Crime in the Cards (#165)

Crime in the Cards has everything I like about a Hardy Boys story: a new hobby for Chet, a Bayport setting, hints of actual intimacy between the Hardys and their girlfriends, the introduction of a new character who makes more appearances, and a mystery with a blindingly obvious solution. Cards isn’t a perfect book, and it won’t appeal to everyone as strongly as it does to me, but I would put Cards among the best of the digests.

The setup for Cards is that Magic the Gathering is sweeping Bayport High, and Chet is one of the best players. Magic the Gathering is a fantasy-themed collectible card game; that means players buy packs of random cards of various rarities, and by that rarity, the cards may achieve value beyond their utility in the game. Of course, this Dixon isn’t allowed to use the name “Magic the Gathering”; instead, the knockoff product is called “Creature Commander,” which is a good enough name. This Dixon shows enough familiarity with the game to make the allusion clear and show he or she has either played Magic or done enough research to make it seem like he or she has.

As any adult might expect, playing Creature Commander doesn’t make Chet cool. Callie and Iola are baffled by the game, and even though Frank says, “The game’s fairly simple” (2), neither he nor Joe has any inclination to play. Joe says, “It’s not my kind of game, but …” and then shrugs. Why should they risk their aura of cool on one of Chet’s hobbies? (Although Chet snipes that they have no qualms about claiming to know all about Creature Commander to impress the girls.) More to the point, ex-BHS football player Sam Kestenberg bullies Chet and his competitors while also getting Joe’s goat.

The mystery begins in earnest when Daphne Soesbee’s Creature Commander deck is stolen from her locker. This is Daphne’s first appearance, and she makes two more appearances before the end of the digest series, in Trick or Trouble (#175) and Warehouse Rumble (#183); in those books she fills a role similar to the one she occupies here: a female acquaintance / friend for Chet. Not a girlfriend, but someone who shares Chet’s enthusiasms. I wish she had appeared more often in the books; the Hardys need more people who are in their orbit but not in their core group of chums, like Jamal Hawkins, and the gender balance of the cast could use some adjustment.

Anyway, Bayport High School responds to the theft and the popularity of Creature Commander in the manner of self-important bureaucracies everywhere: with ham-handed stupidity. (Given how poorly the school handles a cheating scandal in The Test Case [#171], that's unsurprising.) The cards are banned from school grounds, because what BHS wants more than anything is for the problem to go away with as little effort on the part of faculty and staff as possible. But Chet pulls an awesome new rare card, the Coyote, from a pack he bought, and he can’t resist showing it off in front of his Creature Commander playing friends at school. With the Coyote and Bargeist, another powerful rare, Chet believes he has a chance to win next week’s big Creature Commander tournament. (The Bargeist, if you care, is probably a reference to the barghest, which is either a monstrous black dog or ghost or elf in northern English folklore or a daemon that can look like a goblin or wolf in Dungeons & Dragons.)

Chet is caught with the cards in English class. He is supposed to be caring about Moby Dick, a 19th-century decorative doorstop masquerading as something relevant to 21st-century teenagers. When Chet returns at the end of the day to reclaim his cards, he finds they’ve been stolen from the teacher’s desk. Rather than putting his faith in the police, whom Chet doesn’t believe will take the case seriously, Chet turns to the Hardys. Honestly, it’s hard to blame Chet on this one: I can’t believe a Bayport PD officer would consider little pieces of cardboard could be worth hundreds of dollars. I almost imagine Con Riley blinking and asking Chet how much he could get for the ace of diamonds in his desk.

To solve the case, Frank and Joe navigate the world of Bayport collectible hobbies, from a mostly reputable hobby shop (the Dungeon Guild) to a slightly dodgy individual dealer (Gerry) to the extremely sketchy Black Knight, who uses the Internet not to sell cards directly but to meet with potential buyers in out-of-the-way places. Gerry also runs a cloak-and-dagger Creature Commander tournament where everyone wears a mask and winners take possession of one of the cards from the loser’s deck. (This used to be a real Magic the Gathering format, although the card the winner acquires a random card from the loser’s deck, and set aside before the game, rather than a card of the winner’s choice.) The Hardys (and Dixon) wander through the geeky subculture and keep from talking down about the game and its players. Heck, even Callie and Iola pick up the game by the end!

The girls learn the game even though Frank and Joe have considerable physical contact with them than usual. Their relationships start off on rocky ground; when Frank says he and Joe “have something more worthwhile” than vast amounts of money, Iola “hopefully” asks if it’s her and Callie (3). C’mon, Iola; have more pride than that. Fortunately, their relationships improve: In addition to two hugs and three hand squeezes, there are a total of three — three! — kisses. That might be a record for a Hardy Boys book! Usually, I would delve into the implications of all this intimacy, but this time I was struck by the veneer of normal heterosexual teenage behavior given to these acts. The squeezing is of hands; the kisses are on cheeks. This is, by any real measure, a pair of tepid relationships. So why stop somewhere between no touching and normalcy? Did the author feel pressure to include such performative signifiers for some reason? Or was Simon and Schuster convinced its target audience would react badly to mouth-on-mouth kisses, and this Dixon was able to push the envelope only so far?

