Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew: The Big Lie

In Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys: The Big Lie, the teen detectives are forced to investigate a crime that hits closer to home than usual.

As Big Lie begins, Frank and Joe are suspected of murdering their father, Fenton, a Bayport police detective who had been arrested on corruption charges. Although the brothers aren’t arrested themselves, the suspicion has caused them to lose their girlfriends, their chums, and their jobs. Nancy Drew, however, offers help for her own reasons, and the three set out to infiltrate Bayport’s underworld and unravel who is behind the death of Fenton Hardy.

Hardy Boys fans will recognize The Big Lie’s setting. Bayport is a crime-ridden burg, with a police force headed by Chief Collig, and Frank and Joe Hardy battle against lawbreakers — with the help of Nancy Drew, like in the Super Mystery series. But this is not the Bayport from the original series or from the Casefiles or any other sequel series. The city has a tourist-trap, postcard-perfect reputation that doesn’t gibe with the relentlessly generic city of 50,000 the boys inhabited in their own books.

The changes don’t stop with the feel of Bayport. In The Big Lie, Fenton worked for the police, not as a private detective. Frank and Joe’s part-time job is at a lobster restaurant, not as amateur or assistant PIs. Chet and the rest of the chums are nowhere to be seen, and Callie and Iola are glimpsed mostly in shadow; Iola’s name doesn’t ever appear in the book. Nancy’s supporting cast, save for her father and a couple of flashback panels with George, is similarly absent. Fans looking for Easter eggs and references to the classic series will likely be disappointed; the Old Mill (from Hardy Boys #3, The Secret of the Old Mill) makes a cameo, repurposed into an inn, but that’s it. The plot gives writer Anthony Del Col opportunities to insert other Hardys characters into the story — for instance, Peterson, the less competent Bayport detective, could have easily been Oscar Smuff or Con Riley — but he refuses the offers.

Instead, Del Col has made Bayport into a pan-Stratemeyer Syndicate city. In addition to teaming up with Nancy Drew, the Hardys attend a party hosted by the Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift makes several appearances, and the Rover Boys — the Hardys’ even more rambunctious forebears — are vital to the plot. The inclusion of these other series characters elevates the story into something unique, although a Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew fan may feel like the story is more missable because of it; this is not the world the characters usually inhabit, after all. The characterizations for supporting characters also get shaped into the holes they are meant to fit into; Chief Collig, for instance, is depicted as too much of a thug, smacking Frank’s head against a table during interrogation.

The Big Lie is not a noir series, no matter how the publisher, Dynamite, tries to sell it. Frank, Joe, and Nancy are fundamentally good people, not morally compromised in any way; they are forced to realize their fathers aren’t who they thought, but that’s part of most people’s maturation process. Nancy is not a femme fatale; Frank and Joe are not hardboiled detectives. (Nor is Nancy, and Frank and Joe are not hommes homicides.) Few characters are out-and-out cruel, and although the heroes run cons on the criminals, the reader doesn’t get the feeling that any betrayals that happen within the story have much of an impact — save, of course, for the teenagers’ revelation that fathers aren’t who they seem to be. (Mothers seem to be, though.) A revelation of infidelity before the story begins actually weakens the story, decreasing the impact of the faithless character’s greater crimes.

On the other hand, the story’s level of violence, featuring shootings and murders, is much higher than the typical juvenile, though in retrospect the number of concussions and poisonings the Hardys endure is shocking. The Big Lie, at least, imbues each blow with power and shock; punches have consequences, and Werther Dell’Edera’s art gets across the brutality in a way that the softboiled narration of a juvenile series cannot. Even after the violence, Dell’Edera’s art shows the impact of violence; Nancy being interviewed with the blood of a shooting victim still on her hands is an effective image.

