The Mystery of the Silver Star (#86)

So this is how the Simon & Schuster digests begin: with the theft of a bicycle.

After reading the final book, The Mystery of the Silver Star feels like part of a different series for two reasons. The most obvious is Silver Star is the product of a different era, both chronologically — it was written almost two decades before Motocross Madness — and in the conception of how a “typical” Hardy Boys book should be constructed. In Silver Star, the link to the previous paperbacks hasn’t been severed yet; Desert Phantom (#84) is mentioned early on, and all the previous paperbacks are listed on a front flyleaf. More importantly, Silver Star feels invested in the lives of the Hardys and their friends in a way later books don’t.

The Hardy adults are part of the story. Frank and Joe have to ask permission for long trips. (They sometimes are said to ask later in the series, but in this case, it feels like a hurdle rather than a perfunctory line of narration.) The family has a Gertrude-cooked supper together, and the family banters during the meal. Laura Hardy worries about her sons, coming up with chores to keep them at home when a psychic predicts disaster for them — I mean, she’s listening to a psychic, so the book isn’t perfect, but the concern is real, as is her belief in her sons.

The Hardys’ friends aren’t ignored. Callie has a birthday party at El Caballo Blanco, and she warns Frank not to miss it, like he did last year. The description of the party takes several pages, and one of the gifts involves an inside joke that goes on for far too long. Chet serves as an inspiration for a role Joe has to slip into so the Hardys can catch the villain off guard. The boys borrow Laura’s station wagon — geez, I can’t remember the last time that was mentioned — to go on a double date with Callie and Iola, and when they have to divert to New York, they make sure Laura knows she can use their van. By itself, this investment in the Hardys’ lives doesn’t make Silver Star a good book, but the effort makes it a better book.

But the second reason is one I haven’t touched on often while writing about the series. A few months before Silver Star was published, Simon & Schuster released the first few Hardy Boys Casefiles, a parallel series with a different continuity. In the first volume, Dead on Target, Iola Morton died in a car bombing meant for the boys, and Frank and Joe took on a group of assassins called, well, “the Assassins,” and work with / against “The Gray Man,” an agent of “The Network.” Joe vowed to kill Iola’s murderer; the boys use firearms — not in the casual way, like in the early books of the canon, but in the serious, gritty ‘80s way.

It’s kinda silly, but I get it: The Hardys must’ve seemed pretty hokey to the adults creating the series at the time. The Casefiles stories are a product of their era, and despite the series running twenty books longer than the S&S digests, the Casefiles were canceled almost a decade earlier, in 1997. (That’s what happens when you put a new book out every month, I suppose.)

Anyway, Silver Star attempts to differentiate the digests from the Casefiles. Instead of a bombing, the instigating crime is the theft of a bicycle — an experimental, top-of-the-line racing bicycle, yes, but still a bicycle. It’s hard to think of a larger disparity in crimes than the one between bicycle theft and assassination. When the stakes escalate, Frank tries to downplay their experience: “Kidnapping is a little out of our league,” he says (97). This has literally never been true; the Hardys rescued the kidnapped Fenton in The House on the Cliff (#2) and Chet and Biff in The Missing Chums (#4), and as recently as The Demon’s Den (#81), they’d battled kidnappers. Later, Silver Star’s plot veers toward Dead on Target, as it includes espionage and the cooperation of a spy, but even that is used to illustrate the difference between the two series: The spy is a CIA agent, not from the fictional, ultra-super-dooper-secret Network, and no one dies. The spy the boys capture has the decency to be embarrassed that he was outwitted by teenagers rather than committing suicide, like the Assassin did in Dead on Target.

***

Silver Star has its good points, but as I mentioned above, they mostly revolve around the depth of the supporting characters and Frank and Joe treating them like real people. Chet steals his early scene, using his double-dip ice-cream cone to impersonate a reporter and make fun of the set-up: “Bayport’s pride and joy, that duo of dynamite detective work, Frank and Joe Hardy! … Eighteen-year-old Frank Hardy, the brown-haired, brown-eyed older of the two — … give me your honest opinion. Don’t you think all of this hoopla is a bit much for just a silver-colored bicycle?” (2-3). Chet knows his friends are working because when they are on a case, Joe is wears sunglasses — which isn’t true — and because “Frank always comes off like a walking encyclopedia on topics he didn’t used to know anything about” (4), which is absolutely true.

