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.)

One False Step (#189)

I approached the penultimate Hardy Boys digest, One False Step, with some trepidation. George Edward Stanley, who wrote One False Step, had also written two of the worst books in the digest series (The Case of the Psychic’s Vision, #177, and Hidden Mountain, #186). What if One False Step lived up — or down, if you want to think of it that way — to that standard? Or would it be worse if it didn’t?

Well, One False Step is not in the same class as Psychic’s Vision or Hidden Mountain, for ill or for good. It’s obviously a Stanley story; it has the weird level of unimportant details that Stanley must feel gives depth to the story but just ends up being strange. Do we care Aunt Gertrude is reading a romance novel, The Bride from Butte, that has been written by the granddaughter of one of Gertrude’s college friends? No. Why would we? Neither the book nor its author pops up again. Do we care Callie has an identical (but distant) cousin, Mary Beth Edwards, in New York? Well, kinda, but Mary Beth doesn’t show up at all; she’s just a passing mention, a robbery victim whom Frank and Joe hear about but never talk to. I understand naming the Bayport High School cafeteria lady, Mrs. Conroy, but her banter with the Hardys and their chums is a waste of page space.

And then you’ve got Frank and Joe’s new next-door-neighbor and friend, Matt Jenkins. (No mention of whether his family replaced the Forsythes, mentioned in The Mystery of the Chinese Junk [#39], or if they moved in on the other side.) He never turns into a Larry Stu the way Colin Randles does in Psychic’s Vision, but we learn all sorts of irrelevant detail about him: He lived in Botswana, his father was a well-known mystery writer who died of cancer, his mother is a diplomat, and he wants a “normal American high-school experience” (8) like seeing Aerocircus, a weird circus that sells tickets at more than $200 a pop. None of that is relevant, except for the last one, as Matt drags Frank, Joe, Chet, and Tony to Philadelphia at the last moment to see Aerocirque, without first securing tickets.

Well, Matt also uses his Africa sense when Joe doesn’t read the chapter in his history book on apartheid; Matt gives him a lecture on the subject, which he knows about because he lived in Botswana and “apartheid affected all the surrounding countries” (3). That’s like a Canadian telling a Russian about Jim Crow legislation because, hey, Canadians are like Americans and right next door. Still, Joe says, “I should get an A on that test!” (3), and Frank says, “I learned a lot of things about that time too” (3).

That Frank ended that statement with “fellow kids” should be understood, even though it’s not on the page.

Stanley’s handling of the supporting cast is a mixed bag. Chet in included only so everyone can make food jokes, which is standard for a Hardy Boys story, and even though that should be condemned (to an extent), I also don’t want to talk about it. Tony Prito is added to the boys’ trip to Philadelphia because … because … I don’t know why, honestly. I don’t know why the expedition needs a fifth boy, and Tony adds nothing to the story; they don’t need his muscle or knowledge or even his mass as ballast. He doesn’t even use his Italian heritage and food-service experience to complain about / laud Philly cheese-steak sandwiches or hoagies or Italian roast-pork sandwiches or water ice (aka “Italian ice”) or strombolis. I had to double check to make sure the fifth boy wasn’t Phil Cohen or Biff Hooper or Jamal Hawkins. I’m still not entirely sure Stanley was consistent throughout — not because I doubt Stanley’s ability to get the name right but because it didn’t matter.

Girls, on the other hand, fare better. Iola gets in cutting remarks about Callie’s overachieving nature and her brother’s comic-book collection. Callie appears only momentarily, delivering the news of her cousin’s robbery. Gertrude is teased about whether wedding bells are in the future for her and her friend, Mr. Phillips. (The last time Gertrude had a possible romantic entanglement, it was with Clayton Silvers in Past and Present Danger, #166.) The girls in Philadelphia like the boys, or maybe boys in general; when local girls party with the Hardys and their chums, the boys are never lacking in dance partners, and Tony picks up digits from many of them. The girls ask the boys to tell them about Bayport, which … well, where do you start? (After that, Elisabeth, the hostess of the party the boys go to, points out how rich her female friends are, which confuses Frank and Joe, but I think she confused the word “sleuth” for “gigolo.”) Later, Frank and Joe get a couple of girls to show them some Philadelphia “hospitality,” if you know what I mean.

(What I mean is “historical sites” and “lunch at an exclusive restaurant.”)

In Philadelphia, Frank, Joe, and their friends are allowed to stay with one of Fenton’s contacts, Det. Mario Zettarella, and his wife, Gina. Five teenage boys are a lot to have dumped into your house at the last moment, but the Zettarellas don’t mind; they have five grown boys, and Gina enjoys nothing more the feeding and care of teenagers. She was a stock trader for a brokerage before she married Mario, but raising a family — and cooking! — is more fulfilling for her. Why, even with her children out of the house, she doesn’t consider returning to a brokerage! (This is important, but Stanley doesn’t mention it again.)

Frank and Joe say this is their first time in Philadelphia, but that’ s not true. In Shield of Fear (#91), Frank and Joe helped their father expose organized crime and corrupt officers in the Philadelphia police. (This will become important later — or would have, if anyone had remembered it.) They passed through Philadelphia in the revised Secret Warning (#17), Twisted Claw (#18), and Short-Wave Mystery (#24) and the original Secret of the Lost Tunnel (#29), but Frank and Joe don’t do anything there. Interestingly, the Hardys will return to Philadelphia two books later, albeit in a different continuity, in Extreme Danger, the first Undercover Brothers book.

The only mystery in One False Step is whether everyone in the book is brain damaged, or if we’re supposed to pretend they aren’t. The Mary Beth’s family’s high-rise apartment is robbed, an impossible crime with only a few strange marks left on their balcony. The Edwardses weren’t at home because they were at a performance of Aerocirque, the Cirque du Soleil ripoff that uses helicopters to support the tightropes and trapezes.

(I admit, that level of precision flying and acrobatics is impressive; I don’t believe helicopters could remain reliably steady long enough to support the equipment, and tying two helicopters together sounds horribly dangerous. I also imagine multiple helicopters inside a stadium would produce hearing-destroying levels of decibels. Still, I’d probably go see it.)