Del Col gives the reader backstory and narration through first-person text boxes, with the point of view shifting between the three protagonists throughout the story. The different narrators are denoted by different color boxes, and the shift between them comes between issues … mostly. Switching between points of view waters down the narrative voice, however, and it’s easy to miss the switch between them because they are colored with weak pastels, and the colors denoting each character aren’t consistent throughout the series.

The mystery itself is better than most of the plots in the Hardy canon or in the spinoffs — if, for no other reason, the story seems to have consequences within The Big Lie’s world. By taking away the protagonists’ usual supporting casts, however, Del Col shrunk the suspect pool to a suspect puddle, where the guilty can be deduced because they are simply the only people left. Pages spent on the heroes’ convoluted infiltration of a could have been better used for straightforward investigation, leading the detectives down blind alleys with false leads. Tom Swift’s aid is integral to the plot, but he is less a character than a plot device; despite his importance, he appears in few panels and doesn’t have a single speech bubble.

The name given to the secret organization behind the crimes, given in the denouement, is perfect, though.

Dell’Edera’s art is heavy on shadow and frequently light on detail, appropriate choices for a series in which motivations are obscured and iconic status makes it hard to pin down detailed descriptions. I don’t care for Frank or Joe’s haircuts, but they are teenagers — bad haircuts come with that territory. (I do enjoy Nancy’s multiple earrings in one ear: fitting for a girl just beginning to rebel.) As I mentioned before, the fisticuffs in The Big Lie are more visceral than in any Hardy Boys book. Dell’Edera saves his best work for the Rover Boys, particularly the two older ones, Ricky and Teo: Ricky’s a natty dresser, and Teo is a rough, occasionally frightening thug. Colorist Stefano Simeone has chosen a primarily pastel color palette, which is a mistake, I think; it matches the color boxes, but the weaker colors dilute some of the art’s effect.

Fay Dalton’s covers are fantastic; I don’t know if they can be bought as prints, but they would make great gifts for Nancy Drew fans (especially the cover for #3). The covers combine retro styling with a great sense of who the characters are, managing to create a nostalgia not for what the characters ever were but for what they might have been, had their stories possessed a harder or clearer edge. Dynamite’s decision to include the covers only at the back of the collection, lost among the series’ variant covers, is criminal.

This The Big Lie should be a diverting journey for those a fondness for nostalgia, and it could pique the interest of fans of crime comics. I’m not sure whether the series has legs; everything is wrapped up very neatly, and The Big Lie makes no mention of a sequel series.

The Demolition Mission (#112)

The Demolition Mission is, in some ways, an old-school Hardy Boys book.

The opening pages promise a certain kind of Hardy Boys story as Chet pulls up to the Hardy home in a POS jeep he’s just purchased through some “pretty shrewd dealing” (2). Predictably, the brakes don’t work, and as he is about to crash into the Hardys’ van, he and Joe manage to have a conversation during the split-second crisis — yelling complete sentences at each other, with Joe next to the van and Chet in the jeep’s driver’s seat. The conversation is a little lacking; Joe and Chet don’t digress into a discussion on the ontology of perception — how can we know the imminent collision, for instance, is truly real? It’s a missed opportunity here for the Dixon 5000 writing machine.

But Mission isn’t about how Chet got ripped off (although he probably did): It’s about how Fenton fobs Frank and Joe off on a client, and then Frank and Joe wanders around Bayport for 125 pages, wrecking cars and getting the snot knocked out of them.

Five concussions (of the knocked cold variety). Three car accidents, one of them in which the jeep is knocked off a hillside (and no one is hurt, despite lax seat-belt safety) and another one caused by a literal bomb inside a racecar. That crash count ignores Joe’s demolition derby practice, when his car gets T-boned and knocked on the passenger-side door. Callie is kidnapped, a villain tries to kill the Hardys through smoke inhalation (but they escapes because of Joe’s knot lore), and the heroes explore (semi-)secret tunnels. The boys fortuitously overhear a criminal conversation at a diner, but they miss an important clue about identity of the speakers. Really, all that would be needed for Hardy Boys Blackout Bingo would be a sudden storm and a trip on Barmet Bay in which the boat malfunctioned (preferably simultaneously).

