Of Time and the Hardy Boys

In the early books of the Hardy Boys canon, from The Tower Treasure (#1) to The Great Airport Mystery (#9), ghost writer Leslie McFarlane and / or the Stratemeyer Syndicate made an effort to create a coherent chronology. Those first nine books follow the brothers and their chums over three years — essentially from late in their sophomore years in high school to graduation. The books cover three springs (#1, #6, and #9, all of them late spring), two winters (#5 and #8) and a lot of summer (#2, 3, 4, and 7).

After that, the Hardys stopped aging, went back to high school, and never worried about time making sense again. Seriously: time was more linear in a season of Doctor Who than in any five consecutive hardcover Hardy Boys books after that. But that was OK, really; the books were released once per year, and it didn’t matter that readers couldn’t fit together consecutive stories in a coherent timeline. After waiting all year for another book, who cared if they didn’t match up exactly? And as for the back catalog of books — well, who had access to all 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 of them? Those who could read all of them were overjoyed to experience the wealth of Hardy Boys stories.

When the Hardy Boys books came out in paperback, though, Simon & Schuster started releasing several books per year. The only way that would work, as a publishing strategy, is if they expected readers to actually buy more than one book per year — consecutive books, most likely. And in that case, skipping around the calendar becomes more distracting. It’s harder to believe in a fictional world when Frank and Joe Hardy have come unstuck in time.

After finishing Crusade of the Flaming Sword, I’ve read #130 through #141, which coincidentally covers all of the digests released in 1995 (#130-5) and 1996 (#136-41), so I decided to see if the Hardys obeyed the calendar.

Surprisingly, the 1995 books did! Sidetracked to Danger (#130) is set in February, probably about the time the book was released. Although Crusade (#131) has no specific chronological setting, Frank and Joe spend several days without going to school — so it’s set during spring break or summer. They’re back in school in Maximum Challenge (#132), which means it could be set between spring break and the end of the school year; they’re out of school again in Crime in the Kennel (#133), presumably during the summer. Cross-Country Crime (#134) occurs during Thanksgiving vacation, and The Hypersonic Secret (#135) is set only a couple of weeks later, in the run-up to Christmas. So not only can these books fit in a single calendar year, they were mostly published at the same time they were set.

I admit, I was impressed.

The next year’s releases aren’t so well coordinated. The action in The Cold Cash Caper (#136) falls during the February Winter Festival — again, the book take place roughly the same time of year it was released. Unfortunately, it’s not clear when the next book, High-Speed Showdown (#137), occurs, but it’s warm enough for boat racing on Barmet Bay, so it can’t be fit between Caper and The Alaskan Adventure (#138), which ends just before the beginning of the Iditarod in early March. Chet begins a summer job at the zoo in The Search for the Snow Leopard (#139), but Slam Dunk Sabotage (#140) jumps ahead to February (or perhaps early March) for the end of the high school basketball season. The Desert Thieves (#141) is set in early January — probably close to the book’s publication, although on the wrong side of the New Year.

That’s a freakishly small number of summer books — somewhere between two and four out of the twelve books. More than two-thirds of the first 85 books are set during the summer, so that’s quite a change.

1995’s releases show the books could create a sense of time; why couldn’t Simon & Schuster have spread their 1996 releases throughout the year? Of the six, four books were set in the first 80 or so days of the year, with none of them occurring in August or later. Would it kill someone to have a fall mystery? (Maybe it would; there must be a reason why Hardy Boys books are so rarely set in the fall.) I’m sure such things were not a major concern of Simon & Schuster, which had many more pressing concerns — writing outlines, wrangling freelancers, editing manuscripts, marketing, selling — but I suppose I’m saying I would have appreciated it.

Of course, I wasn’t buying the books back then and was well out of the series’ target age range. I also didn’t read the books until more than a decade after they were written. But why wouldn’t Simon & Schuster decide to cater to me?

Crime in the Kennel (#133)

Plot: When a dog at the pet hotel is kidnapped while Iola is on duty, she is fired, and Frank and Joe hunt for the dog. (Mostly to find the dog. Her boss was kind of a jerk.)

