The Crisscross Crime (#150)

For the hundredth book in the Hardy Boys series, The Secret of the Island Treasure, Simon & Schuster brought back Hurd Applegate, a character from the first Hardy Boys book (The Tower Treasure) and a recurring character in early books. I was hopeful S&S would do something unexpectedly retro with book #150, The Crisscross Crime, but I was disappointed.

The book does have touches that recall earlier mysteries. The title is similar to The Crisscross Shadow’s (#32), although the plots have nothing to do with each other. Bayport’s reservoir is important, like in The Secret of Skull Mountain (#27), but the reservoir in Crisscross Crime appears to be a new reservoir, as it isn’t located at Skull Mountain. (It's probably the same reservoir from Dungeon of Doom [#99].) The biggest rush of nostalgia comes when Fenton’s international crimesolving just happens to interlock with Frank and Joe’s Bayport case (The Mystery of Too Many Damn Times to Count). Still, I wish there had been more explicit references to the Hardy Boys’ past in Crisscross. If, as Wikipedia suggests, Crisscross Crime started out as Hardy Boys Casefiles #130 before that series was cancelled, it’s a miracle the book fits with the Digest / original series as well as it does.

Well, I suppose you can count Joe being a headstrong moron and Frank being a plodding dullard being references to the series past — but I’ll get back to that.

The story begins on the baseball field — that’s something else that hearkens back to the good ol’ days, but Frank and Joe were playing baseball for the Bayport Bombers in Danger on the Diamond (#90) as well, so it’s not unusual. Now, if they’d brought back baseball-loving chum Jerry Gilroy, who hasn’t been seen since 1966, then that would have been awesome. Anyway, Joe’s pitching, Frank’s at shortstop, and Biff takes Chet’s old spot behind the plate. The Bayport Bombers are an out from a win with runners in scoring position; Joe hangs a curve, but a diving catch by Frank seals the Bomber victory.

Rather than head to Mr. Pizza, Frank and Joe need to pick up their mother’s car from the shop. While Frank pays, Joe spots a break-in at a nearby bank. The robbers take off when the alarm sounds, and when Frank drives by in Laura’s car, Joe hops in with their video camera and tells Frank to follow that car!

The chase ends in a junk yard, where the robbers abandon their vehicle. But Frank drives Laura’s car into a car crusher — oops! — and as the car is turned into a cube, the boys narrowly escape with their lives and the video camera. I realize this is probably a traumatic moment for them; it would be for me. But our heroes are Frank and Joe Hardy, who have been in traumatic situations from (literally!) Australia to Zurich and everywhere in between, so why do they do so many stupid things afterwards?

For example:

• Joe’s first act after the car is destroyed is to break into the junkyard’s office and snoop around.
  
• Frank and Joe delay telling Laura that her car is no more, and she learns about it by watching the video Joe shot of it turning it into a large die.
  
• When the boys want to learn what happened at a successful robbery that happened just after the break-in they witnessed, Joe poses as a reporter for the Bayport Globe and grills the bank manager, even though the police have told the bank manager not to blab. Why not ask the usually cooperative police, Joe?
  
• When a suspect doesn’t want to talk to the boys, Joe’s reaction is to immediately hop her large wall to force her to talk to them.
  
• When Frank tells his brother to call the cops if he isn’t back from checking a potential bank robbery in ten seconds, Joe’s reaction is to get a couple of baseball bats, give one to Biff, then try to beat up the robber(s), who have guns.
  
• When Frank and Joe are captured by the villains at the end of the book, and Frank realizes the criminals are more likely to kill the boys the more they learn about what the Hardys know, Joe keeps blabbering, letting the criminals know exactly how much the boys have learned.

On one hand, the Hardys have always put justice above property rights or personal safety. On the other hand, Joe might be a nihilist thug, rushing headlong toward the hospital or the grave. (He might have discovered what all those concussions mean for him later in life and be determined not to suffer through the symptoms of CTE.) I realize the above acts are (somewhat) normal for private eyes in fiction, but Frank and Joe are kids with no reason to not cooperate with the police, given how willingly Con will feed them info.

But Frank and Joe never call the police! I’ve joked about the boys considering themselves a law unto themselves, but it’s hard to remember a case on which they have snubbed the five-oh so blatantly. After Laura’s car gets crunched and the boys break into the junkyard office, Frank and Joe don’t call the cops — even though it takes about three hours between the car’s destruction and the arrival of a concussed Biff to pick up the brothers. (A time warp might explain the abnormally long time it takes for a car chase and poking around a room or two, or the boys might have fallen into an alternate timeline: Joe calls Biff “Hoop,” and Biff’s drives a hatchback instead of his usual jeep.) Frank and Joe are determined to investigate, and it takes Frank’s near arrest — the boys’ van was spotted near the botched bank robbery — to get them to hand over their video of the chase.