As it turns out later, some of Frank’s arcane knowledge is that competitive cyclists sweat, and they drink water to replace the fluid. I mean, the narration specifically says Frank mentions this “to demonstrate his knowledge of cycling” (13). I don’t remember the ’80s that well, but I do know that we were told all the time when competing, even in more sedate sports, that we needed to drink water.

Is it any wonder Frank and Joe ditch Chet the first time he turns his back (for more ice cream)? He thoroughly broasted them. (Isn’t that what the kids say today?) And Frank and Joe can’t even come up with a decent parry when Chet says, out of nowhere, “I’m built for endurance, not for speed” (3). I mean, the possible put-downs for that out-of-nowhere line practically write themselves.

So racing cyclist Keith Holland asks Frank and Joe (through Con Riley) for their help. The setup has been done a bazillion times before in the Hardy Boys: Pranks / accidents have been following Keith during his long-distance charity race against Gregg Angelotti, and Keith, worried, wants Frank and Joe to get to the bottom of things. After chatting with Keith in his motor home, which is decorated like a kid’s bedroom with trophies and ribbons, Frank and Joe accept. As always when Frank and Joe investigate, things have to get worse before they get better. In this case, someone shoots Keith’s experimental super-bike, the Silver Star, during a race and steals the bike. Later, Keith disappears, leaving a note behind saying he’ll be back, but no one connected to him believes he left of his own free will. To find him, Frank and Joe solve the mystery of Keith’s neighbor, who has been arrested for espionage, and discover a rogue secret agent. Of course they find Keith and his bike, and they capture the spy. The end!

I mean, it’s not really that simple. Silver Star has a few complicating factors, of course. There’s a local psychic, Molly Frankel, whom everyone takes seriously — Frank says, “She’s always been legit” (37) — and who makes several doom-laden predictions about Frank and Joe and Keith. Someone plants a bug in the Hardys’ van, but they don’t notice him until he jumps out — while the van is in motion — and they don’t find the bug for days; the spy escapes, even though Frank makes the van go so fast the tires squeal on dirt. (When they do find the bug, they crush it, rather than use it to spread misinformation, and the villain mocks the brothers’ jejune conversations during their final confrontation.) When a suspect resists their questioning, Frank “wished [they] had something that looked like a private investigator license” (30), never thinking, well, Frank might be able to get a license; the suspect calls Bayport “crime-ridden” (30), not even knowing teenagers are the city’s main crime investigators. Frank gets an address wrong, and he and Joe end up in the middle of ‘80s New York, where they are accosted by a gang of knife-wielding auto thieves who are scared away by their car alarm.

Once Keith vanishes, the documentarian filming the race admits he pulled the pranks, trying to build some drama for the narrative. Realizing their investigation has uncovered nothing of value, the Hardys head to Keith’s hometown, Boulder, Colo., to look into Keith’s next-door neighbor, Mariana Bornquist, whom the CIA has accused of espionage. The CIA initially arrests Frank and Joe for breaking into Mariana’s home, but one phone conversation with Fenton gets Frank and Joe out of custody and into the thick of the investigation. (I like to think it wasn’t Fenton’s name or reputation that bailed out his sons but rather Fenton’s knowledge that the CIA isn’t allowed to conduct domestic operations in the United States, and the FBI should be in charge.)

(Side note: The narration contends doughnut holes are a local delicacy in Boulder. They’re everywhere now, of course, but Silver Star was written in 1987. Does anyone know if this was true? I mean, Dunkin’ Donuts created the first Munchkins in 1972, and Tim Hortons introduced Timbits in 1976, but I don’t know how great their market penetration would have been other than the northeast / northern Midwest.)

Frank and Joe’s plan to capture Derek Willoughby, the spy who blackmailed Mariana into stealing weapons secrets, is complicated by the boys’ lack of operational intelligence, and Frank and Joe run headlong into the villains’ trap. Derek’s thugs kidnap the boys but find the tracker the CIA had planted on the boys without their knowing only halfway through the abduction. (It’s good to know the CIA suspects the boys are morons.) The thugs take the Hardys to Keith, Derek, and the bike. Derek is looking for the microfilm Mariana claimed to have hidden in Keith’s silver bike, now disassembled; Frank cooks up a cock-and-bull story to convince them to reassemble it, then rides out the door with Frank and Keith running behind. The CIA, in the area anyway because of the tracker, and Derek is humiliated. As he should be — not only was he foiled by teenagers, but the microfilm was in a bike in Keith’s Bolder garage, not in the super experimental Silver Star.

