Carnival of Crime (#122)

So, a carnival of crime, you say …

The Hardys have danced all around the entertainment-industrial complex, but I don’t think they’ve investigated a carnival before. Automobile stunt shows in Fear on Wheels (#108), the circus in Three-Ring Terror (#111), a demolition derby in The Demolition Mission (#112), an amusement park in Danger in the Fourth Dimension (#118), and a Renaissance faire in Crusade of the Flaming Sword (#131), but not a carnival. Admittedly, the Hardys had worked for a carnival in the original Clue of the Broken Blade (#21), and Chet worked for Solo’s Super Carnival in The Mystery of the Whale Tattoo (#47), but no Dixon working on the digests remembers those hardback books. Also, there’s a winter festival in The Cold Cash Caper (#136), but that’s later in the series, and a winter festival has a whole different set of crimesolving issues.

You might not be able to guess the plot of Carnival of Crime from the title alone. The name suggests the carnival is propagating the crime, like Marvel’s Circus of Crime. (A Ringmaster with a hypnotic top hat would be completely optional.) Instead, it’s Hardy Boys Digest stock plot 1b, in which a business is in trouble because of “accidents” that look like sabotage but might not be (but totally are, because this is a Hardy Boys story). Once you know that, the story pretty much tells itself: a standard Reprobate Roll Call (I’ll get to that later), a crooked carnival game, and set pieces in the Tunnel of Love, Fun House, and Mirror Maze. You’re smart; you could’ve thought of this, although you might have had the sabotaged ride be the more exciting roller coaster rather than the Ferris wheel, and you might have laughed at your editor when he suggested a dangerous bumper car attack instead of dutifully trying to put menace into the least menacing attraction at a carnival. (I mean, even the “Guess Your Weight” guy can have an element of fat shaming to his attraction.) But that’s you; you’re principled, and you know what works.

I mean, a carny yells, “Hey, Rube,” at one point to set other carnies against the Hardys. It’s that sort of by-the-numbers book. I’m not saying you could’ve done better; I don’t know the quality of your prose and transitions. But with a professional editor, I’m not going to say you’d do worse.

So, as to the story itself: After Frank and Joe “just finished that business of the mine fires over in Pennsylvania” (35), the operator of Fairs to Go, Susan Bowman, calls the younger Hardys to investigate problems at the carnival, having heard of the Hardys through an unnamed friend. This “friend,” of course, is probably someone on the carny circuit who passes around the names of people who work for free. Fairs to Go is hemorrhaging money and Susan is a teenager who just took over the carnival because of her father’s heart attack, so it’s not like she has many options to combat the alleged sabotage. The Hardys do work for free, but they don’t bother to return Susan’s call; instead, without knowing who Susan is or what she does, they randomly run into Susan when they attend the Bayport Fair, which Fairs to Go is working.

Despite their being the same ages, Susan has to ignore Joe’s skepticism that she’s responsible enough for the job; Joe is unacquainted with responsibility, as being a teen detective is a pastime that carries no responsibility, not even the responsibility to not cause harm to your client’s interests or to take normal efforts to preserve your own life. But that seems like a small price for Susan to pay. In Joe’s defense, Susan claims to be “carny born and bred” (29), an unfortunate turn of phrase which calls to mind unsavory and probably unethical breeding practices involving sideshow performers, and she completely botches any chance Frank and Joe have to keep up their cover identities. Not that their cover identities — students writing a term paper about the carnival business, in this case — would ever fool anyone, let alone a group as legendarily suspicious of outsiders as carnies, but there are forms to be observed, you know? Just like we all pretend corporations are responsible citizens and ignore their rapacious need for profit — until we’re absolutely forced to stop ignoring it.

So who is sabotaging Fairs to Go? Here’s the Reprobate Roll Call:

• Ricky Delgado, Susan’s stepbrother. A business school dropout, Ricky thinks he should be running Fairs to Go. He has two goons, Boomer and Kenny. (I had to look up Kenny’s name because I keep wanting to call him “Esiason.”) Ricky and his goons confront Frank and Joe a time or two; during one confrontation, Joe gets offended when Ricky calls them “boy detectives” (45), a totally accurate description of the Hardy boys, and “turkeys” (67). Later, Frank discovers Ricky is shaking down the booth operators, building a “war chest” that will allow him to revitalize the carnival after he ousts his stepsister in a putsch. (He doesn’t say he plans to have Susan assassinated in her Mexico City exile, but honestly, he doesn’t have to: That’s implied. History has shown us that’s the inevitable course of carnival power struggles. Or is it Communist power struggles? I get confused sometimes. The one with more clowns.)
  
  
• Raoul Duchemin, former Fairs to Go strongman. Injuries have reduced Raoul to a general laborer, but Raoul is unhappy because carnival show business is the only business he knows. He’s also a moron, but there’s no evidence that that makes him unhappy. He has a “crush” (33) on Althea, the Ferris wheel operator, and he glowers at any man who looks twice at her. That was probably supposed to be a menacing (to the Hardys) plot point in 1993, when Carnival was published, but a quarter century has made his attempts to control the romantic life of a woman who has no interest in him into something incredibly creepy.
  
