Schedule / Prime Time Pirates / Loup Garou / real authors

As I mentioned in last week’s update, this week’s book will be Trouble at Coyote Canyon (#119) because I’ve already covered #117 (The Baseball Card Conspiracy) and #118 (Danger in the Fourth Dimension). The next book after Coyote Canyon will be #121 (The Mystery in the Old Mine), as neither my local library nor I have #120 (The Case of the Cosmic Kidnapping).

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To help Frank prepare for Four O’Clock Scholar in The Prime-Time Crime (#109), Joe asks Frank who won the 1979 World Series. Frank guesses the Phillies, which is incorrect; the correct answer is the Pittsburgh Pirates. Twenty-five years after The Prime-Time Crime, 1979 is still the Pirates’ most recent championship. Coincidentally, the cover artist who took over with #113, Daniel R. Horne, is a Pirates fan and put a greeked version of a classic Pirates cap on the cover of The Baseball Card Conspiracy.

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In Rock ‘n’ Roll Renegades, Chet tells Joe that he should play Loup Garou, which neither Frank nor Joe has heard of. (“Loup Garou” is a French phrase for a werewolf-type creature — or just a werewolf, if you like direct mapping of one culture onto another.) It could be a joke on the Hardys expense, making fun of their lack of musical knowledge, but I bet the author is referring to a real band. I can’t find any information on a musical group that would have existed at that time with that name. Anyone know who Chet’s referring to?

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According to a site that bills itself the Hardy Boys Unofficial Home Page, Rock ‘n’ Roll Renegades was written by Chris Lampton. That site has Lampton down as the author of nine books, beginning with Danger on the Air (#95) and ending with The Case of the Cosmic Kidnapping (#120). Lampton himself, however, says he wrote ten digests. (Both Lampton and the Hardy Boys fan site above mention Casefiles #65 as well.)

The complete list of Hardy Boys books Lampton claims to have written are:

• Danger on the Air (#95)
• The Dungeon of Doom (#99)
• The Secret of the Island Treasure (#100)
• Terminal Shock (#102)
• Attack of the Video Villains (#106)
• The Prime-Time Crime (#109)
• The Secret of Sigma Seven (#110)
• Rock ‘n’ Roll Renegades (#115)
• The Case of the Cosmic Kidnapping (#120)
• End of the Trail (#162)
• No Mercy (Casefiles #65)

Looking at that list, it’s fair to say Lampton was a pretty good Dixon. Dungeon of Doom, The Secret of the Island Treasure, and Prime-Time Crime are excellent books, and the only real objection I had about End of the Trail was that it was so short. None of the others were bad, really, although they had their shortcomings.

Most of his books were set around Bayport, with much of the action set around some new interest / hobby of the Hardys or Chet. That’s not exactly an unusual description of any Hardy author, really, but you can pick out some areas Lampton concentrated on: TV and radio broadcasting, computers and video games (his bio says both are interests), and sci-fi / fantasy fandom. He introduces the boys’ work at WBPT, but he’s not the only writer who used it: another (unknown at this time) writer picked it up for Spark of Suspicion (#98).

Also, this list shoots a hole in my theory that the same person wrote Attack of the Video Villains (#106) and Mystery with a Dangerous Beat (#124). Since both books mention the video game Hack Attack, I thought the two probably shared an author. It turns out it was either an observant editor or writer who picked up the game’s name from Video Villains. According to the Unofficial Home Page, the author of Mystery with a Dangerous Beat was Frances [sic] Lantz. That should be Francess Lantz, who wrote many juveniles, including the first six Luna Bay surf series books.

At his blog, Lampton talks about writing Terminal Shock, which he mentions he originally titled The Computer Clue. He also mentions another article about Terminal Shock written less than three months ago.

Lampton has written a number of non-fiction books, mostly for the publisher Franklin Watts. His fiction includes three sci-fi / fantasy books under his own name (The Seeker, Cross of Empire, and Gateway to Limbo). He also wrote three books under the name Dayle Courtney, the pseudonym for the author of the Thorne Twins book series. The Thorne Twins was a series of nineteen books in which twins Eric and Allison used Christian principles to solve mysteries.

The Secret of Sigma Seven (#110)

The title for #110 is The Secret of Sigma Seven, which in the book is also the title of a movie stolen from a Hollywood director. But the story might as well be Frank and Joe Go to a Science Fiction Convention.