Anyway, an impossible robbery of a high-rise apartment should suggest daring, high-altitude acrobatics acts faster than you can say “Wallenda,” but no one makes the connection in New York. No one in Philadelphia makes the connection to Aerocirque when another high-rise apartment is robbed in an identical matter, even though Mario is working security at Aerocirque and is called to the robbery as soon as the show is over. (His position is the only way the boys were able to get into Aerocirque, which is mighty convenient!) The police instead waste their time interviewing fired chauffeurs. Frank and Joe make the connection eventually — not after any epiphany or discovering new evidence but after seeing Elisabeth, the daughter of Aerocirque’s founder, point at apartment buildings while talking to an acrobat.

The brothers tell Mario, and he inserts them into the high-wire troupe that is going to pull the robbery. (These acrobats are all masked mutes, so the impersonations are not as difficult as one might think.) Frank and Joe are supposed to be anchors for the tightrope walkers who will cross over a street to a penthouse from an office building across the street, but one of the two tightrope walkers twists his ankle getting out of their helicopter. After the cable is fired across the street and anchored on their end, Frank and Joe are given the codes for the penthouse’s security and signaled that they must make the crossing. Walking the wire to the penthouse is no problem for the boys, since they do high-school gymnastics and have spent the day training with the troupe, but when they get to the penthouse, the security details they have are for the wrong manufacturer.

Mario and his men are inside the penthouse, so Mario tells Frank and Joe to walk back over and mime to the other two tightrope walkers what the problem is. The police need time to get over to the other building to arrest the thieves before they board their helicopter and escape. Why the police wouldn’t already be in position, given that they had the time to do so while Frank and Joe were walking over in the first place, is beyond me, but …

Well, there’s no “but,” really.

So Frank and Joe walk back over the tightrope. It’s a little more difficult this time, but Stanley makes sure to bleed the scene of most of the tension. When the Hardys complete their second tightrope walk, they find the two acrobatic thieves not only knew who Frank and Joe really were, but they’re not even mutes. The thieves subdue the boys and load them into the helicopter, planning to dump them into the Atlantic, but Elisabeth, the daughter of their legitimate and criminal boss, calls them back; she’s OK with robbery because they need money, but murder is too far. Frank and Joe are locked in a penthouse, where Mario tells them he figured out Aerocirque was behind the robberies before the Hardys did, and he told the gang / Aerocirque leader he had to cut Mario in, or he was going to jail. Mario then leaves.

After she’s left alone with the captive Hardys, Elisabeth tells them everything else. Because Frank and Joe are held in the room where the gang stores its equipment — the storage area is hidden, but keeping Frank and Joe in the same room is still a bad idea — Elisabeth is able to fire one of the cable bazookas, and Frank and Joe make one last high-wire walk. Belatedly, we learn a member of the United States Olympic Committee has told Joe “if [Joe] kept at it, he could make the [gymnastics] team in 2008” (143). Seems like we should have heard about that sort of astounding c.v. earlier!

The gang cuts the wire just before Frank makes it across, but he catches the wire, and a friendly woman lets him and Joe into her apartment. It wouldn’t be a Stanley story if we didn’t learn completely irrelevant and boring information about the woman, Louise Schuster. “She tries to help wayward teenagers,” Frank says (147), and I weep for whatever editor worked on this book.

From there, Frank calls the FBI. Mario is arrested — he did it “for the money” (130-1), which suggests that if his wife had gone back to work, he might have remained honest — as are two of his officers, the Aerocirque acrobats, and Elisabeth. Her father escapes to the Caribbean, presumably with all the money. Crime does pay! The book ends with Matt suggesting Frank and Joe walk a tightrope as a school fundraiser; despite having decided never to walk the wire again, Frank and Joe give in to teasing and peer pressure.

This moment of lightheartedness allows us to forget Gina, whose life has been ruined by the Hardys intrusion. Frank and Joe do not see her after their abduction, and Tony, Chet, and Matt slink away. Callow teenagers!

One False Step is a poor story; an ungenerous yet still accurate assessment would be that it’s a very poor story. The digest series is littered with stories that plumb the depths of narrative ineptitude, and I’m disappointed Stanley would not crash beyond this low-water mark to give readers something sublimely ridiculous or ridiculously sublime. This was Stanley’s last chance to challenge Dr. John Button for the title of worst Hardy Boys writer, and he failed at it. That he didn’t fail by succeeding is an altogether appropriate capstone for his Hardy Boys career.

Hidden Mountain (#186)

I’ve breezed my way through these digests, and by and large, they’ve blurred as I passed them by. Some of them I have a hazy-but-fond memory of, some I vaguely recall disliking, but most blend into a flavorless paste that disappears into the wrinkles of my brain. Occasionally, I have stumbled across something like The Secret of the Island Treasure (#100), one of the best digests, or The Case of the Psychic’s Vision (#177), which spectacularly misjudges what a Hardy Boys book should be. Nothing comes close to the disasters like the original Disappearing Floor (#19) or Flying Expess (#20) or triumphs like the original House on the Cliff (#2) or Mystery of Cabin Island (#8).

Hidden Mountain is more Psychic’s Vision than Flying Express, but this book is closer to catastrophe than you might think. (Like Psychic's Vision, Hidden Mountain is written by George Edward Stanley, according to the University of Southern Mississippi's libraries' archives.) Hidden Mountain doesn’t have Flying Express’s continuity errors or Disappearing Floor’s ludicrousness; rather, Hidden Mountain has a strange idea of what makes a Hardy Boys story a Hardy Boys story. Had this been an adventure of the Generic Teen Detectives — well, if it had been an adventure of the Generic Teen Detectives, I wouldn’t have been reading it, because “Generic Teen Detectives” is a horrible name for a mystery series. But if it had been part of that series, and I had read it, I wouldn’t have liked it, but I wouldn’t have found it so awful either.

To start off with, Hidden Mountain posits a group of teens who don’t feel like the Hardys and their friends. Neither Frank nor Joe is in a “serious relationship” (1), and they date Callie and Iola only “from time to time” (1). The Mortons live in an older part of Bayport, which I suppose is the new status quo, but it still feels weird — and honestly, I feel the Mortons should live in a newer development, as refugees from rural poverty. At the Mortons’ home, Chet complains about all the food his mother has made, saying, “‘Good grief, Mom!’ Chet cried. ‘You’re not feeding an army!’” (7). It’s a bit like Cookie Monster labeling cookies a “sometimes food” — perhaps for the best, but weird and wrong at the same time.

