The Case of the Psychic's Vision (#177)

The Case of the Psychic’s Vision is a weird one, and that’s not meant as a compliment.

First, it presupposes that psychic powers are real, and not in a nebulous or deniable manner; psychic powers can reveal that which is hidden or forgotten. Real psychics are the rule, although the existence of fraudulent ones is acknowledged. Second, Fenton not only believes in these psychics but thinks they have probative value in investigations, both public and private. (They do not, of course.) Third, the Dixon writing Psychic’s Vision posits that everyone’s latent psychic abilities can be developed.

Wikipedia says Psychic’s Vision was the first of four Hardy Boys digests written by George Edward Stanley, although [CITATION NEEDED]. (The University of Southern Mississippi has Stanley’s papers, and the collection lists manuscripts and accompanying correspondence for Psychic’s Vision, The Mystery of the Black Rhino [#178], and The Secret of the Soldier’s Gold [#182], which would seem to settle the matter for those books; no mention is made of a manuscript of One False Step [#189]. ETA on 8 June 2019: The Southern Mississippi archive page also lists Hidden Mountain, #186, as one of his works.) Stanley wrote dozens of juvenile stories, including five Nancy Drew books, the Third Grade Detectives series, and the Spinetinglers series, the latter under the pseudonym of M.T. Coffin. Weld those last two together, and you can see how Psychic’s Vision might have come together.

In an interview, Stanley mentioned reading Nancy Drew, the Dana Girls, and the Hardy Boys as a child, and that inspired him to be a mystery writer. Stanley was born in 1942, so the Hardy Boys books he read would have been the original texts of the canon. That influence is visible in Psychic’s Vision. Chet is back to being a prankster, like in the early days; the author remembers the Hardys live at the corner of High and Elm (which shouldn’t be hard to remember, but, well …). The Hardy name gets a new pal excused for being late to class and causes a Vermont police officer to tell a bunch of kids everything about an ongoing hostage situation. A plot point in which a wealthy man pressures an employer to fire certain employees or risk financial ruin seems straight out of the first decade of the series. The book references early mysteries as well: “We got this airplane-shaped trophy when we solved a mystery at the airport … and we got this car-shaped trophy when we found out who was stealing all of the cars out on Shore Road” (44-45). These are clear references to The Shore Road Mystery (#6) and The Great Airport Mystery (#9), although they received trophies in neither book. Still, it’s a better way to shoehorn references to old mysteries into the book than most.

The psychic angle is an element that could have existed in the early books; certainly the original Disappearing Floor (#19) has events far less believable than psychic phenomena, but on the other hand, a fake psychic seems to be the kind of nonsense the Hardys would fight against — like they fought against a quack eye doctor in the original A Figure in Hiding (#16). But Colin Randles and his family are all good psychics trying to hide their abilities in Bayport.

Well, except for Colin’s sister, Nellie, who wants to hold a séance to cement her friendship with Iola and Callie. Chet sees this as an opportunity for a prank, and he and the Hardys hide near the Shaws’ gazebo. When Iola suggests they try to contact Roberta Sanders, a former P.E. teacher at BHS who went to South America and “just disappeared” (24), Chet responds. Now, it seems like a former teacher vanishing in South America is right up the Hardys’ alley, something they would have been hired to investigate, but I suppose “South America” is too large an area to search, even for the Hardys.

While Nellie and Colin’s parents break into the Shaws’ back yard to protest their daughter’s stupidity and people taking advantage of it, something grapples with Frank, drawing him into the bushes as it tries to strangle him. He doesn’t see who it is; he blames Colin, but it plainly wasn’t. But the culprit is never revealed. The only possible explanation, based on in-story logic, is that something supernatural tried to kill Frank. The only possible explanation, based on real-world logic, is that an old rival tried to kill Frank and was scared off by the kerfuffle caused by the Randleses.

Despite this otherworldly visitation, the main takeaway is that Chet went too far and the Randleses are good people — such good people, as a matter of fact, that Mr. Shaw wants to hire the unemployed Mr. and Mrs. Randles to run a new hardware store he just picked up. How fortunate! It’s always nice when capitalism works out for the little people. Everything’s going to be fine!