And that’s the end of the beginning for Simon & Schuster’s digests, and that’s the end of the end for me. Thanks for reading! I may be back with other posts, but don’t expect anything on a regular schedule. (Like you should expect that anyway, given this site’s posting history.)

Alternate Visions of the End

So Motocross Madness is an unsatisfying ending to the Hardy Boys digests. That gives me the opportunity to ask myself: How would I have ended the series?

First of all, I would have waited until #200 to end the series. (That’s comic-book thinking; comic-book publishers love to make a big deal out of round numbers.) Continuing the six-book per year schedule, that would have meant #200 would have been released near the end of 2006 … or we could stall for time and release it in 2007, the Hardy Boys 80th anniversary. Making it a Christmas event, playing on the nostalgia market to make it a gift idea (more comic-book thinking) probably would have been more profitable; it would also leave the 80th anniversary year clear for the relaunch. I would have also made the final book an event: double the length, released in a hardcover edition. (More comic-book thinking; round numbers, extra-long issues, and special cover formats go together. I’m not suggesting the book should have a chrome or lenticular or a die-cut cover … well, if it’s a paperback, maybe a die-cut cover wouldn’t be so bad.)

As for the story itself, I would have the Hardys and their friends graduate from high school again. That would be more of a background element, though, like it was in the original Great Airport Mystery (#10). The real mystery would come from Hurd Applegate — or his estate, at least. Hurd appeared in The Tower Treasure, the first Hardy Boys story, and he most recently appeared in The Secret of the Island Treasure (#100), so it makes sense that he’d have a role in #200. In my ending, I’d have Hurd’s will leave a mystery for the Hardys; whether that mystery is a puzzle he constructed to challenge them or an ambiguity they need to clear up or something Hurd wanted resolved doesn’t matter much to me.

The Hardys would be helped by all the chums who’d had a role in the past: Chet, Tony, Biff, Phil, Jamal Hawkins, even Perry Robinson and Jerry Gilroy. Iola and Callie would get a chance to be real girlfriends and to stand by themselves as more than girlfriends; after all, Callie was class valedictorian in The Great Airport Mystery, and with an expanded page count, there’s no reason they can’t participate more fully in the mystery. Fenton, Laura, and Gertrude should make more than token appearances, and if the book throws in some connection to the Hardys’ forebears, well, so much the better.

Ideally, different eras and prominent locales would be represented; a trip to Cabin Island is a must, and they should take a Chinese junk as a ferry to New York, a reference to the Mystery of the Chinese Junk (#39). Perhaps they can visit mad scientist Eben Adar from the original Disappearing Floor (#19), or failing that, they can poke around the Perth estate from the revised edition. Their science teacher / track coach, Cap Bailey, who appeared in a couple of ‘50s mysteries, can advise them, or maybe something sinister is happening at Woodson Academy, Fenton’s alma mater, which showed up in The Yellow Feather Mystery (#33). Jack Wayne and Sam Radley could make cameos. Even one of the dumb mysteries could be referenced; an UGLI or SKOOL agent from The Secret Agent on Flight 101 (#46) could pop up, for instance. The Blackwing Mansion from The Blackwing Puzzle (#82) might be another return locale. Heck, the Hardys could explore all the historical mansions in Bayport, perhaps using a previously unknown tunnel system.

Say, I like that idea. Linking these tunnels to Bayport’s history, like the slave trading done by the original owner of the Blackwing Mansion, or to the city’s Chinatown might give the book an extra hook. No — link it to the Prohibition era, during which the series began.

That’s what I would want, but Simon & Schuster would probably want links to the books they published after they bought out the Stratemeyer Syndicate. It would be hard to fault them for that, and I’m not against that. Unfortunately, those digests — the ones I’ve gone over here — are not as engaging as the original canon, and to be honest, they aren’t going to be as enduring. (And most likely, the paperback part of the canon, #59-85, won’t outlast the S&S digests.)

So what might we add to this final story from these digests? WBPT has shown up a few times, and I think Jamal Hawkins is a worthy addition to the supporting cast. I’d even add Daphne Soesbee to the mix, even though she’s shown up only three times. Author Stephen D. Sullivan has made Officer Gus Sullivan a viable choice, although he’s less vital than Con Riley or Chief Collig. Granite Cay, the island in The Secret of the Island Treasure, might make another worthwhile setting. Happy Burger from The Case of the Cosmic Kidnapping (#120) could pop up. They solve mysteries based around Bayport sports entertainment complexes, temporary or otherwise, more than a dozen times, so I suppose they could visit an empty stadium or two; they have a proclivity for amateur dramatics, so skulking around the Grand Theater from Cast of Criminals (#97) or the Orpheum from The Giant Rat of Sumatra (#148) might work, especially if the tunnel system had an exit there.