Plus, Chet owns a shortwave radio.

The shortwave radio used to be a vital part of the Hardys’ crimefighting arsenal, but with the advent of cell phones, the shortwave radio lost its importance; the radio (called a “ham radio,” which is more or less the same) was last mentioned in The Blackwing Puzzle (#82), as far as I can tell. Here, though, the narration reframes radio’s role in the Hardys’ lives: Joe “and Frank had solved a couple of mysteries that involved shortwave, but it was almost always the bad guys who used them” (10). Boo! If Stanley had reframed shortwave as a Hardy thing — Fenton or Gertrude with an old set in the attic, or a childhood hobby Frank and Joe set aside but Chet seems have mastered — I would have been supported or even lauded the decision. But no, shortwave radio is no longer cool enough for Frank and Joe to have ever used.

Anyway, Chet gets a message over the shortwave from Darren Wilkerson, a former classmate who left Bayport suddenly with his family. Darren is in trouble in Hudson’s Hope, British Columbia, Canada, and he needs Chet to get a message to Frank and Joe — but the transmission is cut off before Darren can get off more than a request for help. If I had more confidence that this Dixon and his editor knew the series’s history, I would suggest this book was homaging to The Short-Wave Mystery (#24), a book which involved shortwave radio and a trip to Canada. (And during which Frank killed a lynx with a radio antenna, while Chet took up taxidermy. These were two completely unrelated events.)

After Fenton pretends to exercise parental oversight over the boys, he gives in, arranging for backup in Hudson’s Hope and buying Frank and Joe hiking / mountaineering equipment. Once the boys’ “school vacation” (13) begins* two days after the shortwave call, they are off to Canada, flying from LaGuardia to Edmonton to Dawson Creek, B.C. — a real city of 11,000, not the place named after a James van der Beek character. At this point, the book becomes filled with weird details that go nowhere.

Gertrude laments over a friend in Wisconsin whose house has burned down, and the house was uninsured because her husband might have Alzheimer’s. Neither Wisconsin nor Alzheimer’s (or any other form of dementia) come up again; for that matter, neither does Gertrude. Chet can’t come with Frank and Joe because Mrs. Morton has decided to redecorate the house in “New Mexico style” (19), so she’s going to New Mexico and needs Chet to schlep paintings around. Chet frequently has lame excuses to avoid adventures, but this is a strange yet strangely detailed excuse. At LaGuardia, Frank and Joe inexplicably meet their old babysitter, Annie Wilson, who is working for the airline, and she fawns over them; on the plane to Edmonton, two flight attendants (Bonnie and June, rather than Benny and Joon) give the boys an extra meal each and stop barely short of flirting. This sounds like an airplane fantasy, although that may be because I don’t believe an airplane would serve an in-flight meal, let alone a steak dinner with anyone getting an extra portion, after 2001.

(Flying through Edmonton reminds me of The Viking Symbol Mystery, #42, a clunker that deserves more vitriol directed at it for having the boys casually rack up 5,000 miles of travel in Canada in less than two weeks, flying from Calgary to Saskatoon to Edmonton to Fort Smith, over and over again. At least in that story, Fenton was supervising them from the same province.)

In Dawson Creek — again, a real place — Fenton’s “good friend” (13), Rupert Kitimat, meets the boys when they get off the plane. Rupert is supposed to be a private detective, but the book frequently refers to him as “Detective Kitimat.” That title is almost never used for private detectives; “Detective,” as a courtesy title, is reserved for police detectives. Plus, there’s the question of who’s paying for Rupert’s time? If it’s Fenton, he’s running up a hell of a bill; if Rupert is donating his time, then Fenton must be one hell of a friend.

Anyway, the boys and Rupert take a pontoon plane to Williston Lake, a short-but-rugged hike from Hudson’s Hope. This flight disturbs the boys even though they were certified to fly seaplanes in Viking Symbol. Honestly, it’s like this book doesn’t care about the 75+ years of stupid continuity! Frank, Joe, and Detective Kitimat hike into town over rugged hills, encountering a bear, despite perfectly good roads linking Williston Lake and the town. Anyway, when they get to Hudson’s Hope — surprisingly, it too is real, although it has only about a thousand people — Darren and his family are gone, and a couple of men break into their cabin, shooting at Frank and Joe as the boys flee.

When the men catch up with Frank and Joe, we learn the meat of this stupid, stupid plot:

1) The Wilkersons are part of the Witness Protection Program,
2) But their cover was blown in Bayport — the fourth time this has happened — so the family is hiking across the wilderness to the ultra-secret Witness Protection fortress, Hidden Mountain;
3) Hidden Mountain is in Canada, despite being a haven for people in the US Witness Protection Program, which I admit is probably an effective place to hide them — I certainly didn’t expect the US to keep vulnerable, valuable witnesses in a foreign country, because it’s a stupid thing to do;
4) The two men who shot at Frank and Joe claim to be FBI agents, sent to help the Wilkersons to Hidden Mountain, even though
5) They are so obviously not FBI agents, and the Witness Protection Program is run by the U.S. Marshals Service, which is an entirely different agency that predates the FBI by almost a century and a half;
6) Frank and Joe (especially the former) are able to track the Wilkersons through skills gained through a lifetime of summer wilderness programs, including a summer spent in Oklahoma with another of Fenton’s “good friends” (92), a Kiowa lawyer named George Long Bow;
7) When the Hardys finally shed the two fakes, they run into real FBI agents — again, WITSEC is run by the Marshals Service — and Kitimat, but the fake agents blunder into the Wilkersons;
8) Before the Hardys and the FBI agents can put a plan together, one of the FBI agents is “badly mauled” (101) by a bear and the other injured, evidently suffering a head injury so bad he’s amazed by a travois;
9) But don’t worry about the bear — the FBI agents are allowed to run around a foreign country unsupervised, but they aren’t allowed to kill wildlife, so one of the agents shoots the bear with a “special tranquilizer” (101) that puts the bear into “a twenty-four hour hibernation” (101);
10) So while the FBI agent is pulling his mauled partner toward safety, Frank and Joe insinuate themselves back into the Wilkersons’ / fake agents’ group, even though
11) They have no plan about how they’re going to take care of the fake agents, so the boys are inert as they get closer to Hidden Mountain, not attempting to overpower the fake agents or escape them, although I suppose
12) Escaping would be useless, since the villains have the map to the ultra-secret location that was given to the Wilkersons by some moron, and the villains want to kill all witnesses, so
13) Frank and Joe open a sealed envelope the non-mauled agent gave them, which gives them orders that are kept from the readers;
14) But I suppose the subtlety is best kept from the readers, as the directions are “rocks fall, kill everyone,” which is relevant because
15) To get into Hidden Mountain, everyone must climb the mountain, which means, SCREW YOU, DISABLED OR INFIRM WITNESSES;
16) After getting themselves and the Wilkersons to an overhang while rocks do kill the fake agents and gaining entrance to Hidden Mountain, the Hardys need special permission from Hidden Mountain’s “Supreme Council” to be allowed to leave (138), but
17) They gain that permission to leave because even thousands of miles away from Bayport, in the lost wilderness of Canada, Fenton Hardy’s name opens doors, which is good
18) Because I have no idea how the Canadian or US government resupplies a hidden facility, hundreds of miles from a city of any real size, that has a fifty-mile no fly-zone around it (forgot to mention that) and can be accessed only via mountain climbing, but
19) The story isn’t over, because once back in Bayport, the Hardys are followed by organized-crime figures, and once the FBI arrests those, they announce Frank and Joe will be under FBI “around-the-clock surveillance” (153) for the foreseeable future. Hope Iola and Callie find government surveillance a turn-on, or dates with the girls will go from occasional to nonexistent!

Hidden Mountain is intensely stupid, but its worst failing is that it can’t commit — like these Hardys, who aren’t in a serious relationship. Detective Kitimat follows the Hardys through the Canadian wilderness, but he does nothing to help them or the Wilkersons. The FBI agents show up, ostensibly to help (or take control — this is their moronic operation, after all), but they ignominiously are forced from the book by a bear attack, having done jack squat. They shoot the bear, but they can’t hurt nature’s killing machine; the agents must use stupid, science fictional tranquilizers that will put bears into hibernation for 24 hours, regardless of the size of the bear. The Hardys aren’t willing to hurt the fake FBI agents as they approach Hidden Mountain, even though they know the plan at Hidden Mountain is to kill them; they could have saved the men’s lives by trying something, but they’re willing to let them die rather than, you know, try.

I’m sure I’m leaving out a dozen moronic details — in Hudson’s Hope, for instance, the Wilkersons were warned they’d have to leave by a traveling salesman, which would be the opposite of an inconspicuous way to communicate anything in 2004 in a town of about 1,000 people — but I trust you get the idea: Hidden Mountain is a product of a line and era that often feels like watered-down Hardys, but this book’s stupidity is full strength.

* Which school vacation? The boys are out of school for only about a week, which suggests Spring Break or Easter Break or some sort of fall teacher’s conference, but in Canada, daylight continues until 11 p.m. That must be some time near summer — June, at least — but what occasion results in a week’s vacation from school in June? Even those poor unfortunates who go to school year-round get longer between the end of one term and the beginning of the next, surely.

Wreck and Roll (#185)

Wreck and Roll (#185) is a standard Hardy Boys book. The plot involves Phil Cohen dating a singer in a rock-and-roll band, and — of course — that band is the victim of sabotage, harassment, and light attempted murder. (No one has, as far as I know, ever been charged of attempted murder in one of the digests.) Everything goes about how you’d expect, and although I admit the culprit is better concealed than normally, that’s because the Hardys do little investigating in Wreck and Roll. They react to crises when they’re around the band, but they’re too busy not caring when they’re not around the band.

If you’ve read a half dozen of these books, you can probably guess the specific nature of the disasters: electrical malfunctions, theater mishaps, vehicular attacks. I’ll admit the sabotage of the band’s bungee jump and poisoning of a pre-show buffet was a bit unexpected, but we can’t be expected to think of every way to try to kill a rock band (but fail). Instead, I’m going to use Internet history as an inspiration and create a FAQ, even though we all know there are no questions about this book, let alone questions that are frequently asked:

1. Who is Franklin W. Dixon for this mystery?

Stephen D. Sullivan again.

1.1. How can you tell?

Sullivan doubles down on his namesakes in this book: BPD Officer Gus Sullivan returns for this book, and Sullivan’s son, known only as “Sullivan,” works as the band’s bouncer. Stephen Sullivan also brings back the Browning Theater from Trick-or-Trouble (#175).

1.2. Is that a conclusive identification?

I also read it on the Internet.

2. Who is the returning cast for this book?

Phil, who is described as “tall and thin” (78), is the Hardys’ entre into the action. Callie and Iola accompany Frank and Joe to a couple of concerts, although eventually they lose interest. Fenton and Laura show up, lawyer in tow, to pick up Frank and Joe after they are taken into custody for the crime of being attacked. The Cohens appear at the same time. (In the original canon, Mrs. Cohen was in The Bombay Boomerang, #49, but Mr. Cohen never appeared in the canon.)

2.1. Where’s Chet?

He’s helping at the family farm, which is run by Chet and Iola’s grandparents, for a week. For some reason, Chet’s getting school credit for his labor. Iola doesn’t explain how that works; I can’t imagine Chet taking ag classes, but who knows? Maybe he’s getting biology credit, or maybe it’s part of SkillsUSA, which I knew as VICA as a high schooler.

I think this is mentioned to move the Mortons’ farming heritage a generation back — Iola and Chet probably have never lived on a farm any more — and to foreshadow Sullivan’s next Hardy Boys book, Farming Fear (#188).

2.2. Where do Callie and Iola scarper off to?

They decide spending a weekend at a farm with Chet would be more interesting than hanging around an up-and-coming rock band or watching their boyfriends avert crises.

