Cast of Criminals (#97)

According to my records, I read Cast of Criminals in 2003. I don’t remember the book at all, although I don’t know why. It’s a decent enough mystery, and like many of my favorite Hardy Boys stories, it’s set in Bayport. It also touches on an issue I’ve written about before: namely, that Frank and Joe are awful friends to Chet.

In Cast of Criminals, Chet is acting in Homecoming Nightmare, a play from the ‘50s that the Bayport Players are putting on. (It sounds more like an ‘80s horror movie than a play from the ‘50, although it amuses me to think of Edward Albee or Tennessee Williams writing Homecoming Nightmare. In any event, the plot is more of a slasher movie than Broadway drama.) Being the male lead in Nightmare seems like just another new hobby for Chet. But Joe undercuts him immediately; when Chet has trouble learning his lines, the director asks Frank and Joe whether he’ll be able learn them. “Eventually,” Joe says. “It just takes him a little longer to learn things. He didn’t walk until he was seven” (5).

Everybody laughs. I don’t think making Chet sound developmentally disabled is funny, but eh, people laugh about that if it’s in the right spirit. Later, Joe makes another joke about Chet being the kind of guy who’d show up to pick up a homecoming date shirtless, which gets another round of yuks. But when Iola jokes about Chet — her brother — suddenly it’s not OK. “You’re giving Chet a pretty hard time,” Joe says, and Iola says it’s because Chet doesn’t care about acting. He only wanted to be part of the play because Frank and Joe were. Frank counters that she’s mad at Chet for telling the director he knows what goes “though a killer’s mind because he had a kid sister” (15).

Everybody laughs. Maybe it’s something in the delivery I’m not getting. Some people, like me, can’t tell a joke. Some people can make reading the telephone book funny. And some comics are like licorice: either you love them or you hate them. There’s no middle ground. I think that’s where Frank and Joe fall. I don’t think they’re funny, but the writers (and possibly editors) and characters do.

Whether he’s funny or not, Joe is a jerk; I don’t think there’s much doubt about that. When Callie doesn’t want to give up a tiara that a costume store clerk has erroneously sold her, Joe says, “What’s with her?” (8). God forbid she want to keep something she liked and paid for. After he sees the mess Callie has left after searching her bag for a missing tiara, he says, “I’m not surprised you can’t find something in that mess … Have you ever considered calling in a wrecking crew?” (12). He gets into an argument with Jeffrey LeBeque, a kid Frank and Joe find annoying; they trade insults, and Joe gets the worst of it. (Joe makes physical threats, which is a rung below the lowest form of wit.) Joe even decides he’s willing to assault his brother on the off-chance a shadowy figure isn’t the hidden intruder they’re looking for. (He also knocks Iola down in a similar situation, but to be fair to him, he doesn’t admit to liking that. Of course not: he’s got a hiding from Iola to look forward to.) Later, after Callie endures a series of attacks, Joe tells Frank, “Going out with a girl like that could be hazardous to your health” (63).

You dillweed: you got Iola blown up in the Casefiles, and Iola and Callie would have had much saner lives without the pair of you. You saying this — and Frank not calling you on it — makes me extremely happy both boys were taken out by one of the Shaws’ coffee tables.

Cast of Criminals begins with Chet attempting to kill Callie in Homecoming Nightmare. Nobody thinks Chet will be good at acting, but I think the role is right. He has to have a well of suppressed rage he can tap, given how much Frank and Joe — his supposed best friends — torment him. They’re rehearsing at the Grand Theater, which is a new venue for Bayport live theater; well, it’s new to the reader. Other theaters were mentioned in The Billion Dollar Ransom: a live magic competition was staged at the Bayport Palace Theater, although the Community Arts Association was planning to use the old opera house, which was being restored, for future productions.

While they are rehearsing, Harry Hill (of Hill Costume Supply Company) shows up and asks Callie to return a tiara she bought from her store. (Hill? Hill! Never heard of any salesman Hill.) She was sold it erroneously, and if it’s returned, he offers a lavish discount for the Bayport Players’ costumes. I’m not sure why the theater group is wedded to shopping at Hill Costume Supply, as Hill’s shop is the fourth Bayport costume shop mentioned in the books: Schwartz Masquerade and Costume Shop (79 Renshaw Ave.) in the revised Tower Treasure (#1), Mr. French’s costume shop in the revised Missing Chums (#4), and the Bijou Costume Shop in Tic-Tac-Terror (#74).

Anyway, Callie can’t find the tiara, and no amount of searching turns it up. It’s not even at the stupidly named fast food places (Ice-Cream Kid, Burger Bonanza, and Potatoes Iz Us) she stopped at on her way to the theater. After that, she is harassed and attacked: the Shaw home is broken into, as is the theater; she gets phone calls telling her to drop out of the play; the Grand Theater’s fire curtain almost falls on her; she’s stabbed with a rigged prop knife; a smoke machine spews toxic chemicals while she’s on stage; a player piano’s roll is splotched with red, and “CALLIE’S BLOOD” is written on it; Callie’s replacement tiara is stolen. No one threatens to take her back to Potatoes Iz Us, which sounds like it was named by an entrepreneurial hillbilly (“Would you like to supersize your order to get a large moonshine and side order of meth?”) or someone trying to emulate a hillbilly (“Would you like to supersize your order to get a large Mountain Dew and a side order of … ‘meth’?”)