But I’m shoehorning; I don’t have any real enthusiasm for any of these, save Jamal. Vette Smash from Wreck and Roll (#185) could play a concert in one of those theatres for a post-graduation bash; that would work. Day of the Dinosaur (#128) introduced the Bayport museum, which is located at the former Sackville Mansion; the mansion would make a good stop on the underground tunnel tour, and the museum’s dinosaur park, stocked with “Dino-bots,” is worth revisiting. Psychic Colin Randles and his family from The Case of the Psychic’s Vision (#177) would be fun to mock, if nothing else.

The story would need the usual trappings: the brothers getting knocked out, people getting kidnapped, car trouble, strange forms of transportation (I don’t think they’ve ever used Segways), smugglers. (That would go with the tunnels.) The food should be plentiful; the storms should be severe. Every bit of crimefighting kit should be at their fingertips or under a coating of dust in storage, and science-fictional devices should be available. (Could combine that with transportation and put the brothers in the new Bayport Hyperloop.) Parental supervision should be nonexistent, even though the Hardy parents and Gertrude would be present; the boys should order the police force around like their own private security team. The Sleuth and the Skyhappy Sal should return.

The boys should kiss their girlfriends like they mean it, just once.

We obviously didn’t get this, and we never will. But honestly, I don’t think I’m asking for too much — just everything I want.

Motocross Madness (#190)

So Motocross Madness is how the digests end: with Frank and Joe competing in a motocross competition while trying to find out who’s sabotaging the event.

On one hand, it’s an entirely appropriate ending. It’s a Bayport story, and Bayport is the heart of the Hardy Boys stories. The plot involves a multi-stage competition in which Frank and Joe succeed as talented amateurs; these pop every ten books or so. (See Warehouse Rumble, #183, Trouble Times Five, #173, Training for Trouble, #161, or a dozen other books.) Frank and Joe make passing mentions of their history; Frank says, “I remember reading accounts of Hardys riding cycles as long ago as nineteen twenty-seven” (26) — 1927 being the year the first Hardy Boys book was published — and Joe says, “Sometimes I feel like we’ve been solving mysteries for the better part of a century” (40). Aunt Gertrude makes an appearance to worry about the boys’ safety, which is something she always used to do, and when she gave it up, we discovered no one else really cared. Joe also mentions that time “we rode down Bay Road to that House by the cliffs” (40), a reference to The House by the Cliff, the second Hardy Boys story (and still one of the greatest). Bayport continuity pops up in TV station WBPT and the Bayport Journal-Times, which evidently is a merger of two of Bayport’s newspapers.

Stephen D. Sullivan wrote Motocross Madness, and he’s probably the best candidate to write a send-off. (Well, maybe Chris Lampton, who seemed to specialize in Bayport-area mysteries, would have been a better choice, depending on your point of view, but Lampton hadn’t written a book since The Case of the Cosmic Kidnapping, #120.) The book has a few of his hallmarks: Callie, Iola, and Chet head to Jewel Ridge, Conn., and the motorcycle offered as a prize for the winner of the motorcycle competition is an O’Sullivan SD5, with SD standing for “Stephen D.,” one imagines.

On the other hand, I don’t believe the plan was to make Motocross Madness the final book. When the Casefiles series was axed seven years before, Simon & Schuster had at least one completed (or nearly completed) book in the pipeline, and nothing about this book screams “grand send-off.” (That’s not surprising; little about the digests suggests any sort of overarching plan.) Chet, Iola, and Callie are barely mentioned; the only pal present is Jamal Hawkins, who I think is a great character but who would be an odd choice to represent the Hardys’ chums in a final book. The continuity notes could have been bolted on, and Sullivan writing probably was a coincidence.

Motorcross Madness is an inoffensive book, with few of the previous books’ gaffes that made me chortle and make feverish notes. But the mystery itself is half-baked. Sullivan needed more space to develop the story, whether to check on the condition of a competitor whose motorcycle literally explodes in the middle of a jump or to explain how Frank and Joe knew the motive for some of the incidents or to explore the effects of a bridge collapse in the middle of a race. Still, Sullivan keeps the story moving, which excuses a lot of problems.