2.3. Is Phil cool enough to be dating a frontwoman for a rock band?

Of course not. Julie Steele, who performs as “Chrome Jewel,” is a several orders of magnitude cooler than Phil, although Sullivan soft-pedals Phil’s nerd credentials. He’s great with electronics and wiring, but he’s also the guy who drives an aged Toyota plastered with bumper stickers featuring his girlfriend’s band. Julie shows none of the rock passion one might expect, and the band’s lead guitarist actually says “rocked to meet you” (19), but still … by being the bassist and lead singer of a rock band, she’s much cooler than Phil.

Phil’s also the only significant other who comes backstage with the band, and he always brings along the Hardys. He’s trying too hard, and he’s dragging his own tagalongs backstage as well. Uncool, Phil.

2.4. Does Iola have reason to worry about Joe’s affections?

Not really. The band’s drummer, Jackie Rude, tells Callie and Iola to hold on to their “smart and handsome” boyfriends, or she “might steal one” (20), but she makes no moves on the brothers. Frank was never going to do anything, but Joe also makes no move. I suppose all those hugs Iola gives Joe are enough to keep him from straying … for now.

3. Is a middle-aged man writing about the music the youths love embarrassing or acceptable?

Mostly acceptable.

Let’s start with the band’s name, which I’ve withheld until now. Vette Smash is an acceptable band name, although the name conjures up the image of a person who would put a brick on the accelerator of a sports car and watch it slam into a brick wall in a beautiful fireball. (But not an expensive European sports car, like a Lamborghini or a Porsche; a Corvette, which suggests a more blue-collar sort of destruction.) I’d expect Vette Smash to be a punk band or a hair band, and while Vette Smash definitely isn’t the former, I can’t rule out the band being the latter. I mean, hair bands had been uncool for more than a decade when Wreck and Roll came out, but Vette Smash is only locally cool. We all know Bayport is stuck in a time warp, so when American audiences were rockin’ to Green Day, Nickleback, Maroon 5, and Evanescence in 2004, who knows what’s popular in Bayport at that time?

The members of Vette Smash are Jackie Rude, Ken Fender, Ray Chong, and Julie Steele, who — as mentioned — performs under the name Chrome Jewel. Other than the uninspiring “Ray Chong,” these are solid names, and we can excuse Ray because “Ray Chong” is probably his name.

Vette Smash plays “radical covers of older tunes, power ballads, and original compositions” (17). From what I gather, this is normal for newer acts, and as they grow in popularity, they shift more to their own music. (This may not true; I am not now, nor have I ever been, “hip.”) I’m not sure whether a band in 2004 would play “Riders on the Storm” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” classic rock songs from the ‘60s, over more contemporary ‘90s songs. Grunge may be cover-resistant, for all I know, but it’s hard to believe a band looking for a national contract in 2004 would have the courage to play “Deadman’s Curve,” a 1964 song by surf-rock notables Jan and Dean, even if the cover was “hyped up” (17).

On the unlikely side, the band hangs out at a bar that serves health drinks / food and no alcohol. The bar’s former existence as a gym and clever name (Vince’s Powerbar) almost makes up for that — almost, but not quite.

3.1. But this is definitely a middle-aged guy writing this, right?

Oh, yeah.

3.2. Can you give me examples?

Sure! He starts the story with Phil telling other teens, “Grab your dancing shoes and prepare to party!” (1). Frank tells Callie and Iola they look “super” (2). Joe calls Phil “the Philmeister” (3), years after Rob Schneider left Saturday Night Live. For some reason, he thinks Joe, a noted lunkhead, would know the word “obsequious” and be able to correctly use the word in conversation (61). He calls the band’s version of “Riders on the Storm” a “blazing cover” (63). He picked “Deadman’s Curve” as a song for the and called it an “old classic” (17). This is a man whose knowledge of youth is a little out of date, is what I’m saying.

He also has Frank and Joe conduct a normal conversation while driving motorcycles. This is preposterous, but to be fair, this is a long-standing Hardy Boys tradition, going all the way back to The Tower Treasure.

4. What about the agents who want to sign Vette Smash to a national contract?

The two agents are Walker Crown, a sexist Texan, and the all-business Kelly Miyazaki.

4.1. Sexist?

Crown always calls Miyazaki by her first name, while she calls him Mr. Crown; more importantly, he uses terms like “little filly” (27) and “little kitten” (36) to address her. I mean, he’s trying to demean her in front of potential clients, but he’s doing that with the kind of language that diminishes women.

4.1.1. So they definitely sign with Miyazaki?

No, they don’t.

4.1.2. They signed with Crown?

They did not.

4.2. Then which agent do they sign with?

Neither! Their manager dithers, and the band stalls, so Vette Smash doesn’t make a choice. And why should they? Nothing can go wrong for Vette Smash! There’s no reason to hurry — none at all!

5. Do Frank and Joe get to use sick martial arts?

Boy, do they! At the beginning, Frank is undone in fights by his reluctance to crack heads, giving Joe the opportunity to use hammerlocks and other boring moves to teach the unruly a lesson. But the Hardys and Vette Smash are set upon by mobs twice, giving Frank and Joe a chance to use their awesome moves to hold off the unwashed hordes until the police can be arsed to do something.

Frank uses a judo flip and “a quick chop” (118) in one rumble and “sweeping martial arts kicks” (87) in the other. Most likely Joe would have gotten a few good shots of his own — he has to settle for a slamming his fist into a guy’s gut — but he and Frank were busy protecting Phil and Vette Smash. Like when you’re running an escort mission in a video game, the brothers were prevented from doing cool stuff by the need to keep the feebs they were protecting from dying.

6. On a scale from disinterested to incompetent, how would you rate the Bayport Police Department?

Grossly incompetent. They don’t arrest any people who assault Vette Smash; even without Vette Smash pressing charges, the mob caused damage to property, and the police don’t seem to care. I mean, a mob pulled a man from his car and tried to beat him up! If one of those people had been African-American — as far as I know, Bayport doesn’t have Black people — in 2015, the National Guard would have been called out to keep the peace! And when Vette Smash is attacked again, this time by a rival gang, everyone gets arrested, and then … everyone gets released? The police take everyone’s fingerprints, and then nothing happens.