After Frank and Joe mock Chet’s attempts at cosplay (although they don’t call it that — the term hadn't been popularized in America yet), the boys meet Brian Amchick, a guy from Frank’s trigonometry class, at the convention. Frank deigns to remember one of the little guys who flit through his life, and Brian agrees to introduce Frank, Joe, and Chet to the ins-and-outs of science fiction conventions and their terminology.

BayCon is being held at the Bayport Inn, which has showed up when Chet worked there in Spark of Suspicion (#98). No one brings up Chet’s previous employment in this book, though. Chet is excited about BayCon’s costume party because the prize for the best costume is “a trip to Florida to watch a space shuttle launch” (2). That’s a nice prize, but it shouldn’t be that big of a deal to Chet since he HAS BEEN TO SPACE in a space shuttle.

Let me repeat that: he, along with Frank and Joe, have been in space. They were able to go in The Skyfire Puzzle (#85), the last digest before the year-long hiatus of 1986. But no one mentions this; no one even remembers it either. Joe even says, “Maybe the shuttle will take you along. Then you can become a real space cadet” (3).

Putting aside the undeserved nature of Joe’s putdown, why does no one remember the chums going into space? If I had gone into space, I would never stop talking about it. I’m loath to hold up The Big Bang Theory as any indication of reality, but after engineer Howard Wolowitz traveled to the International Space Station in that series, he didn’t shut up about it. Chet would be like that.

Frank and Joe aren’t there for the costume party, though. They have come to BayCon to see The Secret of Sigma Seven, the fifth movie in a sci-fi epic. Sigma Seven is scheduled to make its debut at the convention, and the movie’s director, Simon Devoreaux, has even come with the movie, to give it a brief introduction and serve on a few panels. Frank, Joe, and Chet have enjoyed the previous four installments of the film franchise, and they can’t wait for #5. They end up disappointed, however, as the print of the film that was to be shown at BayCon is stolen before it can be screened.

Frank and Joe decide they aren’t going to investigate unless Devoreaux asks them to, and he’s not interested in talking to them at all. Fortunately for Frank and Joe, Linda Klein, the convention’s organizer, wants them to find the film, so they agree —

Wait. Why is it fortunate for them? They aren’t getting paid, and the person who would benefit the most has no interest in them. Before Klein asks for their help, Frank says, “Maybe we’d better leave this for the Bayport police” (15). He’s right! Well, he would be right, if the Bayport Police could be bothered to do anything, but they don’t appear in the book. In the 21st century, the FBI would probably be called in, either because of the movie studio’s clout or because of copyright infringement concerns, but we don’t see them either. The field is clear for Frank and Joe!

They get their first suspect: someone roaming around Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con wearing different costumes but the same green medallion. Why keep wearing something that identifies him, when he’s in disguise? The answer: He didn’t think it would matter. The suspect tries to kill Devereaux by giving a real but fake-looking gun to a con-goer and telling him to shoot at Devereaux; he almost tricks Joe into falling down an elevator shaft as well. The suspect seemingly aims a driverless hovercar at Sigma Seven’s special effects director, Jack Gillis. Gillis tells Chet he has no plans to mass produce the hovercars because he’s “already rich” [39]. If that’s not a reason to suspect him of something, I don’t know what is.

Added March 2026: The name "Jack Gillis" is almost certainly a reference to Jackson Gillis, the screenwriter who wrote the first two Hardy Boys TV adaptations, 1956's The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure, which adapted The Tower Treasure, and 1957's original The Mystery of the Ghost Farm. The two aired as serials in episodes of The Mickey Mouse Club. Gillis's career lasted long past the Hardy Boys, as he wrote episodes of TV shows like Lost in Space, The Fugitive, The Wild Wild West, Mission: Impossible, Wonder Woman, Knight Rider, Murder, She Wrote, and many more. He passed away in 2010, two days before his 94th birthday.

Back to the story: Frank and Joe wend their way through the convention, accumulating a meager pile of suspects. Acerbic writer Richard Feinbetter hates Devoreaux because he believes Devoreaux’s movies ripped off one of his stories. Feinbetter’s friend, fellow author Arlen Hennessey, hates Devoreaux’s movies in an artistic sense, but he too believes Devoreaux ripped off Feinbetter. The brothers also suspect George Morwood, a “huckster,” as Brian says, who sells video cassettes of movies at the con. He seems shady, and since the Hardys suspect the movie was stolen for the bootleg market, they keep an eye on him. (The author does nail how surly dealers at cons can be, almost like they are reluctant to sell stuff to you.)

