The London Deception (#158)

You know, it’s really great the Hardy Boys, those plucky underdogs, get to travel to Europe —

Oh, that’s right. They just went to Italy in the previous book, The Lure of the Italian Treasure. Unlike last time, The London Deception describes why they’ve been allowed to head abroad without supervision: They’re visiting Londoner Chris Paul, who stayed with the Hardys while he was an exchange student at Bayport High School the previous year. Why haven’t we seen or heard about Chris before? Because Chris came to Bayport last year, and no Hardy Boys books are set last year. Duh!

Also, Chris is boring. His only personality trait is ribbing the Hardys about American inferiority, and we all know he’s trying to mask his inferiority complex.

Anyway, while on their two-week trip to Jolly Old, Frank and Joe get roped into helping Chris’s father prepare for the premiere of his play, Innocent Victim. Dennis Paul is directing the play, and he’s cast Chris in the title role. Despite being open about how much the Paul family is involved in the play, he’s trying to hide that Innocent Victim is a vanity production, which the theater world looks down upon, by inventing a producer no one sees. The only glimpse we get of the production is a courtroom scene, putting me in mind of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, but that is probably because of my limited knowledge of the theater.

Joe can’t imagine being a performer. “If I was on that stage in front of all those people, my stomach would be doing back flips,” Joe says. “I’d be sweating bullets!” (4). In Danger on the Air (#95), Joe is overwhelmed by the attention he receives after saving a man’s life on TV, so this sort of reaction has been mentioned before. That being said, Joe’s been on stage before, in a minor role as a Baker Street Irregular in the eponymous play in The Giant Rat of Sumatra (#143). (The other actors say he’s not very good.) Frank and Joe had small roles as policemen in Homecoming Nightmare, put on by the Bayport Players’ in Cast of Criminals (#97). Joe was part of a “burlesque orchestra,” led by Chet, at their high-school graduation in The Great Airport Mystery (#9); the graduations were ignored, so we should perhaps ignore Joe’s performance. More seriously, he played guitar in a gig at the Hessian Hotel in Track of the Zombie (#71), and the same book mentions he “often” plays guitar in student concerts at BHS. In the revised Flickering Torch Mystery (#22), he’s part of a combo called “South Forty” with his brother and friends; he plays guitar at a folk / country rock gig in that book.

Joe’s scared of something else as well, although it’s hard to tell if it’s Iola or the play’s technical director, Jennifer Mulhall, or women entirely. Jennifer, who is described as “young” but someone who “radiated confidence and commanded respect” (4), singles Joe out for special attention. She also gives Joe a *wiiiiiiink* as she tells him good night at one point. Joe seems to like Jennifer, as Frank says, “I kind of figured you liked being around her” (95), which causes Joe to blush, but that’s as far as his responses go; he does nothing else, not even thinking of Iola, around Jennifer — not even when she saves him from falling off a building. (Admittedly, he does give her a hug when he rescues her, tied up in a closet, but that’s a little creepy; she doesn’t have much say in the matter.)

Anyway, the production of Innocent Victim has had a run of unfortunate “accidents,” just like you’d expect for a location / business that is used as a locale in the first few chapters of a Hardy Boys book. Jennifer’s assistant, Neville Shah, broke his wrist before the book begins, and he eventually quits. So does the stage manager. In the first chapter, three spotlights blow while Jennifer is leaning off a catwalk adjusting other lights, and she goes over the edge, with only Joe’s strong arm and quick reflexes saving her. Upon investigating, Frank thinks the spotlights’ malfunction “might have been sabotage” (19), which should go unsaid — it’s an insult to the readers’ intelligence to suggest otherwise. Later, a fire (and the excellent sprinkler system that douses it) damage the production’s costumes, and the theater’s sound board is stolen.

The theater’s resident ghost is spotted in the control booth when both the spots overheat, and the theater people immediately bring up the supernatural. (Even Frank has trouble maintaining his skepticism — “Even I’m beginning to think this ghost is for real,” he says [39] — but that’s less a product of the plot and more a result of slipshod writing.) I wanted London Deception to be a full Scooby-Doo: a real-estate scam pulled off by using a supernatural natural legend and a person in a costume. The villainy is centered around a real-estate scam at a theater with a ghost legend; the owner of the theater needs Innocent Victim out so he can sell the theater to a soccer player who wants to open the second location of his restaurant in the remodeled theater in time for the World Cup. But even though the villains have a former circus acrobat amongst their number, they don’t commit to the ghost bit, and that’s disappointing. Perhaps it’s because the ghost, the wife of a former owner of the theater who committed suicide, is just a ghostly presence rather than a true g-g-g-ghost! I understand even villains have to work with what they’re given, but Mr. Jeffries, the owner, needed to start playing up the ghost’s malevolence as soon as he hatched his stupid, stupid plan.

