A Couple of Notes after Shield of Fear

Last week, I ventured a guess at who wrote Danger on the Diamond. I don’t have much of a guess for Shield of Fear. The only clue I can find is the awful motel name: Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell Inn. Such lazy names were featured in a couple of Vincent Buranelli books: the William Tell Hotel in Switzerland and the Montezuma in Mexico City in The Jungle Pyramid and the Australian Arms Hotel in The Firebird Rocket.

Buranelli was a relatively prolific Hardy Boys author. He revised two books, The Mystery of the Flying Express (#20, a book that badly needed revising) and The Flickering Torch Mystery (#22). He also wrote fourteen original Syndicate books, including three in a row (The Bombay Boomerang, Danger on Vampire Trail, and The Masked Monkey). The last book we know he wrote was The Crimson Flame (#77), which was published a mere five years before Shield of Fear. It’s not inconceivable that he would have kept writing books after the Stratemeyer Syndicate sold the series to Simon & Shuster.

Then again, bad motel names are a thin thread to hang this conclusion on, especially given that he only used those names in two of the books we knew he wrote.

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As you may have noticed, I’ve been going through the digests in order — in February, I covered #88 (Tricky Business) through #91 (Shield of Fear). I’m going to continue this pattern, but I don’t have some of the books that are coming up, and some of them I’ve already gone over.

The next books in order are The Shadow Killers (#92) and The Serpent’s Tooth Mystery (#93); you can click on those links to read my recaps. The next book I haven’t recapped is Breakdown in Axeblade (#94), but neither my local library nor I have that book. I’ll skip it and come back to it at a later date.

After that gap comes Danger on the Air (#95), which I’ve obviously covered. For the first Friday in March, then, the plan is for me to cover Wipeout (#96), a title that really needs an exclamation mark at the end.

(And as always, you can find all my summaries so far at this page.)