Anyway: Fenton is working for the Treasury Department, so Frank and Joe are asked — not hired, really, since no one mentions money — by engineer Felix Stock to protect his new high-performance car, the Saurion, ahead of a race against Miyagi Motors’ Sata Speedster at Bayport Motor Speedway. This is what is known as a bad decision: within an hour of Frank, Joe, and Chet’s arrival, Joe destroys the Saurion’s transmission to save his own life during a sabotage attempt, then the car is stolen. Crackerjack work, boys. While everyone is looking for the Saurion, all the shelving in Stock’s parts warehouse are knocked over, domino-style, and Joe allows the culprit to get away without even an idea of how the escape was made.

Felix has no confidence in the cops, so he doubles down on his Hardys reliance. The police show up only when Con Riley arrests Chet for a crime Con knows Chet didn’t commit. (The book can’t even decide whether Riley is an “officer” [60] or “detective” [115 and 141].) Frank and Joe know the cops are most useful off the page, though. I mean, in the digital world of the ‘90s, it’s easy for the Hardys to get help from the police to identify fingerprints: After snapping an “electronic picture” of the print, Frank “transfer(s) the signals from the digital disk into our laptop fax machine, then send(s) it through the modem” to the police (91-2). Simple!

As a side note: Man, Bayport’s criminal ecology is fascinating: the police are ineffectual and the city’s best crimefighter has graduated to bigger ponds, so the city should be flooded with criminal rackets. And it is! But these rackets are so pathetic teenage boys outwit them continually. Perhaps we’re seeing the Hardys prey upon the lowest strata of criminal enterprise, the weakest of the villainous herd that are sacrificed so the rest may thrive. I would love to read an exposé, but Bayport’s various newspapers — the Examiner is mentioned in this one, although Callie is no longer a stringer there as she was in The Smoke Screen Mystery (#105) — are not up to the task. The Third Estate’s weakness is another symptom of the rot that has set into Bayport society.

At the Circuit Diner on Shore Road, the boys overhear a threat against Katie by key employees of the demolition derby, which will be held the day before the Saurion / Speedster race. The boys’ tour of Miyagi Motors, where Callie is interning, reveals nothing, but a robot arm pimp slaps Frank. (This is probable concussion #1.) It’s just an accident! Nothing to see here! Definitely nothing to report to OSHA.

On the way back to the speedway, Chet’s jeep is forced off the road by a white panel truck. Callie falls out of the jeep while it careens down a hillside, but neither she nor anyone else is hurt. (Auto accident #1; Callie is “dazed,” but I made an executive decision that it isn’t a concussion.) When the Hardys get back home, Fenton is there, but Frank and Joe ask for no help from him, other than to use his computer to run license plates. The plates don’t exist, which means the criminal has access to license plate counterfeiting equipment. Nothing comes of this.

What should be vitally important, though, is that Frank and Joe have found a random bit of electronic equipment near Felix’s garage. The next day, Grayson’s Electronics identify it as a radio-control circuit. Given that the Saurion had a sudden malfunction when Joe was driving and another prototype has a sudden, dangerous malfunction later (auto accident #2), RC criminals should be the obvious culprits. It takes three concussions for Frank to put it all together, though.

Instead, Joe joins the demolition derby to spy on derby coordinator Dwain Rusk, who they overheard at the diner. In a practice session, Joe’s junker gets knocked on its passenger-side door because Joe doesn’t know the rules. Joe survives by getting into the back seat just before the collision. (I have no idea how that works, and I can’t recommend it as a safety procedure.) When Rusk says Joe has guts, Joe “[tries] to look modest” (69), which suggests he fails to look modest.

