Warehouse Rumble (#183)

With only nine more books to go — the last eight, #183 to #190, then first book, #86 — we’re in the home stretch. I’ve read four of those books before, so the end feels even closer than it actually is …

Warehouse Rumble is one of those books I’ve read already. I wrote about it a little in my post on the Top 10 Cool Things the Hardy Boys have done, and it occurs to me I was a bit unfair in my dismissal of the book — or maybe my reevaluation is a symptom of my Stockholm Syndrome with the series.

In Rumble, Chet entices Joe and Frank with the promise of “fame … fortune … all the usual stuff” (2) if they audition for Warehouse Rumble, a new TV show in which contestants compete in physical and mental challenges against a post-apocalyptic background. Since Bayport High is closed for a teacher conference, Frank and Joe agree. (Callie and Iola would rather work at a food pantry during the school vacation, which is on-brand for early-canon Callie.) Chet also convinces Daphne Soesbee, a friend who has appeared in a couple of previous stories and who also just happens to be nearby, to be his teammate in the competition. The rest of the book focuses on the on-set goings-on, which is more behind-the-scenes skullduggery than a reality TV competition.

Rumble is another of Stephen D. Sullivan’s contributions to the series, and now that I know what to look for, the signs are clear. He inserts his own name into the narrative via returning BPD Officer Gus Sullivan from Trick-or-Trouble (#175). Daphne mentions her mother and her mother’s bookstore, also from Trick-or-Trouble, and Spy that Never Lies (#163) / Trick-or-Trouble villains / red herrings Jay Stone and Missy Gates make their third appearances. Daphne also mentions her Creature Cards prowess from Trouble in the Cards (#165), which spurred a rivalry with a new villain / red herring, Bo Reid.

Another tipoff? The name of robbery victim Ms. Forbeck is a reference to fellow author Matt Forbeck; a brief perusal of his Wikipedia page turns up the name of Ree Soesbee, and suddenly Daphne’s unusual surname is explained. What’s the connection between Sullivan, Forbeck, and Soesbee? Well, all three have written licensed novels (novels based on IP owned by others); more specifically, all three have written young-adult Dragonlance novels in the years just before Warehouse Rumble came out.

I’m not sure why Warehouse Rumble made me cast my mind toward the cool things Frank and Joe have done over the years, given that a similar conceit — Maximum Challenge (#132), in which the Hardys and their chums compete in a TV show with physical challenges — felt like a run-of-the-mill happening in Frank and Joe's life. Perhaps it’s because I prefer Warehouse Rumble’s post-apocalyptic aesthetic to the generic athletic competition in Maximum Challenge. Perhaps it’s because Rumble still feels au courant, and Challenge is an American Gladiators pastiche that was published just before Gladiators went off the air in 1996. I don’t know.

It certainly isn’t the promise of intellectual challenges. Rumble is scant on the details of the puzzles the contestants have to solve, but it doesn’t skint on describing the physical challenges. In fact, the book is overwhelmingly physical, removing intellectual traces — other than the narrator’s occasional impressive vocabulary word, such as “sardonically” (59) and “decrepitation” (105). The trash talk between the Hardys and their rivals is embarrassing. For instance, Jay Stone call the Hardys, Daphne, and Chet “the Boy Scout Brothers and their twin sidekicks” (7), which is more descriptive than damning. Bo Reid tells Joe, “I got a message for your brother and Morton. … The word is … pain! Too bad it’s your turn to play delivery boy.” Joe responds, “I think I’ll mark this one ‘Return to sender’” (42). This is too wordy and too weak for even a young reader to care about. The little time it would have taken to improve this banter might have improved this book by an order of magnitude, managing to put a little more juice into rivalries with interchangeable / forgettable villains.

More noticeably, though, Frank and Joe show little interest in unraveling the mystery around them, even when the mystery seems likely to crush them under and metal bricks or electrocute them or give them a megadose of sedatives or unleash an army of rats upon them. Huh, Frank and Joe say, maybe filming in a warehouse abandoned for twenty years isn’t a good idea, and TV / high school rivalries sure can get dangerous! They are right, but their lack of curiosity is disturbing.

The book concentrates on the physicalities. Their athletic challenges on the show get a great deal of attention, as you would expect. Chet brags he’s “strong like bull, swift like eagle” (47), like a latter-day Uncle Tonoose. The Hardys and Chet get into fights on set as well; Frank uses his “martial arts training” to land a “karate chop” (34) and a spin kick, and Joe uses a full nelson to subdue a villain. Even the first clue is uncovered by Chet smacking his head into a brick chimney during a fight with Bo Reid.