Standard villain menacing, really, although labeling the red blotching “CALLIE’S BLOOD” is awkward. If your threats are any good, they shouldn’t need explanatory notes. (The smoke-machine trick was used to better effect in Reel Thrills.) Frank and Joe investigate relatively competently, but they get nowhere. When they look into who dropped the fire curtain, no one saw anything, and Chet is particularly unhelpful: “I saw angels … They were all wearing hip boots and they were singing.” Chet was stoned, but he retained the presence of mind to try to play his flighty language off as describing dreams.

The brothers’ competence is only relative to other mysteries, since Frank and Joe get locked backstage at the theater twice. The second time, Joe pulls a lever, opening a trapdoor that drops an unconscious Callie on Frank. There’s a joke here about Frank not knowing what to do with a woman, even when she falls into his arms, but Callie’s unconscious, and I feel uncomfortable about making the joke. It’s there, though, if you want to follow it through; I mean, the author just left it there. Take it if you want it.

For the second mystery in a row, the criminals throw the Hardys a curveball: all the crimes aren’t being committed by the same people, and two different sets of malefactors are acting at cross purposes. The person who keeps threatening Callie to get her to quit the play should be obvious: Lyla Spring, who auditioned for the same part and is serving as Callie’s understudy while also working as the assistant to tyrannical director Paul Ravenswood. “I’m sick of Callie getting all the breaks,” she says after confessing. “I’m an actress too, you know. I’m good, I’ve studied, but I’m just not as pretty as she is. You all just take me for granted” (135). She is a decent actress — Frank and Joe don’t consider her as a suspect — and it has to be frustrating watching those in the Hardys’ orbit getting all the breaks. I feel for her.

Especially since the Hardys couldn’t help her when she needed it. Lyla has a sister who disappeared two years before Criminals. According to Lyla, “You think I forgot how you and Joe jumped into action when Deirdre ran away — even when the cops told you to lay off?” Frank apologizes and says, “We tried.” Deirdre’s disappearance is put early in Frank and Joe’s career: “two years ago,” which would have happened at the same time as the earliest Hardy Boys books. As far as I can tell, this is the only book in which Lyla or her sister is mentioned, so why use them to hang a failure on Frank and Joe? Deirdre Spring’s disappearance is placed in the very select list of Hardy Boys failures, right next to their inability to find Harry Tanwick from the original Disappearing Floor. Hey! Maybe Deirdre ran off with Harry … or was done in by him. Or maybe she did him in and fled — I dunno.

Still, however much I feel for her, Lyla put Callie’s life in danger several times, and she stole the tiara, which put Callie in even more peril. She’s not innocent. She’s just up against the Hardy-Industrial Complex, and no one can defeat that. To dare to overcome it is to risk madness — or prison time. Lyla doesn’t seem to have been arrested, so surely insanity is in her future.

Some of the rest of the cast are briefly suspects, mainly because they’re actors. Joe quotes “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man” from Showboat: “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly,” but instead of saying he can’t help lovin’ that man (or girl) of his, he ends the quote with “actors can be weirdos” (71). He’s not wrong, but it’s a strange way to end the allusion. The weirdest is Amelia McGillis, who is a kleptomaniac. She says things like “primo straight-arrow guy” (67) and “How did a nice duck like him go swimming in this quicksand?” (149). She also fakes attacking Frank and Joe with a bread knife. Still, Frank and Joe can’t pin anything on her because she didn’t do anything.

The break-ins are also easy to unravel, although it takes Frank and Joe a little too long to figure that out. Since Harry Hill is abnormally interested in that tiara, making ridiculous offers for its return, he should be an obvious suspect. Frank and Joe eventually investigate, and a trip to a New York jeweler reveals the tiara was full of real diamonds, not paste. Hill is a fence, and his nephew, who briefly replaced Chet in the play, is his accomplice. Frank and Joe trap the nephew after he follows them to New York the day of the play’s opening, all but getting him to confess. He gets revenge on the Hardys by posing as a terrorist Frank Hardy in a call to the police, but even after Frank and Joe are put in handcuffs, one phone call to BPD officer Con Riley springs them, and they make it to the theater in time.

When Hill and his nephew try to steal the tiara during the play, Frank and Joe go on stage dressed as policemen (their actual roles) and use props and stagecraft to knock the villains down. The police show up and arrest the pair. It was a dumb plan, and Frank and Joe knew it; their planning involved phrases like “Hopefully, [Con Riley] will show” (140) and “‘Maybe … [Con]’s on his way.’ It was more a wish than a statement” (143) and “It was a risky move, but then their whole plan was risky!” (145). Still, they avoid getting shot, and the villains are caught. With a final Chet joke, said by the brothers in unison, the mystery is over … until next time.