But they don’t hand over the tape until after they’ve given it to Phil Cohen, who shouts “Enhance!” at his computers a few times and gets a clear look at the license plates. C’mon, guys! If TV has taught me nothing else — and it’s possible that it hasn’t — it’s that the police have a whole unit dedicated to shouting “Enhance!” at video, even though it’s impossible to improve a video past its original resolution.

I suppose the lack of police involvement cuts both ways. When Joe vaults the fence at a ritzy house on tony High Street — the same street the Hardys live on, although the book doesn’t mention that — and are caught, Frank and Joe don’t feel the need to use the police to justify their presence. Fortunately, the suspect lets them out of the trees in which her Dobermans have chased them and doesn’t call the cops herself.

Collig tries to give the boys their comeuppance, yelling at the Hardys for charging into a bank robbery with baseball bats, but his dressing down is interrupted by a grateful bank manager, who tells Collig the boys saved all that federally insured money and only drew a couple of bullets that hit only one bat. Still, Chief Collig gets his momentary revenge at the denouement: When Frank and Joe reveal the villains’ real, final target, he sneers at them, and his officers laugh. Serves you right, boys.

(This antagonism between Collig and the boys makes more sense if the book was originally a Casefile; Collig’s animus against the boys is much greater in that series.)

I guess I shouldn’t be too harsh on Frank and Joe. After they describe the initial robbery attempt and chase to Fenton, Fenton tells the boys to call Collig “if they find anything concrete” (30). Fenton: They are frelling eyewitnesses to an attempted bank robbery, and they have videotape of the criminals escaping. I’m not sure your sense of responsibility is everything it should be.

The independent streak he inspires in his sons ends up biting him in the ass, though. When Frank and Joe find the counterfeiter Fenton has been hunting is in Bayport, they ask for Fenton’s number; Laura says she has already spoken that day to Fenton, who said he’s returning to Bayport, and boys decide their information can wait. Sure, why not?

And the boys definitely get their cavalier regard for information sharing from their father. When Frank and Joe try to “soothe” Laura and their Aunt Gertrude after they see Laura’s car being crushed, the women tell the boys to call the police (36). The boys refuse. No reason to listen to hysterical women and their completely legitimate concerns about your safety and the modern crimefighting apparatus!

Because Frank and Joe don’t share info with the police, it’s hard to blame Collig for his reactions. He thinks he’s figured out the pattern in crimes — or more accurately, he figures Frank has figured out the pattern, which he shared with the police in a rare moment of cooperation. Well, the book claims Frank figured it out, but let’s see if you can figure it out yourself. First, as Frank and Joe were getting their mom’s car crushed and the police were responding to the triggered alarm, a bank downtown was robbed. A day or so later, while Joe and Biff foiled the bank robbery with their wooden bats, the police were responding in force to an alarm triggered at a bank on Bayport’s outskirts. Frank’s cognitive breakthrough? He “explained the hunch he and Joe had about all the real targets being downtown and all the false alarms being on the outskirts of town” (108).

That’s not a hunch. That’s recapping what had happened in the book so far

Now, what don’t Frank and Joe share with Collig? In the junkyard office, Frank and Joe find detailed maps of Bayport’s utilities, including the sewer lines and storm drains. Also, Fenton is investigating a counterfeiting case for the government, and the printing plates and ink have already been stolen; one of the suspects tells them the paper U.S. currency is printed on is stored in Bayport. (Seems like Fenton should have been on top of that, really.) The boys — well, Frank, really — put 2 and 2 together, and even though they don’t bother to check whether they should be adding or multiplying, come up with the 4-1-1: The criminals are using the storm drains to move around town, and the last bank robberies will be a double fake. The real target will be the armory where the paper is stored.

While the police are responding to a decoy robbery downtown, the robbers use jackhammers to break into the armory from below, which our crack troops can’t hear. They then escape through the storm drains on jet skis. It’s unusual; I’ll say that, at least. After Frank viciously “clocked” a criminal with a tire iron and steals his jet ski (138), the boys chase the other robbers to the reservoir, survive being tied up to drown in the storm drain (Frank flexes his wrists to escape his wet bonds), and pursue the last of the criminals onto the bay, where they prevent international counterfeiter Herve DuBois from escaping onto his speedboat and the open sea.

At no point do they call the police, but the Coast Guard does show up in time to keep the criminals from drowning.