That clue is a skeleton, later revealed to be Joss Orlando, a Bayport man who went out for groceries fifteen years before but never came home. The man might as well have been named “Harry Tanwick,” given how little Frank and Joe care about learning more about him. They show only a scintilla of curiosity about a gold ring with emeralds that Daphne finds in the warehouse basement, even though it’s obviously valuable. I suppose I get it: When you’re competing on a game show on which you nearly die and no one seems to care, you must concentrate on staying alive rather than protecting the property rights of the bourgeoisie. Besides, as Frank says, “Danger is bread and butter to some people” (33), which doesn’t qualify as a bon mot, but works well enough to explain Frank and Joe — even if Frank was talking about someone else when he says that.

We don’t get to see who wins Warehouse Rumble. We do know it won’t be Frank and Joe; they are eliminated in the semifinals by Bo Reid and Lily Sabatine. Daphne and Chet do make it to the finals, where they will face Reid and a new partner, as Lily is arrested after her victory but before the finals. As a consolation prize, Frank and Joe do receive coupons to local businesses, like the Town Spa (a restaurant) and a $1,000-dollar “scholarship bond” (134), which as far as I can tell isn’t a real thing. Still, it’s nice to see Frank and Joe getting rewarded for what they’ve done, even if they aren’t getting rewarded for solving a mystery. (Fenton says they will get a reward for recovering the stolen goods, which will go straight into their college funds, but we don’t see anyone with money forking over the cash or even making that promise.)

Circling around this disaster of a mystery is a pair of outsiders. Clark Hessmann is a local preservationist who wants to prevent the building Warehouse Rumble is filming in from being demolished after filming is over; the building’s owner, Herman Jackson, has a restraining order against him. More annoying is TV reporter Stacia Allen of WSDS, who is always barging into the Warehouse Rumble set and (even though it doesn’t apply) bleating about freedom of press, allowing her to publicize many of the set disasters. (In actuality, WSDS is a Spanish-language AM radio station in Michigan.) If the show’s producer had invested in better security, closed the set, and demanded at least minimal support from a network publicist, the book’s most annoying character and a quarter of the book’s plot points would have been wiped out. (As in The Test Case [#171], Warehouse Rumble takes a dim view of the press.)

Also: Warehouse Rumble should have done a better job taking care of the contestants. The show acquires an on-set paramedic only only after a few serious accidents: a collapsed light tower that has sparking electric wires over water, a collapsed catwalk, a collapsed floor, rat attacks, water that changes color from blue to green to yellow-green for no reason. (I don’t know what the latter portends, but it can’t be good.) These are people in an athletic competition inside a dilapidated structure! You need medical staff on set regardless of whether someone is trying to kill contestants.

Everyone should also take a dim view of the police, as Con Riley and Officer Sullivan seem more interested in avoiding work than solving a crime. The pair find enforcing restraining orders, court writs, and trespassing laws a headache and wish the people involved would just shut up. They are slack on investigating the stolen ring and notifying Joss Orlando’s next of kin. Only when Ms. Forbeck shows up and claims the ring do the police act, and then they overreact, hauling Daphne down to the police station for a robbery that occurred when she was in diapers. Then the narration says the police “decided to let” Daphne’s mother sit in on Daphne’s interrogation (122). They have to! You can’t interview a minor without an adult present! Worse, Mrs. Soesbee wouldn’t even know her daughter was in custody if Frank and Joe hadn’t snuck away to call her.

The rest of Ms. Forbeck’s stolen property is still on set — farther down the chimney Orlando was found in, in fact — but the police can’t find it because it wasn’t in the exact same place Daphne discovered the ring. The people behind the catastrophes on set are siblings Lily and Todd Sabatine, Orlando’s children. (Lily and Todd’s brilliance is described as their ability to give alibis for each other, which shouldn’t have helped; of course they’d lie for each other! The only way this works is if no one cares enough to investigate.) If the police had tracked them down to notify them of their father’s passing or searched the warehouse more assiduously, the case would have been solved and all sorts of menace prevented. Instead — once again — the Bayport PD let a bunch of teenagers do their jobs for them, which in this case involved only showing up to the scene of the crime (the warehouse) at night and beating up a girl and her brother.

Which Frank and Joe eventually did. I mean, everyone had to wait until the Hardys found the time. No need to hurry, after all.

Crime in the Cards (#165)

Crime in the Cards has everything I like about a Hardy Boys story: a new hobby for Chet, a Bayport setting, hints of actual intimacy between the Hardys and their girlfriends, the introduction of a new character who makes more appearances, and a mystery with a blindingly obvious solution. Cards isn’t a perfect book, and it won’t appeal to everyone as strongly as it does to me, but I would put Cards among the best of the digests.