I don’t have a suspect for who Hennessey is supposed to represent, but Feinbetter sounds like Harlan Ellison, a cantankerous sci-fi writer who has a propensity for suing those he thinks have wronged him or stolen his intellectual property. (The name "Arlen Hennessey" sounds more like Harlen Ellison, though.) Ellison has claimed the TV show Future Cop and the movie The Terminator were based on his works, and he won damages in those suits. He sued over the movie In Time but later withdrew the suit. He has been involved in numerous other lawsuits and has been extremely critical of how others, like Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, have treated his scripts.

The fit isn’t exact, though; Feinbetter is a writer from the Golden Age, back in the ‘40s and ‘50s, while Ellison is recognized as part of the vanguard of the ‘60s New Wave. Also, the story Devoreaux is alleged to have stolen from him involves “the Federation of Worlds series of novels”; Ellison has written few novels, and the Foundation / Empire series of Isaac Asimov seems more likely what was being referred to. Of course, “Federation” also calls to mind Star Trek, but that existed as a TV show before it engulfed all media forms.

Also: Feinbetter shoots Frank, Joe, and Brian with a gag gun with a flag that says, “ZAP! You’re star dust!” (55), which I bet Ellison would not do.

Frank and Joe’s detective ethic is less than sterling. They go to lunch without Chet after agreeing to rendezvous with him before the meal, and they don’t even remember him until after they pay the check. Fortunately, Chet’s not in danger; he’s just buying a new costume. After lunch and a panel session, they decide to “take a few minutes off” (65) and visit a sci-fi prop exhibit. When they break into Morwood’s hotel room, they don’t even use their lockpicks: they use a Swiss army knife. In an attempt to get more investigation opportunities, they stay at the Bayport Inn overnight and are introduced to another con tradition by Brian: sleeping on a hotel room floor. (Brian also says staying awake for the con’s full 72 hours is also a tradition; he’s right about both.) Frank and Joe, who are apparently middle-aged, have a rough time sleeping on the floor; Joe even falls asleep during surveillance the next day. (And almost gets stepped on by an elephant, but that’s not important.) With time running out to find the film on the last day of the con, Frank and Joe decide to take a break and watch a movie.

Still, the boys have a high opinion of themselves; Frank says they can perform miracles, although perhaps not on schedule.

After a spear is tossed at Frank, both boys being threatened by a motorcycle gang (not the Flying Skulls from Fear on Wheels, though), and two attempts on Devoreaux’s life, the brothers figure out who did it: Gillis. They aren’t sure why until the FX man tells them he resented Devoreaux; the idea for the movie series was Gillis’s, but Devoreaux relegated him to special-effects director. Gillis paintballs Frank and Joe in the face, which is hilarious to me but should have been painful to Frank and Joe, before fleeing in a hovercar. They recover quickly and pursue Gillis on a low-speed chase in a hovercraft of their own; both vehicles eventually go over the Barmet Cliffs. Somehow, the hovercrafts’ fans take them from terminal velocity to floating on water, and the chase ends when Gillis’s hovercraft is run over by a motorboat.

Brian is impressed by Frank and Joe’s detective work, which Joe claims was, like usual, fueled by “logical thinking and a few brilliant deductions”; Chet cuts him down by saying, “I thought it was usually dumb luck” (147). Joe gets him back on the book’s exit line, though, when Klein insinuates Chet’s about to eat the convention into a financial loss. “‘Chet cut down on his eating?” Joe said with a grin. ‘Now, that’s science fiction!’” (149). I admit: I laughed.

The Prime-Time Crime (#109)

Like The Smoke Screen Mystery, I read The Prime-Time Crime more than a decade ago, and I barely recall it at all. However, like the previous book (Fear on Wheels), The Prime-Time Crime is a pretty good Hardy Boys book.

One of the reasons I like it is that it shows Frank on a scholastic / scholar / quiz (whatever you want to call it, but the right term is “scholastic”) bowl team. He and two teammates play against Littonville High on Four O’Clock Scholar, which is a great name for the show. Frank is the game’s MVP, answering more questions than anyone else and leading Bayport to a victory. Frank certainly seems to enjoy the experience, contracting a severe case of quiz fever: “During the first commercial, Frank leaned back in his seat. His heart was racing. He was exhilarated over how well he had done” (16).

