Wipeout (#96)

It’s not often I wish for more explanations of exotic customs in a Hardy Boys book, but I have to say I wanted more information about how the sport of windsurfing works. Is it a racing sport? Is it a sport like skateboarding, in which tricks are judged by experts? Some combination of the two? (I was afraid it would be the last.)

Windsurfing is a big deal in Wipeout (#96). Frank and Joe head to Almanarre, a real place on France’s Mediterranean coast (not too far from Toulon) that even today draws windsurfers. (The story doesn’t mention it, but the place is a tourist haven: Almanarre is by most definitions part of the Côte d’Azur, known to us Americans as the French Riviera.) The Hardy brothers have been called to France by Doug Newman, who has a windsurfing school in Bayport. Because why not? Why not windsurf in Barmet Bay? Why not have a school for windsurfing in Bayport, a city that for a third or half the year is unsuited for the sport?

Anyway, Doug’s fiancée Catherine is concerned someone is out to get Doug on the eve of the Almanarre Cup, which is a big windsurfing competition. This competition is important because if Doug wins, it will be his third consecutive title, and “The Almanarre Cup is his for keeps” (2). What does that mean, though? He’ll be forever remembered as the competition’s premiere champion? He’ll own the competition and its profits? He gets to keep the competition’s large, ornately engraved trophy forever? Turns out, it’s the last, although the mechanism for giving him the trophy isn’t specified. I suppose we’ll have to assume the event’s bylaws specify the first person to win either three total or three in a row gets the trophy forever and ever.

Doug pooh-poohs the concerns about his safety, but he’s concerned about the spate of (tame) vandalism that hit the villa Catherine has turned into an inn for windsurfers. If words gets around that the inn is jinxed, no competitors will want to stay there. Security at the villa is a joke — “We pay a lot of attention to security,” Doug says (14) in the same paragraph that he mentions they give keys to the high-security area to everyone — and what Doug and Catherine need more than Frank and Joe is a house detective.

As a digression: I miss the idea of a house detective. Not the reality; the house detective was probably just as often a goon meant to hassle patrons as he was a serious means of crime deterrent. But the idea! There’s a guy looking out for crime in the hotel. He has connections to the police and other private detectives, and if something is stolen from your room, he can get the word out. The wheels of justice will be turning immediately! If you are attacked, someone will be only a few floors away from saving you! It’s a great idea. Plus, it allows me to say, with a straight face, the words “house dick.”

Anyway, Doug’s confident about Frank and Joe’s ability — as detectives; he doesn’t think they could be elite windsurfers: Great windsurfers “know what the wind will do before the wind knows. Like detectives” (7). Unfortunately, when it comes to detection, Frank and Joe are unable to know a hawk from a handsaw in Wipeout, no matter if the wind is north-northwest, southerly, or from any other direction. To be fair, the solution to Wipeout is a bit more complicated than in most books, but the solution to part of the mystery stares them in the face throughout, and they just can’t see it.

The danger begins almost immediately, with Doug getting loopy and drowsy on the drive home and almost driving the car into the Mediterranean. Frank and Joe’s quick-ish reflexes — Joe is almost defeated by his seat belt — save them all, but after they get to Catherine’s villa, roofing tiles almost crush Catherine, Doug, and Frank. Joe manages a simul-tackle of all three, saving them. While investigating, they run into Philip Barstow, a villa guest who Joe finds so irritating he “wanted to help him down the stairs with a friendly boot” (21). Later, they meet the two French workmen who had been putting the tiles on the roof. Both are stereotypes: one wears a stupid beret, and the other has a cigarette dangling from his lip. Fortunately, they don’t say much, so we don't hear their outrageous accents, and we don’t see them eat, so there’s no reason to dwell over their probable meals of stinky cheese and wine. They proclaim their innocence, of course, and since they were nowhere near the tiles when they fell, Frank and Joe believe them.

(The Hardy Boys have been to France before without encountering stereotypes; they were in Paris as step in their investigation into war-torn Zebwa in The Revenge of the Desert Phantom, a truly bizarre digest that was frequently referred to for a while because that’s the story in which they acquired their battle van. Also, Frank and Joe were beaten up by a gang of waiters in Desert Phantom, which adds to the book’s inexplicable nature. That humiliating beatdown doesn’t prevent Frank and Joe from traveling to France later in their careers; they visited a castle in Provence in The Castle Conundrum (#168) and Paris in Passport to Danger.)

After Philip, a board designer, and Doug have a nice burn contest, Doug’s chief rival, Ian, accuses Doug of sabotaging his board. The two almost come to blows. Frank and Joe actually decide to investigate rather than just accusing people, such as Philip, of being responsible for the vandalism. In Catherine’s late uncle’s art studio, Frank finds a sketch of a face that looks familiar; when Joe returns for it, it’s gone. Frank also overhears that Catherine is in debt and taking loans from her uncle’s friend and art dealer, Emil Molitor, who warns he might have to buy the villa from her so she has the money to satisfy her debts. (Molitor also wants to do a photo exhibition of the Almanarre Cup trophy, which was designed and engraved by Catherine’s uncle.)

To make sense of the case, Frank and Joe decide to turn to Fenton’s advice. Fenton told his sons, “When you begin an investigation … all you have is questions — lots of them. Try asking yourself the questions first. Then move on to other people” (46). Oh, if only Frank and Joe followed (or remembered) this advice in other books. In this case, the technique doesn’t do much other than get Frank and Joe to direct their questions to each other before they just accuse everyone of everything, but that’s enough. In fact, this book implies Frank and Joe have been acting like idiots in other volumes; later in the book, for example, Catherine says, “Accusing people of doing something often ends by leading them to do just that” (94).