So Frank and Joe get roped into charity motocross competition by Jamal, who — in addition to being an small-plane pilot — is also a pretty good amateur motorcycle racer. Since the event uses smaller 125-cc bikes and is designed to raise money for the medical expenses of the daughter of a motocross track owner, Frank and Joe don’t need too much convincing. (Today, Corrine Fernandez and her family would head to GoFundMe, which is far less of a hassle than designing, promoting, coordinating, and operating a motocross competition. See how far we’ve come with health care in just 14 years!) The prize is the O’Sullivan, which is similar to post-war BSA motorcycles. The O’Sullivan’s real attraction, however, is that Corrine’s father restored it, in part, with pieces from the garage of Gus Metzger, who designed a super-engine that was destroyed in its first run. (Metzger also destroyed the engine’s plans before the first run and died before he could build a second engine.)

The problems start early. While Frank and Joe are signing up, a helmet-clad trespasser bulls his way out of the track’s office and past the brothers. They can’t be arsed with stopping him or chasing him, which gives me Spider-Man flashbacks. (The non-burglar doesn’t end up killing their Uncle Ben or even their Aunt Gertrude.) Someone uses a small fire at the pre-race party at the VFW to clear the room while he / she / they commit petty theft. During the first day of competition, one of the two top pros at the event is knocked out of contest and into the hospital when his motorcycle explodes during a stunt jump. (No one seems to care; the Hardys don’t interview him or check in on the investigation of the explosion; they don’t even visit the fellow in the hospital.) Someone tries to steal the first day’s gate, which the brothers do care about; they recover the money but lose the thief. On the second day, someone smacks Jamal on the skull, ties him up, and takes his place on the track, racing badly to eliminate him from the competition. But Frank and Joe discover Jamal and alert track officials; before the impostinator can be unmasked (unhelmeted, I guess), he leads Frank and Joe on a merry chase through a nearby construction yard and escapes.

The suspect list is too long to list — or really, the suspects are too indistinguishable to care about. Only Justin Davies stands out, and that’s because of his unspecified grudge with Jamal. We don’t know how Justin and Jamal’s enmity started, but it has escalated; Jamal says Davies “nearly ran me over at a crosswalk last week. Then he tried to make it look like my fault” (45). Before one of the races, Davies uses his motorcycle to splash mud all over Jamal, which causes Jamal to start a fistfight with Davies. With all due respect to Sullivan, I doubt Jamal would have responded with violence so quickly; he’s an upper-middle–class African-American kid who probably endured more and has been blamed for most of it. (As evidenced by Davies trying to make the crosswalk incident look like Jamal’s fault.) He’s never shown a hair trigger before. I have to imagine it would take a shaved-head fellow like Davies using the n-word before Jamal flew off the handle; I also have no doubt Davies probably has used the n-word in Jamal’s presence.

In any event, a reprobate roll call would be useless. Equally useless would be delving into the accuracy of the motocross stunt names Sullivan uses, like “no-footed can-can” and “cowboy split” (61); the former seems legit, the latter not, but I don’t care. Anyway, the final event — an endurance race — starts without Frank and Joe having made any real headway on whodunnit or why. (I mean, they suspect someone wants the O’Sullivan, but that’s a no-brainer.) During the endurance event, thugs on a motorcycle knock out Jamal and another racer in an attempt to steal their rides. Frank and Joe — in the middle of the race, no less — defeat them, tie them up, and rejoin the race. The two thugs are revealed as outclassed competitors who faked injuries to drop out and concentrate on their thieving.

Frank and Joe regain some of their track positon, but as they pass over a bridge, it collapses behind them. They do not seem to care about the effect this will have on the competitors they passed. They end up tied for third, with Corrine’s brother, Paco, winning over the remaining pro, Amber Hawk. (I will give Sullivan considerable credit on one front: The competitors are pretty evenly distributed between men and women, and no one suggests the women / girls are at any disadvantage against their male competitors.) At the unveiling of the O’Sullivan, a masked rider steals the prize, racing off toward the construction site again. This time the Hardys capture him, burying him and the motorcycle under cement dust.

So the mystery’s solution is that there were two different groups working the competition, which would have been interesting if Frank and Joe had figured it out beforehand. The robbery-type crimes were perpetrated by the two Frank and Joe caught on the track; the ones that were designed to eliminate competitors were perpetrated by the father of another competitor, who wanted his daughter to win the O’Sullivan; he also sabotaged the course — including the collapsing bridge — to help his daughter. When that didn’t work, he turned to grand theft motocross.