I too know that feeling of excitement and nervousness, that adrenaline that emerges despite doing something so non-life threatening and relatively inconsequential. I played scholastic bowl in high school, and I too participated in a regional scholastic bowl TV show, Scholastic Hi-Q. That sort of success, that show of mental superiority: It gets to you; you keep wanting to play … well, Frank doesn’t, but Frank’s weird.

So is Four O’Clock Scholar, which doesn’t have much going for it other than its name. The rules are weird: if a player rings in to answer a question but is wrong or can’t come up with an answer, his or her teammates get a chance to respond. This has to be a way to give Frank chances to answer questions correctly and make his teammates look foolish, but it’s a horrible rule: it just encourages teams to ring in early rather than when they know the answer. (If a player has confidence in their teammates, she knows they’ll have time to think while she makes a mistake.) The show is broadcast live, which is ill-advised, given the studio audience made up of students from each school; a delay would be advised, given high schoolers’ lack of self-control and tendencies toward crudity.

The station manager says Four O’Clock Scholar is in danger of cancellation, as parents are the ones watching rather than students. Given the way Jeopardy!’s ratings skew, it’s more likely the students’ grandparents watch than anyone else. Frank, ever the weird one, says he and his friends watch the show every day. The station manager says he and his friends are “an unusual crowd.” Low ratings — or at least low ratings in key demographics — isn’t surprising given the dog of a time slot, 4 p.m. … every so often? The frequency of the show's airing is confusing. And how often can adults watch a 4 p.m. TV show? WBPT broadcasts one show on Sunday, then tries to broadcast another on Tuesday. It’s unclear whether other shows are broadcast in between; even more unclear is what time of year it is because Frank and Joe are not going to school on weekdays.

Perhaps the show’s problem is with terminology: when Bayport wins their game, they are told they are in the championship tournament. But the “tournament” seems to be one game rather than, you know, a series of games. I don’t know, man.

The real treats of the book are Steve Burke and Debbie Hertzberg, Frank’s teammates. When Four O’Clock Scholar’s host, Clarence Kellerman, is kidnapped before their game, they decide they will find him because obviously this amateur detecting thing isn’t so hard; Steve’s going to be a scientist, after all, and Debbie’s read tons of mysteries. Given Frank and Joe’s reputations, the two have to be trolling the brothers. Frank doesn’t fear them initially, saying, “I don’t think they can harm anything” (26). Within twenty pages, he’s backpeddling: “I knew it was a mistake to let that pair help search for Clarence” (45). We were always at war with Steve and Debbie, Joe.

How are we supposed to feel about the two amateur amateurs? On one hand, we could be expected to look at them and see how difficult this detecting business is. We might identify with Frank and Joe as readers, but we probably couldn’t do what the Hardys Boys do. Solving mysteries is hard, and it takes more than being “smart” and reading books. You have to know how to investigate and put the pieces together. Steve and Debbie can’t do that.

On the other hand … I chose to look at Steve and Debbie as a parody of Frank and Joe’s behavior in most books. The newbs seize upon station manager Ted Whalen as their chief suspect, and they don’t let anything deter them. Even Joe — Joe! — points out they are jumping to conclusions, but Steve and Debbie are hearing none of that. They plan how to break into Whalen’s home, a suggestion that makes Frank expressly come out against breaking and entering. A Hardy! Speaking out against a little investigatory B&E! Debbie and Steve sneak into the station against Whalen’s express orders, although to be fair, so do Frank and Joe. For a few minutes, Debbie forgets she has the key that will allow them to escape a deathtrap. (Well, that’s more Chet-like, but you get what I’m saying.) Debbie almost falls from a roof as she’s trying to spy on Whalen. They jury-rig a camera to keep tabs on Whalen, only to broadcast the executive eating a sandwich over the air. Even when people try to kill Debbie and Steve, the pair doesn’t give up, despite having no real reason to try. When they search for Clarence in the WBPT’s basement, they are clubbed over the head and stuffed into boxes.