Omigod — what if Catherine is right, and the Hardy family is the reason Bayport is so crime-ridden? After all those years of Fenton (and later his sons) accusing people of crimes, they have only led those suspects into misdeeds they would never have otherwise done? It would be a clear case of accusatory entrapment! This makes the Hardys the villains of the series!

At supper, the inn serves couscous, which the brothers claim never to have had. Ah! But Frank and Joe have had couscous before, while in Morocco for the The Mysterious Caravan. In that book, “cous-cous” was described as semolina served with raisins, carrots, chick peas, turnips, lamb, and broth; in Wipeout, Catherine describes it as “sort of tiny pasta … steamed over vegetables. … Sometimes … we eat couscous with meat” (48). Not as delectable as the meal from The Mysterious Caravan, but the digests never possessed the McFarlane-level devotion to food the original canon did. Times move on, and in Wipeout, they are offered harissa, an extremely hot sauce. Someone doses Doug’s food — his special health food, not couscous — with harissa, and he blames Ian.

After that, the campaigns against the inn and Doug increase in intensity. Someone puts wax on the inn’s stairs to injure somebody, but it’s cleaned up before anyone is hurt. Frank is caught with a counterfeit franc note Catherine gave him; Frank finds the portrait on the bill strangely familiar. (You can figure out why, and most likely, even from my sketchy description, figure out who’s responsible. Frank can’t, though.) Doug is knocked off his sailboard by a low-flying plane; later, his sailboard’s mast breaks, smacking him in the head, and Joe has to rescue him from drowning. Frank and Joe find someone snooping around the inn’s grounds at night — by coincidence; it’s not like they were keeping watch to prevent the nightly incidents of vandalism — but while pursuing the prowler, a broken staircase rail causes Joe to almost fall into the Mediterranean. After rescuing Joe, Frank returns with his brother to find Philip fighting a fire in the shed where all the windsurfers keep their equipment. As the brothers return to their room, they find a note pinned to the door that warns if Doug goes on the water the day before the competition, he “will not come back alive” (89).

So Frank and Joe spring into action! Suspecting an air attack, Frank impersonates Doug while Joe charters a helicopter. When a plane flies close to Frank on Doug’s sailboard, the helicopter flies toward it. The plane takes too long to avoid the helicopter’s charge and crashes into the sea. The French civil aviation authorities are very lenient, giving the pilot of the airplane a fine and the helicopter pilot a stern questioning. Well, I say civil aviation authorities, but the helicopter pilot calls them “gendarmes” (103). Frank and Joe, the architects of an airplane crash and near mid-air collision over a crowded stretch of water, escape without being questioned.

After slipping away from the French authorities, whoever they are, Frank makes a brilliant deductive leap: the crimes are being committed by more than one person or group, although he knows who none of them are. When a heavy statue almost falls on Catherine, Catherine and Doug accuse Ian. Ian runs, of course — when the lynch mob is coming, you don’t think about how sturdy its rope supply is before making a break for it — and Frank manages to corner him in a room. Ian jumps off a balcony 30 feet from the ground. Frank expects Ian to be dead on the stones below, but that seems unrealistic for a top athlete. A thirty-feet drop would probably result in injuries, perhaps severe ones, but Ian’s in good enough shape he would most likely survive. Right?

Anyway, Ian has instead dropped to a lower balcony, which unfortunately for Ian is locked. Frank catches him, and Ian denies everything except putting the hot sauce in Doug’s food. Ian and Doug have a moment of rapprochement, and while Catherine is considering selling the inn to Emil, Doug admits the attacks against him have been staged by his secret agent, Tom Highgate. That’s one mystery solved! But who’s causing the problems at the inn?

That mystery has to be put off when the actual Almanarre Cup competition begins. Doug wins on a tiebreaker over Ian — it turns out it’s one of those competitions where a routine of stunt tricks are judged — but before Doug can celebrate his victory, the trophy is stolen. The gendarmes put up roadblocks, but a nearby fire soon taxes their resources, and they open the city up again. Immediately after the roadblocks are lifted, Frank sees the inn’s roofers putting a large box in the back of their van. Suspecting the trophy is in the box, Frank and Joe immediately take off after the van on their motorcycles. They lose the van briefly, but they discover the trophy has been transferred to a black sedan when the sedan tries to run them down. Frank’s motorcycle is destroyed, but he rides behind Joe until the car collides with a tractor on a one-lane bridge. The man behind everything? Emil Molitor, who is also a counterfeiter.

Before the chase, Frank finally realized the picture he saw in Catherine’s uncle’s studio was the same as the man on the franc note, and it turns out Molitor was interested in Catherine because he forced her uncle to make new plates for counterfeiter money. Unfortunately for Molitor, Catherine’s uncle hid the plates, then died, leaving the only clue to the plates’ location engraved on the trophy. (Frank and Joe find the clue but decline to dig up the plates. Too much work!) So to get access to where the plates were most likely hidden, Molitor tried to force Catherine out of business with a little sabotage, arson, and attempted murder.

Frank and Joe have solved the case — and without the help of the French authorities! In return, Frank and Joe receive a lifetime of free room and board at Catherine’s inn as well as free surfboarding lessons any time they want at Doug’s new surfboarding school in Almanarre. As non-monetary rewards go, that’s pretty good: a free place to stay on the Côte d’ Azur. If they ever get married — HA! — that would make an outstanding honeymoon destination.