The next book in the sequence is Panic on Gull Island (#107), in which Iola goes missing on Spring Break, and no one in the media or law enforcement can muster any interest in a vanished pretty white girl. The Hardy Boys books have some pretty unbelievable plot twists, but that might be the most unbelievable.
***
The Smoke Screen Mystery (#105) is set during Winter Break, while Panic on Gull Island takes place during Spring Break. This gives us a definite and plausible time frame for the intervening book, Attack of the Video Villains: somewhere in the first quarter of the year. Video Villains even mentions Smoke Screen, strengthening the chronological ties.
This demonstrates a slow tightening of chronological continuity in the digests. The Secret of the Island Treasure (#100) is set during the summer, and The Money Hunt (#101) falls during Bayport High’s fall break. Terminal Shock (#102) is set during Spring Break, and Million-Dollar Nightmare (#103) takes place during a San Francisco summer. Tricks of the Trade obviously occurs between Nightmare and Smoke Screen, but that’s not much help, as Smoke Screen takes place at the end of the year. There’s a lot of months between those two points, and we don’t even know what part of the summer Nightmare is set during.
So for the characters, those eight books (#100 to #107) take place over about 21 months. Logically, Frank and Joe would have gone up a grade during that time, and they might even have graduated. (Although if they did, they would have to be in college: you don’t get Spring Break when you’re out of school.) Frank and Joe are never in classes, so it’s impossible to tell. For readers, those books were released over about 14 months (#100 was the first digest released in 1990, while Gull Island was the second for 1991). As I’ve said in other posts, I really appreciate this sort of chronological care, even if it makes no sense in the long run.
***
As I mentioned in Attack of the Video Villains (#106), the video game Hack Attack comes up again in Mystery with a Dangerous Beat (#124). I have to imagine the probability that both books were written by the same ghostwriter is high; why else would the same fictional video game appear in both books? I suppose an observant editor could have realized Dangerous Beat’s arcade scene was a great place to insert a reference to a previous book, and editorial tinkering would explain why Joe is playing the game despite claiming he never wanted to play it again in Video Villains.
On the other hand, maybe Joe is just a teenager and prone to hyperbole.
No comments:
Post a Comment