All of those things seem like things Frank and (particularly) Joe would do, especially that last one. Debbie and Steve’s presence keeps Frank and Joe honest: they have to actually investigate rather than accuse people and run around aimlessly. When Joe asks a stupidly accusatory question of a suspect, Frank chastises him, and Joe apologizes: “It just slipped out. Maybe I’ve been hanging around Steve and Debbie too long” (83). But the question he asked would have been unremarkable in dozens of other books, which is why I come down on the side of Steve and Debbie being a parody.

When it comes to investigating, though, I have a question: where are the police? The woman at WBPT who hires the brothers says, “The police seem to be losing interest … most of the [missing persons] investigations end up going nowhere, or the people [who are reported missing] return on their own” (81). For most missing people, yeah, that sounds right, but Clarence is a local celebrity who hadn't missed a Four O’Clock Scholar in fourteen years. It seems the police should be interested. But we don’t see the cops at all, so I guess we have to fall back on BPD incompetence as the explanation. Or maybe Bayport is such a crime-ridden burg that they are so swamped with other crimes that they cut bait on a disappearance that could be a publicity stunt.

I also appreciate Prime-Time Crime because Chet gets in a couple of zingers instead of being exclusively the butt of Joe’s jokes. And he not only mocks Joe’s intelligence, but he also mocks Iola (or Iola and Joe’s relationship; either is fine with me): When Iola threatens at dinner at Mr. Pizza not to talk to the Hardys if they don’t tell her about their case, Chet warns, “If you keep making promises like that, they may never tell you about the case” (45). Even the villains get some snappy patter when they capture Joe, who figures the mystery out first.

Oh! That’s right: there was a mystery. Well, it turns out Clarence was kidnapped after he realized the two brothers who run WBPT’s home-shopping show were fences, reselling stolen goods on air. Their sales were rather indiscriminate, as it turns out; Clarence recognized his ex-wife’s wedding ring, which still had her initials engraved inside. After Joe figures things out, they kidnap him as well, but Frank frees them, and with an assist from Steve and Debbie, they catch the villains.

In the end, love is triumphant. Steve and Debbie start dating (but never stop bickering). Frank tells Joe they’re going to get “dressed up” and take their girlfriends for a “night on the town” (150) because they didn’t tell Callie and Iola about the case before the Bayport Times broke the case. Frank admits Chet might tag along as well, which isn’t romantic, but there’s going to be food, and who wants the hassle of trying to keep him away from grub? Frank and Joe will almost certainly have time to be as romantic as they want to be (which isn’t very) while Chet has his head in the food trough.

But much like love, Frank and Joe’s services are free: WBPT pays them both jack and squat for their services.

Attack of the Video Villains (#106)

So, you know how Frank and Joe are amazing at everything, right? At detecting — of course, otherwise there wouldn’t be a series — but also all sorts of athletic competitions and at knowing little facts and at shrugging off concussions and other injuries (but mainly concussions) and at somehow knowing where the universe needs them to be at any particular time so they can solve mysteries? Of course you do. Well, in Attack of the Video Villains, Joe adds something new to the things he’s absolutely great at …

(No, not at romancing the ladies. The opposite of that.)

Video games! Particularly one called Hack Attack. After Joe wins a regional competition, Frank and Chet accompany him to the national Hack Attack tournament in New York, where he’s one of 25 contestants. It’s difficult to believe that between detecting, school, athletics, and the firefighting training / firefighting in The Smoke Screen Mystery (#105) that Joe would have been able to get good at any particular video game. I would be willing to overlook the firefighting in the previous mystery, but the author specifically says Joe had hoped the video-game tournament would give them a rest after The Smoke Screen Mystery. But I suppose Joe has to do something in his down time … I mean, it’s not like he’s going to be spending any late nights with Iola.

Evidently, by 1991, when Video Villains came out, someone at Simon & Schuster had heard of this “Nintendo” thing that was going around, and she or he wanted to get in on some of that sweet action by making one of the boys a champion player. By the time Video Villains was published, the Nintendo Entertainment System had been released nationwide in American for about five years, long enough for the entire Hardy Boys target audience to have known the NES and its games intimately.

