The Case of the Counterfeit Criminals (#114)

At the beginning of The Case of the Counterfeit Criminals, we are supposed to accept the proposition the Hardy Boys series has long insisted was true: that Frank and / or Joe could be defeated in an athletic competition.

Bayport High’s track team is set to take on Holman High, another of the revolving rivals Bayport has competed against. Outside the track facility, Joe almost gets in a scuffle with Holman’s Eric Dresser, who, like Joe, competes in the 100-meter dash. In fact, according to a Holman teammate, Dresser “almost” set the state record in the event. Someone should tell him “almost” counts only in hand shoes, horse grenades, and thermonuclear war, but it unnerves Joe as he goes into the locker room the two teams share. Wait — they share a locker room? Bayport’s athletic department is not making enough money off the Hardys.

Joe slips into his brand-new Wombat athletic shoes … listen, “Wombat” is an awful name for a shoe company, but if I go into why, we’re going to be here all day. Suffice it to say wombats are not fast animals, and if you’re going to name anything after a marsupial, it’s going to be the Tasmanian devil (although Warner Brothers would probably sue you) or the extinct thylacine. Frank is doing well in his event — the long jump — and has a chance to win, but before his competition ends, he watches Joe run. Joe is neck-and-neck with Dresser until his Wombats blow out and give him a twisted ankle. Joe wants to accuse his rival because Dresser was messing with Joe’s shoes before the meet, but it’s obvious he didn’t do it; Dresser’s name might as well be “Red Herring.” The problem must be with the shoes.

The narration never says how Frank finished in the long jump, but Holman High wins the meet. It’s likely that this has happened before, but I can’t remember it. Even more remarkable is that Joe resists Dresser’s needling and lets Bayport teammate Fred Tolliver call Dresser out on his lack of class.

Joe still believes Dresser is the culprit, and he bristles when Frank thinks the accusation has no merit. “Logic … That’s all I ever get from you is logic [sic]” (14). Joe knows, subconsciously if not in a way he can enunciate, that the Hardy Boys never get anywhere using logic. Cases are solved by random blundering and the ineffable machinations of chaos, not through logic.

After a brief stop at Benlow’s, where other shoe buyers nearly riot over their defective Wombats, Frank and Joe head home. Gertrude and Fenton make a brief appearance, then are heard of no more in Counterfeit. Back in the family cellar crime lab, the brothers notice an ultraviolet quality control mark in Frank’s genuine Wombat sneaker but not in Joe’s; on Monday, they head not to school (because why would they do that?) but to the Wombat corporate offices in Holman Heights, about twenty miles from Bayport. After a brief misunderstanding — one which Joe apologizes for — Frank and Joe gets Karla Newhouse, the head of customer relations, and Winston Brinkstead, VP of national sales, to “hire” them to investigate the counterfeit Wombats. Well, no money changes hands, but Brinkstead and Newhouse do loan Frank and Joe their authority, which is as good as Frank and Joe get in the digests.

Almost immediately, Frank and Joe get a baseball with a threatening message written on it thrown at them. I appreciate that someone has decided to use an aerodynamic object with a writing surface to deliver the message, but the threat is lacking: “Back off, or you’ll be out of the game for good” (40). The “game” pun just isn’t good enough. Also, the baseball is Wickford brand (Ted Goring model), which sounds like a line of cricket goods, not baseball.

While Frank and Joe are poking around local Wombat retailers, Frank gets a chance to use his martial arts skills to beat up a pair of attackers. (“Martial arts” in general, not any specific one.) Unfortunately for him, he was attacked by three guys, and he ends up unconscious. After he regains consciousness, Frank and Joe decide they’ve questioned enough shoe sellers and decide one of them — Joe, in this case — needs to go undercover at Wombat’s factory. The standard discouragement follows: someone drops a stack of shoes on Joe, someone tries to poison Frank, a gang tries to road haul Joe … you know, the usual stuff. (Joe does meet Norm Weiss at the factory; Norm’s a cool guy who loves Wombat shoes and gives Joe a cover story when Joe takes too long investigating. Frank and Joe don’t meet too many helpful, nice people in the digests.)

Frank and Joe go to Con Riley, who has “mixed feelings about taking help from” the Hardys (96). I’m sure I would, too — on one hand, they make things easy, gift wrapping investigations, but you’d also have to wonder about your competence after a while. On the other hand, if Frank and Joe are more competent than the crooks, that’s all that matters. Con suggests Frank and Joe were attacked by a criminal from a previous case, but that’s stupid: Frank and Joe’s enemies never come back. They get thrown into the Black Hole of Bayport and never return. No one asks about the Black Hole, lest they end up there as well.

Joe realizes his foreman is part of the counterfeit shoe ring while playing a pickup baseball game during lunch. Frank, back at Benlow’s, is attacked in a dark storeroom and uses a “rabbit punch” (106) that he hoped hit his opponent in the throat. (I’m not sure what Frank and Dixon think a “rabbit punch” is, but it’s a punch to the back of the neck or head. It’s illegal in boxing because it’s too dangerous.) The attacker is either the owner, Benlow, or Dresser, who works for him, but Frank doesn’t know who.

But Frank and Joe are making progress! Since the only one they know who is in on the conspiracy is the foreman, Lincoln Metairie (really), the boys head to the warehouse, where they hear about something happening that night. (The gang also disposes of its paperwork by tearing the evidence into pieces, as if they hadn't heard of paper shredders.) When the brothers return that night, they are fortunate the gang is punctual, as the boys are about to fall asleep at around 10 o’clock or so. Frank and Joe sneak in and find Metairie and three others wrapping up the operation; the boys are discovered, and in the tussle afterward, Joe is captured and Frank knocks himself out on a handtruck.

Metairie and one of his co-conspirators take the trussed-up Hardys in their own van, planning to sink them in a deep pond. But Metairie decides to add a co-conspirator to the body count — one who was in favor of sparing the Hardys — and knocks him out, planning to split his $62,500 among the others. ($62,500 in 1992 is the equivalent to more than $100,000 today.) But of course no knot can hold the Hardys; Joe springs free, and after he surprises Metairie, Frank kicks him into the pond. Saving Metairie has to wait until Frank is freed of his ropes, though; it wouldn’t do for Joe to rescue the villain single handed. The Hardys then call the BPD, which calls the Holman Heights police (because that’s where the Wombat factory is).

At the police station, Joe obliquely references the stateroom scene (“the scene where everybody ended up in a small room”) from A Night at the Opera (“that Marx Brothers movie we saw a while back”). Why can’t he just say the stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera? No one’s going to get mad. It’s a hilarious scene, and more young people should know about. Anyway, Frank and Joe reveal retailers (like Benlow) are involved in the scheme, and they out Brinkstead as the mastermind. Brinkstead blusters, but Metairie promises to testify against him. The criminals in the Hardy Boys books are always running a weird version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, except instead of making their choices isolated from the other, one prisoner always confesses in front of the others so everyone loses. It seems like a low-reward strategy, but what do I know?

The boys’ reward is a new pair of Wombats for Joe, but it doesn’t help him defeat Dresser in the rematch. (Although Wombat’s return policy should have resulted in him getting a new pair anyway.) Dangit, Joe, what’s the point of solving these mysteries if the rewards don’t help you become more famous and more accomplished? You did all that work to save a large corporation some money! Corporations aren’t your friends — they’re just taking advantage of you.