Except it isn’t. After demonstrating his psychic abilities by probably saving Joe and Phil Cohen from a fatal car accident and teaching the Hardys how to develop their own psychic abilities (!), Colin upsets the pretty, popular little world of pretty, popular girl Melanie Johnson by telling her she had been kidnapped as a two-year-old. This is the plot’s inciting event, but it occurs 55 pages into the book. No wonder this book runs 166 pages! (This is probably the longest book since Simon & Schuster took over the series at #86.)

Anyway, you make pretty, popular girls unhappy, and you’ll reap the consequences. In this case, Melanie’s boyfriend (and family chauffeur) pummels Colin in a Bayport back alley, necessitating that the Hardys track down Colin’s dumped body before taking him to Bayport General Hospital, the Hardys’ favorite emergency healthcare provider. (Another reason the book is 166 pages: It takes nine pages to find Colin and take him to the hospital.) The assistant principal yells at Colin with unwarranted venom, saying, “I despise people like you” (60). (Frank shrugs off Mr. Brooks’s abuse, which is horrible.) Melanie’s popular friends shoplift from Mr. Shaw’s hardware store, with the police shrugging when the Randleses report it. Pretty standard stuff, really.

But Melanie is pretty, popular, and rich, and when you make pretty, popular, rich girls unhappy, you also reap the economic consequences: Mr. Johnson threatens to call in Mr. Shaw’s loans unless he cans the Randleses. Mr. Shaw caves. It’s always crushing when capitalism doesn’t work out for the little people, which seems like it happens far more often than capitalism working out, although I suppose there’s a bit of confirmation bias there.

The Randleses head back to New York, but on the spur of the moment, Frank and Joe offer to let Colin stay at their home. They don’t consult with Fenton or Laura; when Mrs. Randles asks if the elder Hardys will be OK with an unforeseen lodger, neither brother opts to telephone a parent to ask. Sure! say the boys, and sure enough, they’re right.

With Colin back at BHS, things begin happening. Melanie wants to talk to Colin at her house when her parents are out, and shockingly, it’s not a trap. Melanie kinda remembers the abduction and wants Colin’s psychic help. (She also tells the boys her father told her to date the chauffeur, which is creeeeepy.) Before Colin can deliver any definitive info, the Johnsons come home and find the boys; after Mr. Johnson pulls a gun on them, Colin and the Hardys and escape through the back.

To up the creepy ante, Mr. Johnson commits Melanie to a psychiatric hospital. The boys track her down, but before Melanie can tell them anything, Mr. Johnson shows up, tries to strangle Colin, then collapses in tears after nurses separate them. The next day, at his law firm — the exquisitely named Stanley, Stanley, and Stanley — Mr. Johnson comes clean: His ex-con first wife gave birth to Melanie after their divorce, and when she started dating a thug, Mr. Johnson abducted Melanie to protect her from a criminal environment. He and his next wife, the current Mrs. Johnson, decided not to tell Melanie the truth. This should be a major scandal — non-custodial abductions are crimes, after all — but a combination of Mrs. Johnson’s indifference (she never filed a missing-person report for Melanie) and Mr. Johnson’s riches means he’ll probably escape all punishment. And all adverse publicity, as the story doesn’t show up in the Bayport Times.

That puts the book at about 150 pages, but Stanley has more to his story, so on we go. Melanie wants to track down her biological mother, so she asks Colin for help — the psychic, not the private detectives. Colin uses psychometry on Melanie’s toy lamb to learn bio-mom is in Vermont; three days of real detective work tracks Mary Davis Sullivan to West Middlefield, Vt. When Frank, Joe, their girlfriends, Colin, and Melanie arrive in West Middlefield, they learn Mrs. Sullivan is being held hostage by her ex-husband. Rather than let qualified police officers handle the deadly situation, the boys decide to butt in. They circle around the block, approach the house from the rear, and use Joe’s plan to pretend to be dopey teenagers who cut Mrs. Sullivan’s lawn, hoping Sullivan will be confused long enough for them to get the drop on him. It’s an intensely dumb plan, and it should end with several shooting deaths, but the power of the plot compels Sullivan to be dumb long enough for Joe and Colin to throw the contents of Mrs. Sullivan’s refrigerator at the criminal.

Evildoer subdued, they manage to announce to the police what has happened without being shot or arrested or both, and Melanie gets a moment with her biological mother. Just a moment — then the kids take off, leaving Melanie’s lamb with Mrs. Sullivan, and the story ends.