The book ends with Laura and Fenton showing up at the boys’ next baseball game in her new car; Laura cheerfully tells her sons they will “never” drive it (150). Finally — consequences for Frank and Joe!

Danger on the Diamond (#90)

Ghost-written series books have many problems: absent continuity, the inability to change the series’ premise, inconsistent characterization … the list goes on.

But one of the most frustrating difficulties is when the author uses a character in a role that is obviously better suited to another character. Chet Morton, for instance, is plopped into The Witchmaster’s Key (#55) as Phil Cohen’s companion on a biking tour of Ireland and the Isle of Man. The role is much better suited to a more athletic chum, like Biff Hooper, Jerry Gilroy, or Tony Prito — although Tony always has too many responsibilities to get away for a biking tour, and Jerry hadn't appeared in a book in almost two decades at that point. Still: Biff.

In Danger on the Diamond, one character is described as a practical joker who learned how to pick locks for a magic act he performed a few years before. That character obviously should be Chet, whose character was originally conceived as a jokester and who is forever picking up and dropping hobbies. But no, the role is given to Tony Prito — Tony, the always responsible one who is always working for his father or on another job.

I get that this character has to be athletic enough to attend a baseball camp and play for the Bayport High School baseball team. Tony was a second baseman in The Mummy Case (#63) and an outfielder in Tic-Tac-Terror (#74), but Chet was a catcher on the team in Mummy Case, and the heavyset Chet is not laughable as a catcher. Yes, Chet wasn’t on the team in the revised A Figure in Hiding (#16), but there’s no reason why he couldn't have been in Danger on the Diamond. Chet’s the jokester, dangit, since all the way back in the beginning! [*bangs fist on desk*] His attempted fish prank in The Shore Road Mystery (#6) was hilarious! And Tony’s the worst choice for a lighthearted prankster! [*froth starts dripping from mouth onto keyboard*] Why can’t Franklin W. Dixon get this right?

[*deep, heaving breaths, gradually slowing*] It just makes me mad, that’s all.

Phew. OK, I’m better now.

Anyway, Frank, Joe, Biff, and Tony are attending a baseball camp in Bayport that Chet is not allowed in. (The other members of the Bombers — the BHS nickname, also used in Slam Dunk Sabotage (#140) — are also there.) Dangerous things start happening: the bleachers collapse from sabotage, the pitching machine malfunctions and beans Frank, a rubber ball the pitching instructor squeezes explodes (not in the pitcher’s hand, though), and the locker room’s showers get stuck on very hot, nearly scalding Biff. Tony, whom Biff calls “a clown,” gets blamed for what are believed to be pranks gone wrong. Putting aside that Tony is not a prankster, the Bombers’ willingness to blame Tony speaks to a deeper resentment. Are they angry that his industriousness puts them to shame? Are they indulging in anti-Italian sentiment? Or are they behaving irrationally to further the plot?

That last one, I think. I mean, even Biff keeps blaming Tony. Then again, Biff tries to lure Joe into a shower where they are both intentionally obscured by clouds of steam, so maybe he’s not being written in character either. (He claims it’s to create a “steambath,” but I’m not sure whether filling the shower stalls with steam and take a shower together with a friend is something that would appeal to a heterosexual teenager.)

The incidents bring up larger concerns, none of which are connected to the plot. Perhaps the most interesting is that the author actually takes concussions seriously. Frank is hospitalized briefly after getting beaned, and he keeps a follow-up appointment with the doctor. The doctor says the headaches Frank experiences are normal, which is true, but they’re normal post-concussion syndrome symptoms as well. Since Frank doesn’t seem to experience any of the other symptoms, we’ll let that go. On the other hand, Joe is dazed after getting clubbed in the head and knocked down, but no one cares about that because he doesn’t have a boo-boo on his head like Frank did.

The writer doesn’t seem to have a good handle on baseball, which is worrying. Frank can’t hit at the beginning, so he consults an instructor to improve. The big realization that improves Frank’s hitting? That the hitting instructor “never took his eyes off the ball” while hitting (19). Although this is technically impossible — the visual angle of the human eye and speed of thrown pitches makes it impossible to see the ball the entire way from the pitcher’s hand to the plate — that same advice has been given to every kid who has ever played baseball. Repeatedly. Perhaps every practice. Who gets to their senior year of baseball without knowing this? Perhaps this shoddy coaching is why the Bombers seem so awful; the players we follow — Joe, Biff, and Frank — seem pretty bad, striking out and making constant errors.

Also: Taking his eyes off the ball is how Frank gets beaned by a pitching machine, so, you know, maybe he needs a few more reminders.

