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 digest, 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 wears sunglasses — which hasn’t been true before — 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 the perpetrator 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. At one point, 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, sorts things out, 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 Boulder 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.)

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, Speed 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; when she gave it up, we discovered no one else really cared what happened to Frank and Joe. 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.” The lack of an intentional sendoff is 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 motives 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 a 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.