Thank Dixon for that. Psychic’s Vision is overlong and nonsensical (and not in a good way). But it’s done now, and we never see that psychic Larry Stu again. That’s something to be grateful for, at least.

Hide-and-Sneak (#174)

I have mentioned many times that I find the Bayport-based books that make use of the chums and explore the city are the best Hardy Boys books. Hide-and-Sneak, despite the mediocre, first-draft name, is another volume that supports my theory.

The story begins with Chet harassing Tony about the use of his boat. The boat’s name is never mentioned, but long-time readers of the series will remember it’s the Napoli. (I honestly don’t know whether Tony’s boat has ever been mentioned in the Simon & Schuster paperbacks.) Tony is too involved with his job at Mr. Pizza and moonlighting as a security guard at night at his father’s construction site to deal with Chet’s nonsense, though. (It’s been a while since the industrious Tony has worked for Prito Construction.)

Chet wants the boat because it’s a prerequisite for appearing in a student movie, as advertised in the Bayport Alternative. (Bold for an alternative paper to just label itself “alternative,” although I think a corollary of the Rule of Cool — nothing that labels itself “cool” can be cool — applies here.) Since his appearance in the sci-fi TV show Warp Space in Trouble in Warp Space (#172), he’s caught the acting bug — well, not the acting bug, because he has rejected working with local theater groups, like Frank suggested. I can’t blame him much; if working with the Hardys will teach you anything, it’s that you can’t think small; if you think small, you don’t get to go to Australia or Hong Kong or space. Also, the last time he was in a local play, in Cast of Criminals, Callie was almost killed over stolen diamonds. Since being with the Hardys means attempts on your life, again: You can’t think small. It’s the old scene-stealer’s adage: Might as well be murdered for a movie as a play.

Anyway, Frank and Joe have the Sleuth, “an older-model Chris-Craft boat that Frank and Joe had bought with their own earnings ad some help form their dad” (3). The Sleuth hasn’t been mentioned in literally years: It last came up in High-Speed Showdown, which was about six years before Hide-and-Sneak. It may have been even longer since the boys were paid for anything they did; in the original hardcover stories, they were paid all the time, but I’m having trouble remembering any rewards or fees they’ve collected since then. Still pretending their amateur status is intact for competitive purposes, I suppose.

The Hardys exist in a world in which money is ignored, which means class is as well — except as a signifier of a person’s worth. This becomes plain when the Hardys sign on for the student movie; no one asks if there’s any money involved for the actors. But for the actors, wealth is a proxy for class; the middle-class Hardys with their older but reliable motorboat are good, while Willow Sumner, who is using her father’s expensive powerboat, is a snobby bitch, and working-class Andy Slack and his friend, who have borrowed Andy’s father’s fishing trawler, turn to crime and treachery at the first sign of difficulties. (They are also so bad at both crime and treachery they come out of things with no money and are forced to switch sides back to the Hardys’.) The production itself has money woes, and the director is eager to smooch the hinder of the first rich person who will give him the time of day in order to increase the budget from shoestring to cruise-ship hawser.

I will give the Dixon full points for making the boys’ chief rivals a trio of girls without a) pairing them off with the boys or b) making one of them the fat one to match Chet / counteract Chet / be a lazy writer. Such arrangements happened occasionally from the ‘60s to the end of the Syndicate books, but they haven’t occurred often in the S&S digests. I mean, Joe takes the opportunity to get to know Willow’s friend Trisha Eads and ask her out — Joe calls her “fiesty” (106), so at least he has a type — but that’s just the way Joe rolls.

The movie, named Hide-and-Sneak, is improvised, lacking a script, to be filmed with digital cameras over three days on Barmet Bay. The actors’ goal is to find and keep the McGuffin, an unwieldy modern art project, while the cameras — one to each boat — capture enough footage to cobble together an interesting 80 minutes. I have my doubts, but that’s what the director and the producer, Joan Athelny, want.

Frank maintains an arch, cool demeanor throughout the planning stages despite his clear interest in drama. He’s unfamiliar with the term “McGuffin,” but he has seen the Shore Point Players’ production of The Miracle Worker, which featured Willow as Helen Keller, and Fenton and Laura had taken Frank to New York to see improv. (He’s also the one who suggested Chet take to the theater.) Frank works out the power struggles between writers, director, and producer as if he has been reading Variety. Frank obviously has some interest in theater or movies; why else would he have seen the Shore Point Players’ do anything? And yet he has no interest in the stage. He stayed out of the cast in Cast of Criminals, The Giant Rat of Sumatra (#143), and The London Deception (#158). He doesn’t use the investigation in Reel Thrills (#127) to force an entrance into the movie world. What is Frank’s endgame?

