Plot: Iola is missing on Spring Break, and Joe and Chet eventually head down to a Florida motel to find her.
“Borrowing” from the past: Iola Morton is Joe’s girlfriend — it even says the pair are “going together” on the very first page. That reasonable and natural description of their relationship may not seem remarkable, but it was never used in the first 50 Hardy Boys books. Never. Instead, there were euphemisms like Iola being Joe’s “special friend,” “best girl,” “regular date,” even “staunch supporter.” It’s also revealed in Gull Island that Joe gave Iola a watch engraved with the romantic (for him) inscription of, “To Iola, From Joe.” This is the first thing, as far as I’ve known, that he’s ever given her.
Iola is kidnapped in Panic on Gull Island. In the original canon, Iola was particularly resistant to such shenanigans; she was tied up, with the rest of the Mortons, in The Ghost at Skeleton Rock (#37), and that’s it. As for injuries, her hair was singed in The Clue in the Embers (#35), and she was knocked out after hitting her head on a boat’s gunwale, which caused her to fall into Barmet Bay in The Secret of Pirate's Hill (#36). (The ‘50s weren’t great for Iola.) She was also pulled underwater in Tic-Tac-Terror (#74). Falling into the bay was the worst thing that happened to her … until she was blowed up in the first Hardy Boys Casefile, Dead on Target.
The Hardys are chased by some Doberman pinschers during Panic on Gull Island. The Hardys have been chased by dogs for years, starting with a Russian wolfhound named Chan in Footprints Under the Window (#12) and continuing too many times to get into. They had previously been menaced by Dobermans in the first paperback adventure, The Night of the Werewolf (#59), and the revised A Figure in Hiding (#16).
Do you care?: Joe seems slightly concerned but not exactly upset when Chet tells him Iola has disappeared. The first thing he does is drive to the airport to pick up Frank and Fenton — like they couldn’t have hailed a cab — and the narration notes that Iola’s disappearance would “affect him as much as it did Chet.” Such a effaced way of expressing the thought — it allows the sentiment to be interpreted as an expression of possible grief (or joy, when she is found) as much as it does legal troubles the disappearance could cause them (did you have anything to do with it?). Nobody else seems too worked up either. It takes the adult ostensibly looking after Iola and her friend Daphne Garnett two days to call the Mortons. Two days! The Mortons send Chet, rather than a responsible adult, to investigate. And Fenton tells the boys to drive all the way down there — a 24-hour trip that leaves them exhausted — rather than flying them down there.
On the other hand, Joe is so worked up over Iola’s disappearance he can’t muster the will to make a fat joke while he and Chet wait for Fenton and Frank to arrive. Frank, on the other hand, doesn’t miss a beat, going for a joke about Chet’s appetite minutes after surviving a crash landing on a passenger plane.
Separation of Frank and Joe: At the beginning of Panic on Gull Island, Fenton and Frank are returning from a detecting trip to Chicago. Why was Joe left behind? To make some calls and talk to a “friend” from the telephone company about some things. He could have done that from Chicago! Besides, Joe doesn’t have any friends that Frank doesn’t have, right?
What are you driving, a wheelbarrow?: At about 3 a.m., Chet estimates he and the Hardys are 300 miles from the Florida border and about 18 to 19 hours from Gull Island. The fictional Gull Island is somewhere between Naples and Sarasota. That’s … that’s incredibly slow.
Since they’d just eaten, they wouldn’t have to stop again until Florida, at least — about five hours away, since the speed limit back then was probably 55 mph. But to get from the Florida border to Fort Myers, Fla. — which is between Sarasota and Naples and closer to Naples, the more southerly city — is between 300 and 350 miles, depending on the route. Most of it would be on the interstate. Even with highway driving, eight hours would be a long time; Mapquest estimates it at about five and a half, although the speed limit is higher now. So will they be taking four to six hours of meals and bathroom breaks on such an important trip? I suppose they could actually, you know, rest, which would add about that much time to their ETA, but they are three teenagers driving on the interstate. The whole point of multiple drivers is not to have to stop to rest.
Long arm of the Syndicate: The Stratemeyer Syndicate, which created and controlled the Hardy Boys series for decades, revised the books in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. One of the things they wanted to do was have Frank and Joe more respectful of the police (and other authority figures) and to make those with authority more worthy of respect.
In Panic on Gull Island, the Hardys and Chet are stymied in their investigation by the worst lawman ever. The deputy sheriff obviously wouldn’t know a crime wave if it bit him in the hinder. He decides a kidnapping, a boat theft, destruction of a private dock, vandalism, and a boat explosion are not only unconnected incidents but not crimes at all. He responds to the kidnapping concerns by saying that since there was no ransom note, there obviously was no kidnapping — financial gain evidently being the only reason for kidnapping a pretty teenage girl that he can conceive of. And that’s putting aside the possibility that the case was murder! The only question is whether the deputy is incompetent or corrupt, but the end of the story suggests (in its omission of the deputy) that the readers were never supposed to regard the deputy as corrupt at all. Still, he’s pretty awful.