Frank and Joe investigate — of course — and according to a private investigator hired by Jeffries, Frank and Joe “have some fame as amateur sleuths” (43), which is good to know; in the last ten or so books, that’s varied. (The idea their career would be secret never made any sense to me.) Frank sounds like he’s learned some investigative tricks in London Deception; when he questions a member of the cast, he manages to frame his questions to her in a way that doesn’t sound accusatory. Shockingly, that’s a big step forward. Also a step forward, at least technologically: To investigate the theater’s history, Joe “surfs the internet” (38) and searches for the Quill Garden Theater. Joe gets sixteen results, which is both ridiculous and possible for 1999. Using Google today, I found 844,000 results on that phrase (although only three when using quotes around the term), and the theater doesn’t even exist in my world.

Since Frank and Joe are in a foreign country, they get to sightsee — well, they traipse through London landmarks while investigating, which is almost like sightseeing. They go on a Haunted London tour, and they follow suspects to Madame Tussaud’s, the Tower of London, Victoria Park, and the Boleyn Ground (unnamed in the story), the home of the West Ham United soccer team. That’s the way I like to see new people and places: while completely distracted!

I apologize for this digression, but I did research, and by Dixon, I’m going to use it: Footballer John Moeller wants to open his restaurant’s second location in preparation for the next World Cup, which Moeller intimates will be in England, but that doesn’t make any sense. Deception was published in 1999; the year before, the World Cup was in France, while the next scheduled one, in 2002, was scheduled to be held in Japan and South Korea. England hasn’t hosted the World Cup since 1966, and it isn’t among the scheduled future hosts. I think the author was hoping American kids wouldn’t know or care about the World Cup schedule, but that’s playing with fire — given youth soccer participation rates, American kids were probably much more likely to know about the World Cup than American adults.

However, the author was much more knowledgeable about the Premier League, the top league of English (and occasionally Welsh) soccer. The fictional Moeller plays for West Ham United (“the Hammers”), a London-based team that has generally been mediocre or worse since London Deception was written. (West Ham, as Dean Thomas’s favorite team, is the only soccer team mentioned in the Harry Potter series.) Every year in the Premier League, the three worst teams are sent down to the second-best league (now called The Championship), and three Championship teams are elevated to the Premier League. West Ham was relegated from the Premier League after the 2001-02 season, spending three seasons in the second tier, and then again after the 2010-11. West Ham spent only one year in the less-prestigious Championship that time before returning to the Premier League.

Frank and Joe discover that soccer hooliganism is a real thing. The boys almost get trampled during a scuffle, and they get thrown into the stadium’s detention area, which is filled with hooligans, for trying to approach Moeller after the match. West Ham has links to hard-core soccer hooliganism going back to the ‘60s. Surprisingly, according to Wikipedia, West Ham hooliganism isn’t restricted to fights with opposing fans: They also fight one another, which is only unusual to an American in that these hooligans organize themselves into factions to do their in-fighting.

In Deception, West Ham is defeated by Chelsea, another London-based team. Chelsea has been one of the best clubs in English soccer, a charter member of the “Top Four” group (now the “Big Six”) that has dominated the sport this century. Chelsea has won five league championships in the 21st century, finishing outside of the top four (in a 20-team league) only five times. No wonder West Ham loses!

Back to the story … Despite a lack of brain power — when Jennifer goes missing, Frank and Joe ignore a consistent tapping sound in the theater, and they let Jeffries get the last word in a detective / villain exchange near the end — they catch Jeffries, Shah (aka Anacro, the Human Spider), and the play’s former stage manager with the help of Moeller and the London police. The Hardys don’t even have to resort to karate to catch these effete London theater villains; Frank uses a mannequin’s arm to smack the stage manager, and Joe uses “powerful punches” (145) to knock out Shah.

Of course, Innocent Victim turns out to be a hit, and the most chill powerful West End producer, Mr. Schulander, shows up to dangle funding in front of Dennis Paul. A happy ending!