So why is the O’Sullivan so danged important? Well, it’s because of the parts from Metzger’s garage — specifically, the gas tank. While Metzger burned the blueprints for his supercycle, he used the gas tank to sketch the original design, making the tank valuable … assuming its use as a, you know, gas tank, didn’t also destroy the sketches.

But the good news is that Corrine’s family not only has the money from a successful fundraiser, but they also have the O’Sullivan and the gas-tank designs. Frank and Joe have the pleasure of competing and another mystery solved under their belt. The last page has a note of finality to it; when asked what they are going to do next, Frank says, “Who knows?,” and Joe asks, “A long vacation, maybe?” (154). Jamal hopes they will “both be ready to rev up and race new criminals” (154), which may be a hint about the new series; the Undercover Brothers ad on the inside back cover, which faces the final page, claims the brothers will have motorcycles.

As for me? Well, I was a little disappointed by the finale, but I did learn that “Klaxon” is a trademarked term, as Sullivan capitalizes the word. According to Wikipedia, a Klaxon is specific warning siren — think the “ahooga” of a submarine as it dives. This is a small consolation, though.

But I’m not done! I have one last digest to go: the first one. I’ll be back in two weeks for that one.

George Edward Stanley

One Final Step is George Edward Stanley’s last published book set in anything resembling the original Hardy Boys continuity. He published a few Hardy Boys Secret Files books after Final Step, and he wrote a pair of Hardy Boys books that weren’t published and don’t have a date in the University of Southern Mississippi’s George Edward Stanley Papers guide. One of the unpublished books was written originally for the later Undercover Brothers series with the original title Living with Blue People; the title morphed to Desert Danger and finally to Sahara Oil!, but Living with Blue People is as nearly as perfect an encapsulation of Stanley’s Hardy Boys work as can be imagined. Like his Hardy Boys books, the title is inexplicable on its own and completely clashes with the Hardy Boys style and tone, and I can’t read it without thinking about how bad it is.

I’ve been hard on Stanley, but that’s only because his Hardy Boys books are awful. But that’s just his Hardy Boys books! He wrote literally dozens of other children’s books, as evidenced by the archived version of his faculty web page; some of his works written under pseudonyms, like the digest Hidden Mountain (#186) and his Secret Files work, aren’t even included. He was a professor of African and Middle-Eastern languages and linguistics at Cameron University, a state college in southwest Oklahoma. Another biography has more astonishing information: He earned a doctorate in literature! He was inducted into the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame in 1994! He was a member of the National Council of Less-Commonly Taught Languages, which isn’t that prestigious, but it’s fun to know! He taught creative writing to others! He was a working writer that publishers turned to, time and again!

George Edward Stanley, who passed away in 2011, had an amazing career. His family and friends should be proud of him, regardless of what I say about him. I mean, his Hardy Boys stories are poor, which is disappointing, given that reading the Hardys and other juvenile series inspired his writing career, but that’s just one aspect of his impressive life. The rest of his career extended far beyond most people’s achievements.

One False Step (#189)

I approached the penultimate Hardy Boys digest, One False Step, with some trepidation. George Edward Stanley, who wrote One False Step, had also written two of the worst books in the digest series (The Case of the Psychic’s Vision, #177, and Hidden Mountain, #186). What if One False Step lived up — or down, if you want to think of it that way — to that standard? Or would it be worse if it didn’t?

Well, One False Step is not in the same class as Psychic’s Vision or Hidden Mountain, for ill or for good. It’s obviously a Stanley story; it has the weird level of unimportant details that Stanley must feel gives depth to the story but just ends up being weird. Do we care Aunt Gertrude is reading a romance novel, The Bride from Butte, that has been written by the granddaughter of one of Gertrude’s college friends? No. Why would we? Neither the book nor its author pops up again. Do we care Callie has an identical (but distant) cousin, Mary Beth Edwards, in New York? Well, kinda, but Mary Beth doesn’t show up at all; she’s just a passing mention, a robbery victim whom Frank and Joe hear about but never talk to. I understand naming the Bayport High School cafeteria lady, Mrs. Conroy, but her banter with the Hardys and their chums is a waste of page space.

And then you’ve got Frank and Joe’s new next-door-neighbor and friend, Matt Jenkins. (No mention of whether his family replaced the Forsythes, mentioned in The Mystery of the Chinese Junk [#39], or if they moved in on the other side.) He never turns into a Larry Stu the way Colin Randles does in Psychic’s Vision, but we learn all sorts of irrelevant detail about him: He lived in Botswana, his father was a well-known mystery writer who died of cancer, his mother is a diplomat, and he wants a “normal American high-school experience” (8) like seeing Aerocircus, a weird circus that sells tickets at more than $200 a pop. None of that is relevant, except for the last one, as Matt drags Frank, Joe, Chet, and Tony to Philadelphia at the last moment to see Aerocirque, without first securing tickets.