  
• Cecil Farkas, who runs the shooting-gallery game. Frank and Joe expose his rigged game almost as soon as they enter the carnival — he feeds chipped BBs into the rifle, making it almost impossible to hit the target, so I learned something about gaffed games — and of course he’s going to hold a grudge after Susan gives him his walking papers.
  
  
• The four Fratelli Brothers, a clown family. They are almost always in character, which means “amusing” disinterested people who just wish they’d go away. I don’t think I need to say more than that, really.
  
  
• Mystery culprit.

Since Ricky is too obvious a villain, you will be unsurprised to learn that “mystery culprit” is the winner of the Hardy Detecting Sweepstakes. (For those of you who were wagering, Mystery Culprit pays $25 to win, $10 to show, $3 to place.) This Dixon does give the mystery a twist by having Ricky’s goons betray him to work with Morris Tuttle, Susan’s father's partner / business manager. Tuttle had been cooking the books for years, and to conceal his crime, he was sabotaging the business and siphoning money from Fairs to Go to pressure Susan into selling her family’s interest. He also put a hose through his office window to destroy the business’s computer and claimed he had no backups. (Of course he had backups; of course the boys find the “diskettes,” which is perhaps the most ‘90s thing about this book.)

Given that the villain is a middle-aged guy who projects an aura of benign concern throughout, how is the menace delivered in Carnival? Joe avoids the deadly threat of the aforementioned bumper car attack. When the Ferris wheel is stopped, Joe momentarily slips out of his gondola to try to prevent a young boy, whose lap bar didn’t lock, from winning a Darwin Award, but he fails at the rescue attempt, never reaching the child, and has to leap back in his own gondola. (The kid didn't really need rescuing, so the three-page “action” sequence was pointless.) One of Ricky’s goons attacks Frank in the Fun House; Frank defends himself, but he doesn’t use his “well-honed martial arts instincts” (143) until they’re needed to capture the culprits at the end of the book. Boomer shoots a Roman candle in the Tunnel of Love at Frank and Althea —

No, it’s not like that. You know it’s not like that. Frank would never canoodle with a girl other than Callie. Althea suggested the Tunnel of Love as a place to privately discuss Ricky’s perfidy. (The attack works, frightening her into silence.) However, Joe would totally take a girl other than Iola into the Tunnel of Love, and Iola’s reaction would have given the book a believably terrifying element.

In the final move by the villains, Joe gets sapped while investigating Kenny and Boomer’s trailer. (Joe’s rationale for the B&E? “Uninvited visits always pay off,” he thinks as he picks their lock [106].) The villains dump him in the Mirror Maze with an unconscious Ricky, then set the maze is set on fire. It’s not a bad plan, as far as it goes; Frank and Joe were suspicious of Ricky, and the bound Joe next to Ricky might have given investigators the idea that Ricky had abducted Joe and both had been the victim of an accident. I don’t think any real investigator would believe that — it’s too convenient — but this is Bayport. I can’t imagine the Bayport Police Department has a great reputation, given how much of its work it outsources to teenage boys.

On the other hand, angering the Great and Powerful Fenton Hardy by harming / killing one of his sons seems less like tempting fate and more like demanding one’s own destruction from an angry and powerful god.

*****

Usually, this is where I’d end this post, but this Dixon makes a major misstep I have to talk about.

When you’re dealing with circuses and carnivals, you have clowns. It’s difficult get rid of them, and no matter how much you spray or put out traps, the best you’re likely to do is drive them into a neighbor’s property until that neighbor drives them back. But given the near-mandated presence of clowns, a writer should use creepy clowns, a reliable threat that readers and protagonists will respond to. Even though this Dixon doesn’t want to lean into the shifty reputation many carnies have — Susan calls them “friendly, honest people,” even though carnivals “attract a few crooks” (30) — you can’t cover clowns’ inherent creepiness, no matter how much clown white you use. Early in the book, Dixon uses that creepiness as a plot point, when Joe sees a clown through the Hardys’ kitchen window: “a ghostly white face with exaggerated, brightly colored features. It’s huge red lips were fixed in a demonic grin. … a clown from a horror film” (35).

That’s a solid hook, and it would be genuinely frightening if that clown kept popping up, leering at the boys and doing something violent or frightening. In this case, the clown lures Joe into an IED: a firework under a metal can, triggered by a tripwire. No one is hurt, and the bomb — powerful enough to toss Joe “into the air like a dead leaf” — is accompanied by a threatening note with a pun. Con Riley and the police show up, but they cede their authority to Frank and Joe. The boys, showing their usual legal acumen, hold on to the evidence (for no real reason) and decline to press charges (because vigilante justice is the best justice — who needs the authorities mucking things up?).

The horror clown plotline is mostly forgotten, though — Frank glimpses the clown later in the book, and Joe finds clown white in Boomer and Kenny’s trailer. Other than that, the brief promise of something genuinely frightening without being too kid-unfriendly is forgotten.