The setup for Cards is that Magic the Gathering is sweeping Bayport High, and Chet is one of the best players. Magic the Gathering is a fantasy-themed collectible card game; that means players buy packs of random cards of various rarities, and by that rarity, the cards may achieve value beyond their utility in the game. Of course, this Dixon isn’t allowed to use the name “Magic the Gathering”; instead, the knockoff product is called “Creature Commander,” which is a good enough name. This Dixon shows enough familiarity with the game to make the allusion clear and show he or she has either played Magic or done enough research to make it seem like he or she has.

As any adult might expect, playing Creature Commander doesn’t make Chet cool. Callie and Iola are baffled by the game, and even though Frank says, “The game’s fairly simple” (2), neither he nor Joe has any inclination to play. Joe says, “It’s not my kind of game, but …” and then shrugs. Why should they risk their aura of cool on one of Chet’s hobbies? (Although Chet snipes that they have no qualms about claiming to know all about Creature Commander to impress the girls.) More to the point, ex-BHS football player Sam Kestenberg bullies Chet and his competitors while also getting Joe’s goat.

The mystery begins in earnest when Daphne Soesbee’s Creature Commander deck is stolen from her locker. This is Daphne’s first appearance, and she makes two more appearances before the end of the digest series, in Trick or Trouble (#175) and Warehouse Rumble (#183); in those books she fills a role similar to the one she occupies here: a female acquaintance / friend for Chet. Not a girlfriend, but someone who shares Chet’s enthusiasms. I wish she had appeared more often in the books; the Hardys need more people who are in their orbit but not in their core group of chums, like Jamal Hawkins, and the gender balance of the cast could use some adjustment.

Anyway, Bayport High School responds to the theft and the popularity of Creature Commander in the manner of self-important bureaucracies everywhere: with ham-handed stupidity. (Given how poorly the school handles a cheating scandal in The Test Case [#171], that's unsurprising.) The cards are banned from school grounds, because what BHS wants more than anything is for the problem to go away with as little effort on the part of faculty and staff as possible. But Chet pulls an awesome new rare card, the Coyote, from a pack he bought, and he can’t resist showing it off in front of his Creature Commander playing friends at school. With the Coyote and Bargeist, another powerful rare, Chet believes he has a chance to win next week’s big Creature Commander tournament. (The Bargeist, if you care, is probably a reference to the barghest, which is either a monstrous black dog or ghost or elf in northern English folklore or a daemon that can look like a goblin or wolf in Dungeons & Dragons.)

Chet is caught with the cards in English class. He is supposed to be caring about Moby Dick, a 19th-century decorative doorstop masquerading as something relevant to 21st-century teenagers. When Chet returns at the end of the day to reclaim his cards, he finds they’ve been stolen from the teacher’s desk. Rather than putting his faith in the police, whom Chet doesn’t believe will take the case seriously, Chet turns to the Hardys. Honestly, it’s hard to blame Chet on this one: I can’t believe a Bayport PD officer would consider little pieces of cardboard could be worth hundreds of dollars. I almost imagine Con Riley blinking and asking Chet how much he could get for the ace of diamonds in his desk.

To solve the case, Frank and Joe navigate the world of Bayport collectible hobbies, from a mostly reputable hobby shop (the Dungeon Guild) to a slightly dodgy individual dealer (Gerry) to the extremely sketchy Black Knight, who uses the Internet not to sell cards directly but to meet with potential buyers in out-of-the-way places. Gerry also runs a cloak-and-dagger Creature Commander tournament where everyone wears a mask and winners take possession of one of the cards from the loser’s deck. (This used to be a real Magic the Gathering format, although the card the winner acquires a random card from the loser’s deck, and set aside before the game, rather than a card of the winner’s choice.) The Hardys (and Dixon) wander through the geeky subculture and keep from talking down about the game and its players. Heck, even Callie and Iola pick up the game by the end!

The girls learn the game even though Frank and Joe have considerable physical contact with them than usual. Their relationships start off on rocky ground; when Frank says he and Joe “have something more worthwhile” than vast amounts of money, Iola “hopefully” asks if it’s her and Callie (3). C’mon, Iola; have more pride than that. Fortunately, their relationships improve: In addition to two hugs and three hand squeezes, there are a total of three — three! — kisses. That might be a record for a Hardy Boys book! Usually, I would delve into the implications of all this intimacy, but this time I was struck by the veneer of normal heterosexual teenage behavior given to these acts. The squeezing is of hands; the kisses are on cheeks. This is, by any real measure, a pair of tepid relationships. So why stop somewhere between no touching and normalcy? Did the author feel pressure to include such performative signifiers for some reason? Or was Simon and Schuster convinced its target audience would react badly to mouth-on-mouth kisses, and this Dixon was able to push the envelope only so far?