Well, Matt also uses his Africa sense when Joe doesn’t read the chapter in his history book on apartheid; Matt gives him a lecture on the subject, which he knows about because he lived in Botswana and “apartheid affected all the surrounding countries” (3). That’s like a Canadian telling a Russian about Jim Crow legislation because, hey, Canadians are like Americans and right next door. Still, Joe says, “I should get an A on that test!” (3), and Frank says, “I learned a lot of things about that time too” (3).

That Frank ended that statement with “fellow kids” should be understood, even though it’s not on the page.

Stanley’s handling of the supporting cast is a mixed bag. Chet in included only so everyone can make food jokes, which is standard for a Hardy Boys story, and even though that should be condemned (to an extent), I also don’t want to talk about it. Tony Prito is added to the boys’ trip to Philadelphia because … because … I don’t know why, honestly. I don’t know why the expedition needs a fifth boy, and Tony adds nothing to the story; they don’t need his muscle or knowledge or even his mass as ballast. He doesn’t even use his Italian heritage and food-service experience to complain about / laud Philly cheese-steak sandwiches or hoagies or Italian roast-pork sandwiches or water ice (aka “Italian ice”) or strombolis. I had to double check to make sure the fifth boy wasn’t Phil Cohen or Biff Hooper or Jamal Hawkins. I’m still not entirely sure Stanley was consistent throughout — not because I doubt Stanley’s ability to get the name right but because it didn’t matter.

Girls, on the other hand, fare better. Iola gets in cutting remarks about Callie’s overachieving nature and her brother’s comic-book collection. Callie appears only momentarily, delivering the news of her cousin’s robbery. Gertrude is teased about whether wedding bells are in the future for her and her friend, Mr. Phillips. (The last time Gertrude had a possible romantic entanglement, it was with Clayton Silvers in Past and Present Danger, #166.) The girls in Philadelphia like the boys, or maybe boys in general; when local girls party with the Hardys and their chums, the boys are never lacking in dance partners, and Tony picks up digits from many of them. The girls ask the boys to tell them about Bayport, which … well, where do you start? (After that, Elisabeth, the hostess of the party the boys go to, points out how rich her female friends are, which confuses Frank and Joe, but I think she confused the word “sleuth” for “gigolo.”) Later, Frank and Joe get a couple of girls to show them some Philadelphia “hospitality,” if you know what I mean.

(What I mean is “historical sites” and “lunch at an exclusive restaurant.”)

In Philadelphia, Frank, Joe, and their friends are allowed to stay with one of Fenton’s contacts, Det. Mario Zettarella, and his wife, Gina. Five teenage boys are a lot to have dumped into your house at the last moment, but the Zettarellas don’t mind; they have five grown boys, and Gina enjoys nothing more the feeding and care of teenagers. She was a stock trader for a brokerage before she married Mario, but raising a family — and cooking! — is more fulfilling for her. Why, even with her children out of the house, she doesn’t consider returning to a brokerage! (This is important, but Stanley doesn’t mention it again.)

Frank and Joe say this is their first time in Philadelphia, but that’ s not true. In Shield of Fear (#91), Frank and Joe helped their father expose organized crime and corrupt officers in the Philadelphia police. (This will become important later — or would have, if anyone had remembered it.) They passed through Philadelphia in the revised Secret Warning (#17), Twisted Claw (#18), and Short-Wave Mystery (#24) and the original Secret of the Lost Tunnel (#29), but Frank and Joe don’t do anything there. Interestingly, the Hardys will return to Philadelphia two books later, albeit in a different continuity, in Extreme Danger, the first Undercover Brothers book.

The only mystery in One False Step is whether everyone in the book is brain damaged, or if we’re supposed to pretend they aren’t. The Mary Beth’s family’s high-rise apartment is robbed, an impossible crime with only a few strange marks left on their balcony. The Edwardses weren’t at home because they were at a performance of Aerocirque, the Cirque du Soleil ripoff that uses helicopters to support the tightropes and trapezes.

(I admit, that level of precision flying and acrobatics is impressive; I don’t believe helicopters could remain reliably steady long enough to support the equipment, and tying two helicopters together sounds horribly dangerous. I also imagine multiple helicopters inside a stadium would produce hearing-destroying levels of decibels. Still, I’d probably go see it.)

