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.