After lunch, Frank realizes the Saurion may be hidden in the raceway’s underground tunnels and is so excited he blunders immediately into a pit in a darkened shed; Joe follows him into the inky void (concussions #2 and 3). Joe, in fact, hits the concrete floor so hard he forgets he’s carrying a penlight and then “rouses” Frank by slapping him, which can’t be good for brain health. But the boys find the car and the thief; unfortunately, the thief gets the drop on them with a flare gun, has Joe tie up Frank, then bops Joe on the head. (Concussion #4, and Joe’s second in an hour.) The helmeted crook lights a fire to kill the boys through smoke inhalation, but before they are overcome, Frank frees himself from Joe’s “slipknots” (83), and the boys escape with the Saurion.

The double concussion and smoke inhalation don’t stop Joe from driving in the demolition derby a few hours later. Why should they?

Frank, though, is concerned about Callie’s absence. He receives a note from her explaining the delay, but it’s not written in her handwriting. He figures out that Felix’s shift former mechanic, Marvin Tarpley, was around when Callie was last seen; when he confronts Tarpley, the mechanic intimates he stuffed her into the trunk of the junker Joe’s driving in the derby. To save Callie, Frank gets Joe to throw in the towel, even though he was one of only two drivers left.

Callie’s sangfroid is amazing. She’s abducted, then stuffed into a dark trunk and jounced around who knows where. This should be traumatic! But her reaction after being freed from the trunk? “‘When you invited me to the demolition derby,’ she said dryly … ‘I never thought I was going to be demolished.’”

This sort of emotional reserve is shared by other characters. When Joe drives the car for less than five minutes and destroys its transmission, no one — not the car’s designer, and not the car’s usual driver, Katie — is angry at him; they completely believe his contention that the only way to stop the malfunctioning car was to shift it into reverse while it was traveling at full speed. (Remember: this happens within an hour of Felix meeting the boys.) I mean, I might believe Joe’s assertions about what the car did, but seeing the state-of-the-art machine I designed, built, and staked my business on destroyed by a teenager would at least rattle me. I imagine I would be somewhere between screaming curses at the kid and wailing sobs, but that’s just me.

I’m not saying the book doesn’t portray people’s reactions to crises convincingly; no no no. I’m saying the lesson this book tries to teach kids is that keeping your cool is the ultimate virtue. And also that crashing cars is kinda cool.

Frank and Joe run into Tarpley the next morning after a little B&E in one of the speedway owner’s office. The boys get away with just a blow from a tire iron to Frank’s shoulder; Tarpley just gets away. Frank shrugs off the injury. But the boys discover Katie helped Tarpley escape, which means Joe gets to drive the Saurion in the big race. Frank says one of Joe’s ambitions is to drive in the Indy 500 (64), but that doesn’t mean he’s qualified. Felix is in a bind, though, and Joe’s right there — and when the Hardys visit Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Double Jeopardy (#181), Joe does get to drive an F1 car (and claims to have driven an Indy car previously), so obviously Joe has a skill: conning people into letting him drive race cars.

(Cringeworthy moment: Felix admits the reason he hired Katie to drive was because he had a crush on her. Ewwww.)

While Joe, Chet, and Felix get ready for the race, Frank investigates other leads, then gets drawn into a trap by the most convincing lie of all: that was in another car crash. Once he’s trapped, Frank is conked on the noggin for concussion #5 (third for him). While the race is roaring along, Frank comes to, escapes easily from the raceway’s tunnels, and tracks down the villains — Katie, Tarpley, and one of the speedway’s owners — with Callie and Chet.

They snatch away the controls, but a bomb has been set to explode in the car 77 minutes after the race’s beginning. Seventy-seven minutes gives Joe long enough to win the race — seems like poor planning to me: why cut it close? Why not have it explode long before then? — and the bomb takes out only the brakes. Joe survives the crash, and everything turns out OK. (At least until the chronic traumatic encephalopathy sets in during the Hardys’ forties.)