Nothing happens after Ken is almost killed by a sabotaged bungee cord. Nothing happens when an electrical fault sets the Browning Theater on fire; nothing happens when an electrical fault zaps Julie and her metal costume. Nothing happens when someone steals Ken’s convertible, stuffs Ken in the trunk, and tries to run over Julie with the car. Nothing happens when a rival band’s guitarist gets shocked by a guitar Ken was meant to play. It’s not just — just — that no culprit is captured or identified; I know justice can take time. But it feels like the police don’t ask the important questions: Does the band want protection? Who is out to get the band? Should we send an undercover or uniformed cop to be on top of things if another attempt is made? It’s hard to understate how much the police seem to be ignoring the nearly unignorable.

Perhaps Frank and Joe are to blame for this. They’re supposed to have “police contacts” (76); maybe those contacts were waiting on the go-ahead from Frank and Joe before doing anything. But the lack of work by the police and the lack of investigation by Frank and Joe does make Bayport seem like a lawless, early ‘90s urban hellhole (absent the hard-core drugs) that had been on the wane for a few years by this point but was still entrenched in the public mind.

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.

The Case of the Psychic's Vision (#177)

The Case of the Psychic’s Vision is a weird one, and that’s not meant as a compliment.

First, it presupposes that psychic powers are real, and not in a nebulous or deniable manner; psychic powers can reveal that which is hidden or forgotten. Real psychics are the rule, although the existence of fraudulent ones is acknowledged. Second, Fenton not only believes in these psychics but thinks they have probative value in investigations, both public and private. (They do not, of course.) Third, the Dixon writing Psychic’s Vision posits that everyone’s latent psychic abilities can be developed.

Wikipedia says Psychic’s Vision was the first of four Hardy Boys digests written by George Edward Stanley, although [CITATION NEEDED]. (The University of Southern Mississippi has Stanley’s papers, and the collection lists manuscripts and accompanying correspondence for Psychic’s Vision, The Mystery of the Black Rhino [#178], and The Secret of the Soldier’s Gold [#182], which would seem to settle the matter for those books; no mention is made of a manuscript of One False Step [#189]. ETA on 8 June 2019: The Southern Mississippi archive page also lists Hidden Mountain, #186, as one of his works.) Stanley wrote dozens of juvenile stories, including five Nancy Drew books, the Third Grade Detectives series, and the Spinetinglers series, the latter under the pseudonym of M.T. Coffin. Weld those last two together, and you can see how Psychic’s Vision might have come together.

In an interview, Stanley mentioned reading Nancy Drew, the Dana Girls, and the Hardy Boys as a child, and that inspired him to be a mystery writer. Stanley was born in 1942, so the Hardy Boys books he read would have been the original texts of the canon. That influence is visible in Psychic’s Vision. Chet is back to being a prankster, like in the early days; the author remembers the Hardys live at the corner of High and Elm (which shouldn’t be hard to remember, but, well …). The Hardy name gets a new pal excused for being late to class and causes a Vermont police officer to tell a bunch of kids everything about an ongoing hostage situation. A plot point in which a wealthy man pressures an employer to fire certain employees or risk financial ruin seems straight out of the first decade of the series. The book references early mysteries as well: “We got this airplane-shaped trophy when we solved a mystery at the airport … and we got this car-shaped trophy when we found out who was stealing all of the cars out on Shore Road” (44-45). These are clear references to The Shore Road Mystery (#6) and The Great Airport Mystery (#9), although they received trophies in neither book. Still, it’s a better way to shoehorn references to old mysteries into the book than most.

The psychic angle is an element that could have existed in the early books; certainly the original Disappearing Floor (#19) has events far less believable than psychic phenomena, but on the other hand, a fake psychic seems to be the kind of nonsense the Hardys would fight against — like they fought against a quack eye doctor in the original A Figure in Hiding (#16). But Colin Randles and his family are all good psychics trying to hide their abilities in Bayport.

Well, except for Colin’s sister, Nellie, who wants to hold a séance to cement her friendship with Iola and Callie. Chet sees this as an opportunity for a prank, and he and the Hardys hide near the Shaws’ gazebo. When Iola suggests they try to contact Roberta Sanders, a former P.E. teacher at BHS who went to South America and “just disappeared” (24), Chet responds. Now, it seems like a former teacher vanishing in South America is right up the Hardys’ alley, something they would have been hired to investigate, but I suppose “South America” is too large an area to search, even for the Hardys.

While Nellie and Colin’s parents break into the Shaws’ back yard to protest their daughter’s stupidity and people taking advantage of it, something grapples with Frank, drawing him into the bushes as it tries to strangle him. He doesn’t see who it is; he blames Colin, but it plainly wasn’t. But the culprit is never revealed. The only possible explanation, based on in-story logic, is that something supernatural tried to kill Frank. The only possible explanation, based on real-world logic, is that an old rival tried to kill Frank and was scared off by the kerfuffle caused by the Randleses.

Despite this otherworldly visitation, the main takeaway is that Chet went too far and the Randleses are good people — such good people, as a matter of fact, that Mr. Shaw wants to hire the unemployed Mr. and Mrs. Randles to run a new hardware store he just picked up. How fortunate! It’s always nice when capitalism works out for the little people. Everything’s going to be fine!

Except it isn’t. After demonstrating his psychic abilities by probably saving Joe and Phil Cohen from a fatal car accident and teaching the Hardys how to develop their own psychic abilities (!), Colin upsets the pretty, popular little world of pretty, popular girl Melanie Johnson by telling her she had been kidnapped as a two-year-old. This is the plot’s inciting event, but it occurs 55 pages into the book. No wonder this book runs 166 pages! (This is probably the longest book since Simon & Schuster took over the series at #86.)

Anyway, you make pretty, popular girls unhappy, and you’ll reap the consequences. In this case, Melanie’s boyfriend (and family chauffeur) pummels Colin in a Bayport back alley, necessitating that the Hardys track down Colin’s dumped body before taking him to Bayport General Hospital, the Hardys’ favorite emergency healthcare provider. (Another reason the book is 166 pages: It takes nine pages to find Colin and take him to the hospital.) The assistant principal yells at Colin with unwarranted venom, saying, “I despise people like you” (60). (Frank shrugs off Mr. Brooks’s abuse, which is horrible.) Melanie’s popular friends shoplift from Mr. Shaw’s hardware store, with the police shrugging when the Randleses report it. Pretty standard stuff, really.