If I were in charge of the Hardys, I wouldn’t be satisfied with this sort of restraint. I understand not even hinting at sexuality, sure, but a taste of honey is worse than none at all. And I don’t think snogging hurt Harry Potter at all, even among those in the Hardys’ target age range (8 to 12, according to the back cover).

However, if Frank and Joe are unable to meet Callie and Iola’s physical teenage needs, the brothers do treat them like trusted peers in the investigation — not equals, exactly, because the Hardys have considerably more experience at being detectives, and even Chet has helped them more. But Iola and Callie get to participate; sometimes they have to stand up for themselves to get that right, but Frank and Joe acknowledge they have something to contribute rather than insisting on increasing the mystery’s level of difficulty by refusing help. I mean, being the wheelwoman and cutting off avenues of escape with a vehicle aren’t the most exciting ways to help, but they are valuable; they can be crucial. This is a vast improvement; Iola also mentions having to hide in the trunk previously — she refuses to do so again — but the context is left unsaid. Was it for a mystery, or was it to sneak into a drive-in? Maybe to keep Aunt Gertrude from knowing the boys’ had invited strange women into the car?)

Unfortunately, even with the help, the Hardys fail, or at least they fail to meet their deadline, the Creature Commander tournament. Chet shells out a lot of cash — where does he get it all? We never see him work — to buy the cards to compete in the tournament, even though they aren’t as good as the ones he’s lost. Unfortunately, he’s disqualified in the tournament’s second round for accusing another player of using one of Chet’s stolen cards, then punching him. Yes, at the end of the book, Chet gets a special reward from the game’s creator for helping to expose the counterfeiting — wait, is counterfeiting as a crime restricted to currency? Anyway, for helping to preserve player confidence in Creature Commander cards, gets an even cooler card, so as always, being Frank and Joe’s friend is stressful but lucrative for Chet.

The Hardys and their friends also tour Bayport while solving the mystery, which I always enjoy. Sometimes I wonder if anyone at S&S ever thought to compile a bible or at least a map for Bayport, and then I realize how silly the idea is. In the Hardy Boys stories, continuity is a bug, not a feature; anything that might confuse the audience, might make readers think they are missing something, is to be avoided. So we won’t be see Old Bluff Road again; that’s no real loss, as the road’s only real purpose is to be a deserted backroad near cliffs, which is the role the Shore Road used to fill. Bayport’s northwest side, where industrial parks have replaced the scrub thickets Frank and Joe knew as children, will be rewritten into something else. The Kiff and Kendall restaurant chain will disappear into the ether, as will the abandoned Benson Mini-Mall be mentioned in further books — and, unfortunately, the new, nearby development of Magus Hills will also cease to exist after Cards.

This is a shame because Magus Hills makes Bayport about 241 percent cooler. I don’t care whether Magus Hills was named by a fantasy nut, or maybe a fanatical devotee of John Fowles; whether the development has streets named after Gandalf and Raistlin or Nicholas Urfe and Phraxos — or hey, it could be named after either Marvel Comics character with that name. I’d even settle for the Zoroastrian sense of the word.

(One place name that continues to be used is Jewel Ridge, Conn. The city is mentioned as the home of the one of the competitors in the Bayport Creature Commander tournament; the state isn’t mentioned, but Jewel Ridge’s location has been established in other books.)

The solution is blindingly obvious. Although Gerry, a high-school Creature Commander card dealer who doesn’t play the game, is an obvious suspect, the key clue is the presence of Mr. McCool, a belligerent part-time teacher who teaches kids how to use a print shop. Of course Mr. McCool is connected to the thefts, which he uses to acquire cards to copy in his printing plant. (Kestenberg the bully is pulling the actual thefts, funneling the cards to McCool, and then selling the fakes and real cards as the Black Knight, which was a bit harder to predict.) I find it hard to believe McCool could duplicate the cardstock and finish of the cards, but what trips him up is that he duplicates the ketchup stain Chet soiled his Coyote and White Knight cards with. Seeing the stain on a Coyote card caused Chet to start a fight at the big tournament, but only when the police revealed the stain was printed onto the card does the penny drop for Frank — only 100 pages after it did for me, but hey, we can’t all be geniuses.

(If you think it’s petty and foolish to claim genius status at being an adult smart enough to solve a mystery in a book aimed at pre-teens, well, I don’t care, Judgy McJudgerson.)