The three villains reveal they were sabotaging the Saurion to get control of Felix’s automotive intellectual property and the track itself, but that’s not important, nor is their double crossings, which don’t make any real sense. The important bit is that Frank and Joe were hit on the head several times, there were car crashes, and no one got too upset about it later.

The Three Investigators: The Secret of Skeleton Island

I admit, to my shame: I am not a one-juvenile-mystery-series man. I also dabble in reading the Three Investigators series. When I was a kid, the Three Investigators were my drug of choice when I ran out of the pure Hardy stuff. However, since the Three Investigators were a sideline, even though I read a lot of the volumes as a child, I have no idea which ones now.

But fortunately, my local library system has several Three Investigators books, and from time to time I indulge my sense of nostalgia by picking up a book. At the end of last year, on a whim, I put a hold on The Secret of Skeleton Island, the sixth book in the series; while returning home from the library with the book, I explained to my wife that the Three Investigators were very different from the Hardy Boys, especially in the ‘60s, when the Three Investigators series began.

The Three Investigators are, like the Hardys ostensibly are, a bunch of middle-class teens who investigate crimes. Unlike the Hardys, Jupiter Jones, Bob Andrews, and Pete Crenshaw didn’t trot the globe. They stuck mainly to Southern California for their setting, and they got around the area mainly by riding their bicycles. Two of them had semi-regular employment. (Maybe three, but I can’t remember whether Second Investigator Pete had to work.) Unlike the Hardys, they didn’t have their father, his assistants, or the police at their beck and call to assist them; the Three Investigators had to rely on the clever Ghost-to-Ghost Hookup, in which they called five friends and offered them a reward for specific info, and if those friends didn’t have it, the friends were instructed to call five more friends and ask them. (And those second-degree friends would each ask five more friends, and those friends would ask five more, etc. etc.) It was — if such a thing could be said without snickering — a more realistic approach to teenage crimefighting.

(On the other hand, there’s a limousine the boys summoned when they needed it, and they knew director Alfred Hitchcock, who listened to their reports, introduced the books, and often referred their services to others. Realism only goes so far when it comes to the pre-teen literary crowd, I suppose.)

The Secret of Skeleton Island, published in 1966, contradicts everything I said to my wife, without even a how-do-you-do. Author and series creator Robert Arthur sends the boys to a film set on the East Coast so the boys can be filmed scuba diving, with the proposed short film giving the movie crew a way to generate a little extra revenue and stay in practice while a location setting is rebuilt. In reality, though, the boys are undercover investigators, trying to figure out why the set is being sabotaged and discover (if necessary) the secret of the ghost that haunts the island the movie crew is working on. Also: the island (or the waters around it) have a pirate treasure.

This is a Hardy Boys plot; honestly, it’s as if Arthur stole the Hardy Boys writing machine (the Dixon 5000) from the Stratemeyer Syndicate for an afternoon, fired it up for a single plot, and then put it back before anyone realized it was missing. He probably didn’t have the time or inclination to read the instructions; he didn’t realize you have to cycle the Dixon 5000 through a lot of runs before you get to anything approaching an original plot.

The pirate treasure and scuba diving on the East Coast is straight out The Secret of Pirates’ Hill (#36), which came out a decade before this book, and Arthur does not significantly improve on that story. (He does add some bits of verisimilitude, like the tides spreading and hiding the treasure, but that change is more than ignorable.) The title itself is more than reminiscent of the book after Pirates’ Hill, The Ghost at Skeleton Rock (#37). Like Skeleton Rock, Skeleton Island mentions the supernatural without doing anything to develop the concept; the “ghost” in Skeleton Island is soon exposed as a hoax. The Three Investigators series often does better with the supernatural, usually building an eerie frisson between hard reality and the possibility of the strange, but any possibility of weirdness is dashed early in Skeleton Island in favor of a humdrum mystery.