But Melanie is pretty, popular, and rich, and when you make pretty, popular, rich girls unhappy, you also reap the economic consequences: Mr. Johnson threatens to call in Mr. Shaw’s loans unless he cans the Randleses. Mr. Shaw caves. It’s always crushing when capitalism doesn’t work out for the little people, which seems like it happens far more often than capitalism working out, although I suppose there’s a bit of confirmation bias there.

The Randleses head back to New York, but on the spur of the moment, Frank and Joe offer to let Colin stay at their home. They don’t consult with Fenton or Laura; when Mrs. Randles asks if the elder Hardys will be OK with an unforeseen lodger, neither brother opts to telephone a parent to ask. Sure! say the boys, and sure enough, they’re right.

With Colin back at BHS, things begin happening. Melanie wants to talk to Colin at her house when her parents are out, and shockingly, it’s not a trap. Melanie kinda remembers the abduction and wants Colin’s psychic help. (She also tells the boys her father told her to date the chauffeur, which is creeeeepy.) Before Colin can deliver any definitive info, the Johnsons come home and find the boys; after Mr. Johnson pulls a gun on them, Colin and the Hardys and escape through the back.

To up the creepy ante, Mr. Johnson commits Melanie to a psychiatric hospital. The boys track her down, but before Melanie can tell them anything, Mr. Johnson shows up, tries to strangle Colin, then collapses in tears after nurses separate them. The next day, at his law firm — the exquisitely named Stanley, Stanley, and Stanley — Mr. Johnson comes clean: His ex-con first wife gave birth to Melanie after their divorce, and when she started dating a thug, Mr. Johnson abducted Melanie to protect her from a criminal environment. He and his next wife, the current Mrs. Johnson, decided not to tell Melanie the truth. This should be a major scandal — non-custodial abductions are crimes, after all — but a combination of Mrs. Johnson’s indifference (she never filed a missing-person report for Melanie) and Mr. Johnson’s riches means he’ll probably escape all punishment. And all adverse publicity, as the story doesn’t show up in the Bayport Times.

That puts the book at about 150 pages, but Stanley has more to his story, so on we go. Melanie wants to track down her biological mother, so she asks Colin for help — the psychic, not the private detectives. Colin uses psychometry on Melanie’s toy lamb to learn bio-mom is in Vermont; three days of real detective work tracks Mary Davis Sullivan to West Middlefield, Vt. When Frank, Joe, their girlfriends, Colin, and Melanie arrive in West Middlefield, they learn Mrs. Sullivan is being held hostage by her ex-husband. Rather than let qualified police officers handle the deadly situation, the boys decide to butt in. They circle around the block, approach the house from the rear, and use Joe’s plan to pretend to be dopey teenagers who cut Mrs. Sullivan’s lawn, hoping Sullivan will be confused long enough for them to get the drop on him. It’s an intensely dumb plan, and it should end with several shooting deaths, but the power of the plot compels Sullivan to be dumb long enough for Joe and Colin to throw the contents of Mrs. Sullivan’s refrigerator at the criminal.

Evildoer subdued, they manage to announce to the police what has happened without being shot or arrested or both, and Melanie gets a moment with her biological mother. Just a moment — then the kids take off, leaving Melanie’s lamb with Mrs. Sullivan, and the story ends.

Thank Dixon for that. Psychic’s Vision is overlong and nonsensical (and not in a good way). But it’s done now, and we never see that psychic Larry Stu again. That’s something to be grateful for, at least.

Trouble Times Two (#167)

First proposition: The title of Trouble Times Two makes no sense. While the book does contain trouble, I can find no multiplier of said trouble.

Second proposition: Trouble makes more prescient statements than usual, commenting on the decline of unions and newspapers in 2002, years before their collapse had become national panics, and delivers a pointed statement on the lack of protections for whistleblowers.

Third proposition: The main chum (non-girlfriend division) in Trouble is the brainy Phil Cohen, and his opinions are given more respect than usual: When he convinces the others to watch a foreign film rather than an shoot-‘em-up or romantic film, the entire of gang of teens have a great time. Frank decides he should support Phil’s suggestions more often, since this “rare victory” (50) turned out well.

Conclusion: This means something.

I don’t know what, though. Whether this is an attempt to inculcate liberal values on the Millennial Generation, or whether this is an attempt to reflect the values of the book’s target audience, or whether I’m just a couple of steps from claiming the world is run by lizard people, I don’t know, but again: This means something.

The book starts with Frank drowsing in social studies class and being kept awake only by Callie flicking paperwads at him, which gives credence to the target audience argument. But later in the first chapter, “big, beefy” (8) Biff Hooper gets punched by troublemaker Tom Gilliam, and Biff is too surprised to fight back; that Biff, a character named after his fondness for punching, doesn’t fight back against an unprovoked attack in his only appearance in the book suggests a desire for pacifistic Millennials.

And then again, Tom gets the nickname “Trouble Boy” (3) and is later promoted to “Captain Trouble Boy” (61). Neither is a nickname real teenagers would tag a miscreant with; if an adult used it, it wouldn’t stick. Maybe this non-normal behavior is a hint about the Lizard People … Later, Joe says “the organization” built by Ho Chi Minh gave the United states a “big headache” (11). Of course the Lizard People would minimize the damage done to their world order — unless Ho was a Lizard Person himself? How deep does this lizard hole go?

(The author later writes a car “backs up” “in reverse” [17], which is either a Lizard Person writing or bad editing. I’ve given you the evidence. Only you can choose to see the truth.)

Anyway, Trouble Boy gets stuck in a study group with Frank, Callie, Phil Cohen, aspiring newsie Liz Webling, and Kevin Wylie, whose father is Tom’s father’s boss. For the social science fair — which I’m pretty sure isn’t a thing, or at least shouldn’t be a thing — they decide to report on the effects of / on whistleblowers. Frank defuses Tom’s natural surliness and anger by appointing him the leader of the team’s anti-whistleblower group. However, the team is hobbled by Tom’s five-day suspension for punching Biff, and when the other group members show up at the Gilliam apartment, Tom’s father becomes peeved at his son’s anti-whistleblower stance.

