boys mystery: wild accusations, bad investigative technique, and no means with which to gather clues other than breaking and entering and asking uncooperative or bewildered people questions.

This mystery weekend is complicated by a couple of other thefts at the hotel. Even though the Hardys know the area has been subjected to a wave of hotel burglaries, Frank and Joe manage to convince everyone the first theft — a fellow guest’s camera and watch — is part of the mystery weekend. When someone rips off the hotel’s safe, well, they mostly manage to keep people from realizing what’s going on … except the police, who haul Frank and Joe in for questioning when they find burglar’s tools in the boys’ room.

Frank and Joe are shocked. Those tools aren’t theirs! They draw the line at lockpicks, and there’s no evidence they brought theirs to the mystery weekend.

The cops aren’t impressed by Frank and Joe’s abnormal deference to their authority — seriously, the boys don’t tell them to gather evidence or try to direct the investigation at all — nor do they care about the boys’ parentage or their insistence that they were hired to stage a burglary. (This is why you always get a contract when you’re hired to perform semi-illegal acts. If nothing else, this book has taught me that.) “Sometimes the sons of law enforcement officers turn out to be bad apples,” says Det. Culp, although within less than a page he acknowledges their considerable reputation as investigators. Interestingly, Frank and Joe get no apology or admission that mistakes were made from the police when they are cleared.

Frank and Joe are also mocked by Brad, a surly youth who has been razzing the Hardys since the beginning of the weekend. He thinks the Hardys’ situation is “hilarious” (131); earlier in the weekend, he tells the Hardys, “Any idiot can solve a crime” (38). He’s obnoxious, and readers immediately know he will go down one of two character paths: villain or guy who reconciles with the Hardys when he learns they aren’t that bad. Quick — guess which it is! The answer will not surprise you.

Not long after their release, the Hardys enumerate the attempts to scare them away from the Sky Blue Inn: the brick hurled at them, being tailed to the Sky Blue Inn by a mysterious motorcycle, a (harmless) spider in their chocolates, a chemical in Frank’s food that causes his throat to close, and Joe getting knocked out. That last one was kinda funny, because while he was unconscious, someone wrote (“scrawled”) “Get out and go home!” (80) on his t-shirt with a marker. It would have been even better if the attacker had made a rude drawing on his face while he was out.

But when they were listing all the attacks, they forgot two: Iola’s original abduction, and Iola getting knocked out while preparing to take a hot shower. (Only her terrycloth robe saved her from burns. Believe in the amazing protective power of terrycloth!) You know what? I don’t think Frank and Joe value Iola’s safety very much.

Or maybe they skipped over the second attack because it brought up awkward questions. Just before Iola is attacked, Frank and Joe are in her room to check it for “surprises.” When Iola steps into the bathroom, Frank says, “She sure likes a hot shower” (44). Why does Frank know about Iola’s shower preferences? Is this knowledge, in any way, linked to his tepid goodbye to Callie, which involved giving “her arm a reassuring squeeze” (23)?

And this brings up another point, another false brick I have often ignored because I had become too use to its falseness. How likely is it that a teenager would go to a mountain hotel, hours from home, with her or his boyfriend / girlfriend, and not get a lecture? I’m not saying all good parents, or even most parents, would stop their teenage kids from going on the trip, but even with both partners’ brothers along, any sane parent would have to expect some level of hanky-panky (defining hanky-panky how you like, anywhere from “super-duper make out” to “steamy monkey love”). And it’s not like Chet’s sharing a room with his sister: to conceal Chet’s affiliation with the Hardys and make him a less visible suspect in the mystery weekend, Chet is in a separate room from his sister. The potential for a bit of adolescent dalliance is glossed over, of course, because Bayport teens appear to have their hormones removed soon after puberty. It’s for their own good, of course.

Anyway. With things coming down to the wire, Iola gets another threatening note: “Tell your friends to back off — or else!” (111). Suddenly, Iola is frightened by vague rhetoric, even though she admits she doesn’t know what “or else” might mean. (She should be frightened that someone knows Frank and Joe are her friends, not her brothers; Iola and the Hardys had been posing as a family for the mystery weekend.) Frank and Joe claim to be frightened — “We’d be fools if we weren’t,” Frank says — it doesn’t change their behavior at all. The note turns out to be just a bit of set dressing, like the graveyard on the Sky Blue Inn’s grounds that the clerk mentions when they check in; it gives Iola “the creeps” (35) briefly, then it’s never mentioned again.

More serious matters do rear their head. When the Sky Blue Inn’s real owner shows up, Frank and Joe learn the “Mr. Maxwell” who hired them to do the mystery weekend was a fake. When they pursue the fake Maxwell — who was inexplicably hanging around the grounds — they are stopped by the police, who have confined them to the inn’s grounds. This means the plot is the uncommon “fake out” gambit, like in The Masked Monkey, in which the criminals hire the Hardy Boys to investigate their own crime. Usually, they do this to cover themselves — the situation demands they do something, so they hire someone they hope will be incompetent — but there’s something more going on here …

After someone fires a potshot at the brothers, Frank and Joe make their big breakthrough when they realize the last threatening note was typed on the same typewriter the instructions from the fake Maxwell were typed on. Since Brad is the only one they know in the hotel with a typewriter, they break into his room. Brad confronts them there, along with the inn’s clerk, who has a pistol. As it turns out, Brad’s the brains behind the rash of hotel burglaries and the trap the Hardys find themselves in. It’s not the fake-out gambit — it’s the extremely rare revenge trap! Brad wants Frank and Joe sent to jail for his hotel robberies in revenge for Fenton arresting his father, Joe Wingo, who was “the head of a gang of criminals who operated on the East Coast” (144-5).

Joe Wingo … I can’t find any mention of a Joe Wingo in my notes on the first 85 Hardy Boys books or on the Internet, although I did find articles on a Pastor Joe Wingo who pled guilty to stealing millions from a charity he and his wife ran. (The article doesn’t mention Fenton Hardy.) It would have been nice if the writer could have used a name from a previous book, but no — we get a completely new, made-up name. Continuity is something that happens to other series, I suppose.

And we don’t even learn what kind of crimes Joe Wingo was responsible for. Was it something unspeakable, like clown smuggling? Dealing in lucrative but illegal antihistamines? Stealing bridges, melting their iron down, then creating commemorative statues of those very same stolen bridges to sell at a huge profit?

Anyway, Brad’s attempts to “scare” Frank and Joe away from the mystery weekend were attempts to intrigue the brothers, which worked perfectly. Frank cheerfully admits how they were suckered as he punches the clerk into submission. Fortunately for the Hardys (and justice), the bellhop / handyman at the inn was an undercover detective, and he heard Brad’s admission of guilt.

The case is solved, and while Frank and Joe explain to their fellow guests what happened, one of them hauls Chet in for the theft of Iola’s necklace. Everyone laughs at him for solving a (fake) crime that all of them were there to solve. You did what you were supposed to do! You idiot.