Whatever it is, Hide-and-Sneak doesn’t do anything to advance it. Each team gets a doggerel poem leading them to the McGuffin. The clues point toward places like Merriam Island and Shipwreck Cove; the latter is new, but the former — and its lighthouse keeper, whom Joe mentions is now buried on the island — appeared in The Secret of Skull Mountain (#27), as Frank and the Sleuth ended up on the island after running out of gas. The boys also mention the Barmet Shoals, which appeared in The Phantom Freighter (#26). This is pretty tight continuity work for a Dixon who thinks the Hardys live on Oak Street (81).

Because Joe’s attempts to lose the girls’ boat gets the Sleuth pulled over by the harbor patrol, Willow and her friends get the MacGuffin first. The boys climb the cliff at Shipwreck Cove, which is the location of the construction site Tony had been guarding — still was guarding, actually, as he jumps the Hardys’ cameraman. From the cliff, they spot the girls in another cove, but they don’t see the McGuffin; Joe correctly surmises the girls are using it as an anchor, and before dawn the next day, he cuts it loose and steals it for his team. The other two teams tear after the Sleuth, which ducks and swerves between small islands, eventually hiding behind a yacht. But the yacht is deserted, like the Mary Celeste (Frank tells the story of the doomed ship as they investigate); when Chet spots the owner swimming nearby, they rescue him, and the story comes to a screeching halt.

Peter Buckmaster — a name truly worthy of the Stratemeyer Syndicate — is the owner of the yacht, a Wall Street bigwig, and the owner of the construction site above Shipwreck Cove. He sweeps up the director and the cast, taking them to his under-construction home, and the director’s obsession with getting more funding for Hide-and-Sneak stalls the production for an entire day — long enough for Joe to ask Trisha out and for Buckmaster’s entire financial empire to crumble. Once the news of his financial misdeeds hits the air, Buckmaster hops on his yacht, which explodes in a fireball before it can get far from the cove.

Suicide? Frank’s not convinced. He thinks a strange woman in disguise has been lurking around the movie, both before and after the explosion, and he’s sure someone’s still skulking around the construction site; he sets a trap, but the intruder escapes in the blinding rain when Chet has to save Joe from tumbling off the cliff. Another trap nets Buckmaster’s ex-wife, who is both the producer and the woman in disguise. She financed the movie to get extensive footage of Barmet Bay, where she suspected her ex-husband was hiding himself (and his money); she suspects Buckmaster faked his death.

While the Hardys, Chet, and Mrs. Buckmaster search for Buckmaster’s hidden money, they are interrupted by Andy and his friend, who decide to steal Willow’s dad’s boat. Frank uses his “martial arts” to deal with Andy and his knife, but Buckmaster returns from his watery grave with a gun. Andy and his friend throw in with Buckmaster, claiming to be capitalists like him; Buckmaster has Andy tie up his friend, Chet, and the Hardys before pistol-whipping him. “Now you know the first two rules of successful capitalism,” he tells Andy’s unconscious body. “Never do anything you can get someone else to do, and never pay for anything unless you have to” (122). Good advice for a villain too!

While Buckmaster takes the powerboat, removes the bilge plug from the trawler, cuts the Sleuth loose, and makes his getaway with his ex as a hostage, Chet gets another hero moment: He crawls over to Andy’s knife and uses it to cut Frank loose. After everyone is free, Andy and his pal go for help while Joe retrieves the Sleuth and hotwires its damaged ignition. They set out after the powerboat, but unable to catch up with it, they attract the harbor patrol by shooting a gas can they have tied behind their boat with a flare gun. I would think the flare would be more than enough to attract police attention, but I am not a boy detective!

The combination of the harbor patrol attracted by the explosion and police alerted by Andy catch Buckmaster. Chet, after his two hero moments, takes the Hardys’ advice to try out for a production of South Pacific. Frank and Joe decline to do any more acting, ending the book by telling Chet, “If you’re going to be a star, it’s better to shine alone” (135). It’s good advice, even if Chet will never achieve anything without the Hardys, but at least that exit line allows the book to wrap up more than 10 pages early, just like End of the Trail (#162).