The kids are also amazed that the former major-league instructors are so much better than them at baseball. Of course they are! These guys made it to the top of the profession, and they’re not out of shape; they’ve been playing baseball at camps like these for years. Of course they can school cocky little twerps like you.

Whether they should is a better question. Is making all the attendees look awful a good business plan? I honestly don’t know. The consequences of the blow to the kids’ little egos argues against that tactic, but the tear-them-down-to-build-them-up school of thought says you need to make them realize how bad they are before they’ll listen. Since only fifteen players, all from the Bombers, are at the camp, I don’t think the camp can afford the defections this approach would cause. Maybe humiliating players has already had an effect; perhaps rumors about the camp’s techniques discouraged other schools, like intra-county rival Seneca Tech (from The Sinister Sign Post, #15), from sending their players.

The instructors seem committed to the abuse. When Frank and Joe approach the former major league pitcher, Zeke Horner, he tells them to “get lost”; when Joe protests, Horner says, “I’ll say anything I want … Keep your mouths shut and maybe you’ll learn something” (30).

The most worrying part of the plot is that the author expects us to believe that one of the coaches was kicked out of baseball for association with gamblers, and no one heard about it. That’s asinine, although I have the benefit of having seen the Pete Rose investigation unfold; Danger was published in 1988, while Rose was investigated and banned from baseball the next year. Major League Baseball couldn't keep a lid on the investigation into Rose for much more than a month. Even during a time when the players and press were much more cozy, like the ‘60s, the rumors would have been rife. If MLB could have hushed it up at the time, the story would have leaked in the intervening years. And I’m not convinced MLB would have kept it quiet. A chance to frighten the players by crucifying a minor player would have been too good to pass up.

Anyway. After a series of “accidents” and assaults, the Hardys throw themselves into the investigation. Technically, the Bayport Police Department also investigates, but we know how effective they are. This time, Chief Collig settles on Tony as a likely suspect, does nothing about it, then abandons the case. It’s clear the BPD doesn’t care: when Frank finds a tie-clip at an arson site, Collig tells them to bring it to the police station the next day. Chain of custody? Forensic evidence? Nope! That’s going to reflect negatively on the department when the Hardys give them their evaluation.

(To be fair: Frank just picks up the suspicious tie-clip from the ground and carries it to Collig, so it’s not like he’s concerned with good investigative techniques either.)

Frank and Joe’s plan for the case is to make accusations and browbeat the victims of the crimes they witnessed. It turns out this is an effective technique — they get the owner of the camp, Spike Nolan, to admit what’s going on, and Horner agrees to meet them at the Bayview Motel to discuss what’s going on — but they’re working on the wrong assumptions. Frank and Joe assume the accidents and damage are part of insurance fraud being pulled by Nolan or his employees, but a loanshark / gambling kingpin’s attempts to blackmail and extort Nolan and Horner are the reasons for the accidents.

(By the by: The Bayview Motel appeared in the revised Figure in Hiding (#16), way back in 1965! The years have not been kind to the Bayview, which is now “a rundown motel on the edge of town” (117). Bayview Beach was mentioned in Tic-Tac-Terror, but there’s no solid evidence the two are close to each other.)

Frank and Joe’s haphazard interest in this “evidence” thing they’ve heard about is especially galling when they quote Fenton: “It’s just like Dad’s always saying: Solid investigative skills usually pay off with good results” (110-1). Geez. Tell that to the driver who got run off the road by gangsters who thought it was the Hardys’ van. If Frank and Joe had, you know, alerted the police about the danger, perhaps an innocent’s life wouldn’t have been jeopardized.

Anyway, to get more this “evidence,” Frank and Joe get a bug from Phil Cohen before they head to the Bayview Motel. Phil insists on accompanying them, and Frank and Joe reluctantly agree. Why they are so reluctant to let Phil run electronic equipment in the van? I dunno, but he comes in handy after Frank and the victim are kidnapped by hired goons. While Joe goes to rescue his brother, Phil gets the cops. The BPD arrives too late, of course, and are forced to take possession of the criminals Frank and Joe have already captured. Oh, and they probably are forced to extinguish the conflagration that once was the goons’ van, which exploded when Joe ran into it with a lawnmower. I wonder if the van's manufacturer based its design on the Corvair or the Pinto? To be fair, it must have been a super lawnmower, because Joe managed to catch up with the van while riding the lawnmower.

Anyway, the bad guys are taken into custody, and Nolan — cleared of gambling allegations that got him banned from baseball — gets an offer to coach from a major league team. Does he take it? No! He’s going to stick to running baseball camps. Why? Because he’s stupid, just like this book.