Liz is a character who has slipped beneath my radar, a side effect of my skipping around the canon. Liz first appeared in the early Casefiles as Callie’s friend, but Trouble appears to be her first appearance in the Digests. Liz is also in Kickoff to Danger (#170) and The Test Case (#171), filling the young snoop role one would expect of the daughter of someone in the newspaper game. (Here, she and her father work at the Bayport Gazette; in Kickoff and Test Case, her father is an editor at the Bayport Times, and she works for the school paper, the Beacon. She also reports for the Bayport Cable News in Test Case.) In Test Case, her reporting alienates the Hardys, and — as far as I can tell — she made no more appearances in the series.

That’s the boring school stuff. The mystery begins when Joe runs supplies to Fenton, who has staked out Stinky Peterson’s apartment building, posing as a homeless man. Stinky’s a thief — he’s a pro, according to Fenton, despite being nicknamed “Stinky” — but Joe and Fenton can’t stop him from handing off stolen pearls to a fence. The fence tries to kill Fenton as he drives away, which accords with the Bayport police’s reports of a more violent fence, one who is also more efficacious and has a longer reach. This fence is also suspected of murder, a rarity in a Hardy Boys book.

Con says the fence is from a national syndicate, not a “homegrown organized crime type” (29), which is sad; as every Millennial knows, the best criminal organizations are artisanal, bespoke groups that are committed to consuming the profits of their local region. It’s more responsible, you know? And you get a more personal feel when you’re stabbed or mugged.

The next day, Laura is giving everyone — Fenton, the boys, and the readers — the silent treatment and refusing to make breakfast. This is Laura’s only appearance in the story, and her only purpose is to not say anything. She and Gertrude are mentioned a couple of other times, but they are only mentioned to highlight their absence from the home. (Well, Gertrude also gets to pass a phone to Fenton.) The Hardy ladies could be less present in this story, but in books in which the women aren’t mentioned, their absence occasionally is felt as a presence. Here, they do not even register their lack of presence.

When the teenagers witness Tom’s dad, Russell Gilliam sneaking into Tri-State Express, the shipping company he is an accountant for, late on a Saturday night, the Hardys get suspicious. Frank looks up Russell’s employment history (somehow) and sees he’s had a series of short-term jobs. While Joe thinks he might be “like that famous impersonator guy” (52) — I’m guessing he’s referring to the 1996-2000 TV show, The Pretender, in which a genius imposter on the run takes a new type of job every episode — Frank thinks he’s the advance man for the national crime syndicate.

Fenton’s background check reveals something different; Russell Gilliam received a golden parachute, which Fenton calls a “golden handshake” (63), from each of his employers. His peripatetic job history began at Dynodyne — a name that also suggests Lizard Author / bad editor, especially when they could have used Yoyodyne — when his house burned down, he lost his job, and his wife divorced him and took the kid.

Tom and Kevin posture when Tom’s suspension is over, and while Kevin makes abstract threats with a knife, Tom puts a stink bomb in Kevin’s locker that ignites magnesium Kevin kept in it. Joe, who shadowed Tom, gets the fire under control but refuses to rat out Tom, even when the assistant principal threatens his permanent record. Now trusting Joe, Tom comes clean: His dad is a professional whistleblower, getting payouts and NDAs from his crooked employers. After Tom’s mom died, Tom has lived with his father, wandering around the country; Tom worries his father has lost sight of “the line between being an idealist and being an extortionist” (90).

Things go wrong when Tom decides to solicit advice from Fenton. Fenton isn’t at the Hardy home, but the social-science fair group is, so Tom unburdens himself to them instead. Kevin tells his father, who is using his shipping company to fence goods for a silent partner; Mr. Wylie isn’t good at hiding his tracks, as Kevin’s grandfather tried to hire Fenton to investigate his son-in-law months before. Kevin’s father fires Russell, and Frank and Joe are worried Mr. Gilliam will declare “war”: “I guess trouble is Mr. Gilliam’s business,” Frank says (103), echoing the title of a Raymond Chandler short-story collection.

Despite this link to tough-guy stories, when Russell is lured into a trap and assaulted by Stinky Peterson, Frank and Joe save him and lament that unlicensed investigators like Russell can’t handle the “rough and tumble” (112) of the PI business. I’m pretty sure an accountant would make a great private investigator, and avoiding assault isn’t part of PI certification; in any event, Russell shrugs it off as a warning. Frank and Joe agree, and if there’s anything they know, it’s violent warnings.

(Or maybe they don’t. The Hardys have never been able to tell the difference between warnings and attempted murder.)

The Hardys can’t prevent Tom from being kidnapped the next day; Joe won’t even stick up for Tom from Kevin’s insults. (I’ve said Joe was a bad friend before; this is just more evidence. It’s always easier to punch down, isn’t it, Joe?) The Bayport police won’t look for Tom for 72 hours, even though he’s a minor and doesn’t have a history of being a runaway, because they’re not very good at their jobs, so the Hardys step up. When the Hardy brothers confront the Wylies at their McMansion, the elder Wylie’s silent backer, Nicolai, barges in with goons and takes everyone to the Tri-State offices, where the Gilliams are already being held.

The prisoners are bound, and Tri-State is set ablaze. (Nicolai really does not care about the fire looking like an accident. He has a very low opinion of American pig-dog police.) With the help of a box cutter Tom palmed, they manage to cut their bonds, break down a barred window, and escape with the help of firefighters. Mr. Wylie turns state’s evidence, Mr. Gilliam decides to give up his silent whistleblowing, and everything turns out OK.

Except as far as we can tell, Nicolai is still free, and his organization will probably threaten the Wylies’ lives. And we’re never told what grade the group received on the project that started this fiasco; Tom refuses to argue against whistleblowing, so Frank says “Phil and the other kids” (149) will work something out. “Other kids”? Are you going to give them Werther’s Originals if they do good work?

Or maybe he means, “Phil and the other non-Lizard People.” If so, I was right: this means something.

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.)