“Borrowing” from the past: Not much, really. Gertrude’s pie is lemon this time; Gertrude made a lemon meringue pie in The Secret Panel (#25) and The Secret of Skull Mountain (#27). Frank uses the Sleuth to get into position for a trap; the boys don’t often use their motorboat in the digests. When discussing unrealistic career aspirations with a waitress, Joe jokes Frank “was supposed to pilot the next space shuttle” (33). Frank and Joe were astronauts in The Skyfire Puzzle (#85), although neither of the boys were pilots. Frank did get to threaten to space a man, though. That has to be a career highlight, although not one you can joke about to gain the confidence of a potential source.

Oh! Frank and Joe also have cargo almost fall on their heads when they visit the waterfront. This happens many, many times in the original canon — it’s a cliché, like storms when they are on Barmet Bay and the boys’ case dovetailing with Fenton’s and the decaying Bayport waterfront. The latter also appears here; the boys visit the waterfront throughout the canon, although it was best described in The Melted Coins: “Bayport’s waterfront is a picturesque but squalid part of the city. The streets were dark and crooked, crowded with second-hand stores, cheap hotels, and shabby restaurants. There was an unpleasant odor … in the air” (93).

In our last episode, which no one saw: Iola’s former co-worker, Dana Bailey, gushes about reading about Frank and Joe catching thieves at the fairground. Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear in any of the immediately previous books. Does anyone know if this appeared in one of the digests? Or was this made up to give Frank and Joe some cheap heat? I suppose it could be a reference to Crusade of the Flaming Sword (#131), which takes place at the "RenFaire."

All-American boys: If you ever have thought Frank and Joe were absurdly competent, Crime in the Kennel does its best to disabuse you of that idea. The boys are continually beaten and humiliated by their opponents. They leave their van unlocked, and a suspect rifles through their stuff and takes the only bit of evidence they had. While investigating a pet store during working hours, Joe is buried under a pile of bagged dog food. When Frank and Joe break into the pet store that night to look at the store’s records, both are bopped over the head with a mop handle, then stuffed into large dog carriers. There’s so much wrong with that sentence: the breaking and entering, the single blow to the head with a mop handle knocking them out … they deserve to be locked in dog carriers. Frankly, they deserved to be locked in dog carriers and not let out until the staff arrived the next morning, but they manage to escape their impromptu prisons.

Later in the book, both boys are maced by a suspect. After Iola is kidnapped, Joe is chloroformed by her kidnapper and hauled away. Joe spends most of the rest of the book trying to escape his bonds and getting beat up by the kidnapper once he does break free. Joe is humiliated in Crime in the Kennel, and who does the humiliating? An animal technician with no particular martial arts prowess.

Frank is at a loss against a female opponent. He knocks a paintball gun from her hands, but she slugs him, then bites him and easily regains the gun. On the other hand, Frank makes up for this and getting mop-handled by taking a paintball at point-blank range between the eyes without flinching. That has to sting like a motherf — that has to sting real bad, man. But Frank just wipes the paint away and continues like it’s nothing.

Perhaps their martial arts skills are degenerating. At one point, Frank uses a “partial karate stance” (17). What the heck is that? Do you learn that when you get your half-green belt?

Iola!: I’ve gone over Iola’s fiery, occasionally mercurial, temper before, but she doesn’t display much of that in this book. She complains at the injustice of getting fired, but she doesn’t give her boss any of the heat she would have given to Joe. I suppose dealing with an adult is a different dynamic. After Frank and Joe agree to find the missing dog, Iola immediately takes off for Boston with her mother and doesn’t return until more than halfway through the book. Frank and Joe immediately allow her to deliver the ransom for a different dog; she’s immediately abducted — the abductor says it’s because she tried to remove his mask, but we don’t actually see her try to do that — and spends most of the book tied up or cowering.