Anyway, an impossible robbery of a high-rise apartment should suggest daring, high-altitude acrobatics acts faster than you can say “Wallenda,” but no one makes the connection in New York. No one in Philadelphia makes the connection to Aerocirque when another high-rise apartment is robbed in an identical matter, even though Mario is working security at Aerocirque and is called to the robbery as soon as the show is over. (His position is the only way the boys were able to get into Aerocirque, which is mighty convenient!) The police instead waste their time interviewing fired chauffeurs. Frank and Joe make the connection eventually — not after any epiphany or discovering new evidence but after seeing Elisabeth, the daughter of Aerocirque’s founder, point at apartment buildings while talking to an acrobat.

The brothers tell Mario, and he inserts them into the high-wire troupe that is going to pull the robbery. (These acrobats are all masked mutes, so the impersonations are not as difficult as one might think.) Frank and Joe are supposed to be anchors for the tightrope walkers who will cross over a street to a penthouse from an office building across the street, but one of the two tightrope walkers twists his ankle getting out of their helicopter. After the cable is fired across the street and anchored on their end, Frank and Joe are given the codes for the penthouse’s security and signaled that they must make the crossing. Walking the wire to the penthouse is no problem for the boys, since they do high-school gymnastics and have spent the day training with the troupe, but when they get to the penthouse, the security details they have are for the wrong manufacturer.

Mario and his men are inside the penthouse, so Mario tells Frank and Joe to walk back over and mime to the other two tightrope walkers what the problem is. The police need time to get over to the other building to arrest the thieves before they board their helicopter and escape. Why the police wouldn’t already be in position, given that they had the time to do so while Frank and Joe were walking over in the first place, is beyond me, but …

Well, there’s no “but,” really.

So Frank and Joe walk back over the tightrope. It’s a little more difficult this time, but Stanley makes sure to bleed the scene of most of the tension. When the Hardys complete their second tightrope walk, they find the two acrobatic thieves not only knew who Frank and Joe really were, but they’re not even mutes. The thieves subdue the boys and load them into the helicopter, planning to dump them into the Atlantic, but Elisabeth, the daughter of their legitimate and criminal boss, calls them back; she’s OK with robbery because they need money, but murder is too far. Frank and Joe are locked in a penthouse, where Mario tells them he figured out Aerocirque was behind the robberies before the Hardys did, and he told the gang / Aerocirque leader he had to cut Mario in, or he was going to jail. Mario then leaves.

After she’s left alone with the captive Hardys, Elisabeth tells them everything else. Because Frank and Joe are held in the room where the gang stores its equipment — the storage area is hidden, but keeping Frank and Joe in the same room is still a bad idea — Elisabeth is able to fire one of the cable bazookas, and Frank and Joe make one last high-wire walk. Belatedly, we learn a member of the United States Olympic Committee has told Joe “if [Joe] kept at it, he could make the [gymnastics] team in 2008” (143). Seems like we should have heard about that sort of astounding c.v. earlier!

The gang cuts the wire just before Frank makes it across, but he catches the wire, and a friendly woman lets him and Joe into her apartment. (It wouldn’t be a Stanley story if we didn’t learn completely irrelevant and boring information about the woman, Louise Schuster. “She tries to help wayward teenagers,” Frank says (147), and I weep for whatever editor worked on this book.

From there, Frank calls the FBI. Mario is arrested — he did it “for the money” (130-1), which suggests that if his wife had gone back to work, he might have remained honest — as are two of his officers, the Aerocirque acrobats, and Elisabeth. Her father escapes to the Caribbean, presumably with all the money. Crime does pay! The book ends with Matt suggesting Frank and Joe walk a tightrope as a school fundraiser; despite having decided never to walk the wire again, Frank and Joe give in to teasing and peer pressure.

This moment of lightheartedness allows us to forget Gina, whose life has been ruined by the Hardys intrusion. Frank and Joe do not see her after their abduction, and Tony, Chet, and Matt slink away. Callow teenagers!

One False Step is a poor story; an ungenerous yet still accurate assessment would be that it’s a very poor story. The digest series is littered with stories that plumb that depth, and I’m disappointed Stanley would not crash beyond that low-water mark of ineptness to give readers something sublimely ridiculous or ridiculously sublime. This was Stanley’s last chance to challenge Dr. John Button for the title of worst Hardy Boys writer, and he failed at it. That he didn’t fail by succeeding is an altogether appropriate capstone for his Hardy Boys career.