The “undercover on a movie set” idea was used in the revised The Clue of the Broken Blade (#21), although that was released a few years after Skeleton Rock. (Ironically, the Hardys had to head west to get on a movie set, while the Three Investigators head east.) While the Three Investigators work this case for Alfred Hitchcock, the boys’ jobs — and their guardians, for the most part — remain completely unmentioned. The kids’ undercover identity is immediately blown, and they are put in jeopardy both by their own stupidity (jumping into a car with the first person who calls their name) and adults’ (using a party line without realizing it’s not a private line — stupid California elites). These are classic Hardy moves, and this echoes many adventures; probably the first time was when Frank and Joe hopped into a strange man’s car while traveling west during the original Hunting for Hidden Gold (#5).

In Skeleton Island, the Three Investigators are rescued by Christos, their own earnest, amusing ethnic sidekick for the adventure. The helpful local color is a feature in many Hardy Boy adventures; The Mystery at Devil’s Paw (#38) might be the relevant reference for this one, but there are so many to choose from. The sidekick is even a Greek kid in America, just like Evangelos Pandroplolos in The Shattered Helmet (#52), although Helmet was published after Skeleton Island. (I can’t imagine that the Stratemeyer Syndicate was copying Arthur in any way; I think Arthur just stumbled on a Hardy Boys element before the Hardy Boys series itself did.)

Like many Hardy Boys stories, most of the adventure happens on the water or on small islands in a backwater arm of the Atlantic. (Christos has his own boat, which is sunk in an “accident.”) On the other hand, like the worst of the Hardy Boys stories, the story is divorced from any of the quirks and fun of the boys’ home setting that gives the series its distinctive flavor. Just like in a Hardy Boys book, the adults, who include one of the Three Investigators’ father, are ineffectual, unable to find any clues as to what’s going on. The adults — including the police — contribute nothing, not even serving as decent blocking figures. There’s even a character with the last name “Morton,” for Fenton’s sake.

Skeleton Island isn’t a complete rip-off of the Hardy Boys, even given the similarities. The characters are just different enough to keep the outlines from matching up everywhere. As always, the Three Investigators have too much ratiocination to allow anyone to mistake one of their plots for a Hardy Boys story; for instance, Jupiter, the smart member of the Three Investigators, manages to solve the crime before anyone is captured by the bad guys. (However, because he’s the fat, unathletic one — and because he has a cold — Jupiter gets left behind and has to summon the authorities to bail everyone out, just like the overweight Chet Morton.) The book eventually disdains gold doubloons from the 18th century as mere trinkets, baubles only worth anything if gathered in quantity, whereas a Hardy Boys book would treat them as significant souvenirs if not major treasures.

(The Hardy Boys are right on this one: a Spanish doubloon was made of gold. Today, the forty doubloons found by Christos, Pete, and Bob would be worth around $50,000 just from the value of their gold, let alone their historical value. Admittedly, gold’s value has outpaced inflation over the last quarter century, as that amount of gold in 1966 would be worth only around $1,400 — about $10,000 in 2017 money.)

Part of me wonders if Arthur, because of sales or editorial pressure, decided to make a more deliberately Hardy-like book. “All right,” I imagine him saying, cracking his knuckles over his typewriter, “if the Hardy Boys are so damn popular, then by Holmes, I’ll give them a Hardy boys book! But it will be a better book than any Hardy Boys book!” (Then in my mind he cackles maniacally, but I doubt Arthur was a cackler. He was a pro.)

In any event, the results are disappointing. I would say that a dud of this magnitude this soon in a series — this is #6 — could signal imminent cancellation. But the Three Investigators lasted for 43 books, almost a quarter of a century, and outlived their patron, Alfred Hitchcock. (He was replaced by the fictional Hector Sebastian in later books and in revisions of the early volumes.) Better days are ahead for Jupiter, Pete, and Bob, and even though I might not write about them, I’ll enjoy reading them.