Joe does call her a “strong person” (23), though, and he fears her wrath when he and Frank lose the dog they were supposed to be dogsitting for her. (She had agreed to look after the dog, but when she got a chance to go to Boston, she fobbed the dog off on the brothers.) His fear is unfounded, though; she doesn’t attack Joe when she finds out, even though he starts his explanation with “We can explain” (95). (Nothing positive has ever followed “We can explain” in the history of the human race, so obviously Iola can restrain her temper when she wants to.) Her next question was which of the suspects had stolen the dog; perhaps she had merely shifted her anger to a more appropriate target.

Iola does get back at her ex-boss, though. When she has been cleared and Dana has been arrested, she’s offered her job back. She says, “I’ll think about it” (147).

All the news that’s fit to print: The newspaper this time is the Banner. The Banner appeared in The Great Airport Mystery (#9). The Times is Bayport’s most popular paper, appearing in thirteen books (counting both original and revised books).

You know that movie, starring that guy who was on that show: Midway through the book, Frank and Joe are followed by a red pickup, driven by someone wearing a mask. Frank says, “He looks familiar … like that movie character, the green one with the huge teeth and superpowers” (75). The movie Frank is so strenuously avoiding mentioning is The Mask, starring Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz (her first acting role). The Mask was released in 1994, one year before Crime in the Kennel was published.

It’s so hard to tell the difference, sometimes: Frank believes the dognapper is an amateur because “he hasn’t done anything really serious. … Mostly he’s given us headaches” (79). While I appreciate Frank’s appraisal — he ends up being right, after all — those amateurs give him and his brother a thorough working over. In the canon, the professional criminals generally don’t give the boys two beatings and a chemical attack and a humiliation like the criminals in Crime in the Kennel.

On the other hand, the criminals aren’t the brightest. They steal the dog Frank and Joe are looking after with the expectation that this act will make them give up the investigation. Perhaps, if they issued an ultimatum or threat — give up now or we kill the dog — it would have worked, although threatening humans never gets the boys to back off a case. But the dognappers don’t contact Frank and Joe, so of course the brothers are going to continue looking for the animal. Later on, one of the dognappers attempts a semi-glutteal ransom for the dog, but that goes poorly as well. Also, one of the dognappers says, after being captured, that Frank and Joe don’t have any real evidence against them; unfortunately, Frank had just rescued Joe and Iola from being kidnapped, and as Frank points out, their testimony about what happened is likely to be more than enough to send both of them to prison.

We’re living in the future! (‘90s edition): Frank manages to gain the phone number of the dognapper by using a “caller ID box” (98) when the dognapper calls in a ransom demand, but Frank needs to call the telephone operator to get the number’s location.

Warehouse dog: As shown on the cover, a dog aggressively gets near Frank. In this case, it’s a pit bull terrier. Although Frank and Joe were frequently attacked by dogs, they never ran into pit bulls in the original canon. Doberman pinschers and German shepherds were the most common.

Comments: This is not the best-written digest. I could be charitable and say it seems to be geared for a lower reading level than other digests, but I’m not sure that was what the writer and editorial staff were aiming at. The first two paragraphs of Crime in the Kennel do not sound as if they were professionally written, and although the book improves from there, the prose never really overcomes the shaky start of passages like, “Iola Morton was Joe’s girlfriend. If Iola was in trouble, he had to help her” (1).

The book does have a couple of genuinely touching moments. After Joe finds Iola after they had both been kidnapped, he asks her if she’s all right; she replies, “Now that you’ve found me” (115). It’s not the most original, but it feels genuine because the characters so rarely express that sort of idea. The criminals are also a boyfriend / girlfriend team, with the girlfriend as a reluctant criminal: “After Price fired you, Mike, didn’t I tell you I would stick by you? … You were after some kind of get-rich-quick scheme. What was I supposed to do? I didn’t want to be a criminal, but I didn’t want to lose you either. So I went along” (140). The speech manages to generate some sympathy for the poor woman, despite her terrible taste in men.

Grade: C-. I would not want to read another book about the thoroughly below average Hardy Boys, but I admit, locking them in the pet carriers was a stroke of genius.