If I were in charge of the Hardys, I wouldn’t be satisfied with this sort of restraint. I understand not even hinting at sexuality, sure, but a taste of honey is worse than none at all. And I don’t think snogging hurt Harry Potter at all, even among those in the Hardys’ target age range (8 to 12, according to the back cover).

However, if Frank and Joe are unable to meet Callie and Iola’s physical teenage needs, the brothers do treat them like trusted peers in the investigation — not equals, exactly, because the Hardys have considerably more experience at being detectives, and even Chet has helped them more. But Iola and Callie get to participate; sometimes they have to stand up for themselves to get that right, but Frank and Joe acknowledge they have something to contribute rather than insisting on increasing the mystery’s level of difficulty by refusing help. I mean, being the wheelwoman and cutting off avenues of escape with a vehicle aren’t the most exciting ways to help, but they are valuable; they can be crucial. This is a vast improvement; Iola also mentions having to hide in the trunk previously — she refuses to do so again — but the context is left unsaid. Was it for a mystery, or was it to sneak into a drive-in? Maybe to keep Aunt Gertrude from knowing the boys’ had invited strange women into the car?)

Unfortunately, even with the help, the Hardys fail, or at least they fail to meet their deadline, the Creature Commander tournament. Chet shells out a lot of cash — where does he get it all? We never see him work — to buy the cards to compete in the tournament, even though they aren’t as good as the ones he’s lost. Unfortunately, he’s disqualified in the tournament’s second round for accusing another player of using one of Chet’s stolen cards, then punching him. Yes, at the end of the book, Chet gets a special reward from the game’s creator for helping to expose the counterfeiting — wait, is counterfeiting as a crime restricted to currency? Anyway, for helping to preserve player confidence in Creature Commander cards, gets an even cooler card, so as always, being Frank and Joe’s friend is stressful but lucrative for Chet.

The Hardys and their friends also tour Bayport while solving the mystery, which I always enjoy. Sometimes I wonder if anyone at S&S ever thought to compile a bible or at least a map for Bayport, and then I realize how silly the idea is. In the Hardy Boys stories, continuity is a bug, not a feature; anything that might confuse the audience, might make readers think they are missing something, is to be avoided. So we won’t be see Old Bluff Road again; that’s no real loss, as the road’s only real purpose is to be a deserted backroad near cliffs, which is the role the Shore Road used to fill. Bayport’s northwest side, where industrial parks have replaced the scrub thickets Frank and Joe knew as children, will be rewritten into something else. The Kiff and Kendall restaurant chain will disappear into the ether, as will the abandoned Benson Mini-Mall be mentioned in further books — and, unfortunately, the new, nearby development of Magus Hills will also cease to exist after Cards.

This is a shame because Magus Hills makes Bayport about 241 percent cooler. I don’t care whether Magus Hills was named by a fantasy nut, or maybe a fanatical devotee of John Fowles; whether the development has streets named after Gandalf and Raistlin or Nicholas Urfe and Phraxos — or hey, it could be named after either Marvel Comics character with that name. I’d even settle for the Zoroastrian sense of the word.

(One place name that continues to be used is Jewel Ridge, Conn. The city is mentioned as the home of the one of the competitors in the Bayport Creature Commander tournament; the state isn’t mentioned, but Jewel Ridge’s location has been established in other books.)

The solution is blindingly obvious. Although Gerry, a high-school Creature Commander card dealer who doesn’t play the game, is an obvious suspect, the key clue is the presence of Mr. McCool, a belligerent part-time teacher who teaches kids how to use a print shop. Of course Mr. McCool is connected to the thefts, which he uses to acquire cards to copy in his printing plant. (Kestenberg the bully is pulling the actual thefts, funneling the cards to McCool, and then selling the fakes and real cards as the Black Knight, which was a bit harder to predict.) I find it hard to believe McCool could duplicate the cardstock and finish of the cards, but what trips him up is that he duplicates the ketchup stain Chet soiled his Coyote and White Knight cards with. Seeing the stain on a Coyote card caused Chet to start a fight at the big tournament, but only when the police revealed the stain was printed onto the card does the penny drop for Frank — only 100 pages after it did for me, but hey, we can’t all be geniuses.

(If you think it’s petty and foolish to claim genius status at being an adult smart enough to solve a mystery in a book aimed at pre-teens, well, I don’t care, Judgy McJudgerson.)