On the other hand, everyone else is stupid in how they handle him. The locals seem to think he has no superior, with no one mentioning appealing to the county sheriff’s office. One local suggests running against him in an election, but that’s asinine — deputies are generally appointed by the sheriff, who is the one who runs for office. It takes until two-thirds of the way through the book before anyone mentions the state police, let alone any other level of law enforcement. In a technical sense, even if the deputy believed Iola was kidnapped, that crime is the jurisdiction of the FBI rather than a county office. No one even mentions talking to insurance companies and their investigators about the crimes.
In the end, though, it shows how little everyone wants to get Iola back that no one alerts the media. There might not have been a 24-hour news cycle in 1991, but I guarantee that the disappearance of a female teenager on Spring Break would have caused a firestorm of attention on the case. Things would start happening. But no one thinks about putting pressure on the police by even threatening that. No, no — that would interfere with Frank and Joe’s “investigating,” which mainly involves trespassing and crashing parties.
Seriously, Iola, you might want to think about finding better friends.
Com-put-tor: The Hardys are on the cutting edge of technology; they take a portable phone (which gets stolen), a fax machine (!), and a portable computer (which if I remember those days correctly, was only barely portable). But that’s not all; by connecting through Fenton’s computer, they’re able to find a client list for a local car rental agency (primitive hacking?), and when they go to the police in Miami, all the current real estate owners are listed on a computer by the parcel they own. Given that many counties haven’t made that leap twenty years later, the Hardys are very lucky.
Gator gonna getcha: In the book, Alligator Alley — the highway that runs between Naples and Miami across the Everglades — is described as a narrow road, with a soft, sandy shoulder. One mistake, according to Joe, would end with the van in the swamp.
As originally constructed, the road was indeed a two-lane highway, but now it’s a four-lane toll road, part of Interstate 75. It’s long and straight, and in the middle of the night, it could serve as prime territory for someone wanting to see how fast their vehicle can go. Interestingly, the change from two to four lanes came during the time Gull Island saw print; Gull Island was published in 1991, and the expansion took place between 1986 and 1992.
Hurricane … No?: I am shocked — shocked! — that there is no hurricane in this book. There’s plenty of wind and rain, but there’s no hurricane. I know that Spring Break does not fall during hurricane season, but logic has never been a concern as far as the Hardys are concerned.
Do you remember what happened in previous cases, Frank?: Frank leads Joe to trespass on a suspect’s property. He tells Joe, “The worst that can happen … is he’ll tell us to get off his property.” That sentiment is interrupted by a charge from the suspect’s guard dogs. Also, they suspect the man of being involved in a kidnapping; shouldn’t Frank have considered getting abducted a possibility? Not to mention worse fates, like being injured or killed?
Chet seems to have figured things out, though. When Frank and Joe ask him to pose as a cable installer and tell him, “Just check out the person’s reaction to the name. That’s all,” Chet says, “Every time you say ‘that’s all,’ I seem to get knocked out or tied up!”
Joe is not a lawyer: At one point, when Joe picks up a real estate contract and starts browsing it, the narration notes his lack of legal knowledge. For an “amateur” private investigator and someone his mother wanted to be a lawyer, his ignorance of the law is amazing. He enters a man’s house; because the door was unlocked, he claims that he isn’t guilty of breaking and entering, although that doesn’t matter. He hands over a pair of thugs who tried to run him off the road to police, claiming they’re guilty of aggravated battery; that’s not what trying to knock someone off the road with a vehicle is, and the reader never sees them commit aggravated battery. And finally, he obtains a confession from a suspect with the threat of letting the man drown; obviously, Joe has never heard of “duress.”
This is still better than Frank. To stop the criminals from escaping, he steals a speedboat and destroys it by ramming it into the criminals’ boat.
Oh, this time you’re interested: At the end of The Secret of the Island Treasure, Frank and Joe reject Hurd Applegate’s offer of another mystery, which involved finding a lost silver mine in Latin America. In fact, they run away like little children at the mention of the boogey man. But when their local contact in Panic on Gull Island talks about a sunken treasure galleon, they are all over that action.
Opinions: I think the Dixon for this book was trying to write a James Bond story for teenagers rather than a Hardy Boys book. There was little or no help from the police — in fact, when the Hardys do secure their cooperation, they act rashly and violently before the police arrive. They attend a party to try to gain intelligence. They ignore the law to go where they want to go. They talk with the chief suspect, with each side knowing the other’s true intentions but with each maintaining a patina of civility. There’s a nice semi-tropical location as well. The villain even has a pool full of sharks, like Largo has in Thunderball. As you can imagine, it doesn’t work very well, especially since the sharks don’t eat anyone.
The Hardys’ remarkable resistances and powers are taken to ridiculous extremes. They wander into Miami off Alligator Alley and hand over a couple of thugs to police, and instead of having to answer a lot of inconvenient questions, the police take their word for things — and the boys don’t even have to invoke the name of Fenton Hardy. The boys and Iola are also gassed with the pesticide methyl bromide (also known as bromomethane), with Joe and Iola falling unconscious; they are both revived without complications. However, methyl bromide at those concentrations should have caused some sort of complications, since the pesticide is highly irritating to the eyes, skin, and linings of the nose and throat. It’s not just a random knockout gas: it’s a chemical gas meant to kill things.
Grade: C-. One of those books whose plot falls apart if you look at it wrong, and not in a fun way.