Hack Attack is played on the Videomundo platform, which is presumably similar to Nintendo; note the similar ending to their names. Videomundo has been sold in America for three years, according to Video Villians; that’s not as many years as the NES had been in the US, but it’s longer than Videomundo’s main competitor, Omega. Omega is probably a reference to Sega, which had been selling games and game systems in America for much longer than Nintendo had been selling the NES and NES games, but the Sega Genesis, Sega’s first success in America after the video game crash of 1983, had been released only in 1989. Like the NES controllers, the Videomundo controllers have A and B buttons. One of the players says Videomundo cartridges are much larger than Omega cartridges; NES cartridges were about twice as tall as a Genesis cartridge, about the same width, but not quite as thick.

This isn’t the only time Hack Attack appears in the Hardy Boys series. In Mystery with a Dangerous Beat (#124), Joe plays Hack Attack in an arcade. I made fun of the taxi-based video game, which I claimed “has never been a thing.” This is not exactly true: in 2000, the game Crazy Taxi was released for the Sega Dreamcast, and the game was successful enough to spawn a few sequels. Hack Attack is a strange game, in some ways; the missions are random, and it doesn’t seem to have a standard opening stage. In other ways, it feels like a classic NES game. The player is a taxi driver who delivers his passenger from one city to another, with outlandish and stereotypical obstacles to overcome (tornadoes in Kansas, for instance). The game frequently sounds goofy but not atypically reality-averse for games at the time. The author sounds like such an adult when he has the kids discuss it, though.

Anyway, Joe is trying to win the contest and the $50,000 grand prize. He’s up against Jason Tanaka, a Japanese-American who is of course good at video games; Nick Phillips, a nervous guy; Bill Longworth, the previous year’s champion; and 21 other mooks we never see or care about. Unfortunately for Joe’s peace of mind, thieves are stealing Videomundo cartridges from tournament participants, although the criminals eventually focus on a copy of Hack Attack that Chet acquired at a game swap. Although Joe was outraged at the hotel’s lack of action to find the thieves in Tricks of the Trade (#104), he lets the hotel’s lack of action in Attack of the Video Villains slide. Maybe he has gained a sense of proportion and realizes video games aren’t as valuable as jewelry!

The thief has trouble figuring out who has the copy of the game he wants to steal, although this advantage doesn’t help the Hardys apprehend him. Joe is particularly frustrated by the thief, a small, wiry guy who regularly outfights and outruns Joe. Evidently Joe’s video gaming skills have caused his physical skills to atrophy. Ha, ha — Joe’s a nerd now!

One interesting thing: the Bayporters have never heard of the Konami Code. Jason shows them how a series of buttons pressed at certain games’ start screens can unlock various upgrades — more lives, better equipment, etc. Jason doesn’t use the exact Konami Code (up up down down left right left right B A), but the first code he uses is the Konami Code with the ups and downs deleted. As Jason says, such codes are used by developers to test the games. No known codes have been discovered for Hack Attack, although Joe says one “might come in handy at the tournament” (35). Jason, suspecting Joe of being a cheater (or willing to be a cheater), gives “him a dirty look.”

Frank and Joe — mostly Joe — spend most of their investigation accusing Omega of the video game thefts. Why would the company want to steal games it could legally buy? Who knows! Omega handles the accusations about as well as you might imagine, with one exec pointing a light gun for the Omega game system at Frank to freak Frank out when he’s found snooping around Omega’s offices. Frank and Joe’s ineffectiveness continues when they stand by helplessly as Chet gets bundled into a car by kidnappers, but with the help of an NYC stoplight, they manage to recover their friend. The two abductors are quickly released on bail, which is possible, but getting released so quickly for kidnapping seems unlikely (and expensive).

Joe finishes in third place in the tournament's first round, after which the competition is reduced to only the top four. Between rounds, the boys find a weird note dropped by Nick Phillips: “SING EVERY NICE SONG WITH EASY NOTES” (94). Obviously this is a mnemonic; since the letters used are the same as the first letters of the cardinal directions, I thought this might be the pattern to get through a maze. But given what the Hardys learned about video-game codes, they should figure out it's a keypad code — down right up down left right up, or something like that — that gives an advantage. Unfortunately, the Hardys are completely oblivious, and Jason gets arrested for the video game thefts.

On the day of the finals, Chet urges Joe to have “a breakfast of champions” (109), which I thought was bourbon and cornflakes but turns out to be pancakes dripping with syrup. Live and learn! With the sound of chiptune jazz in his ears, Joe plays his heart out, but the competition is interrupted by a power outage. The video game thief gropes Joe in the darkness, looking for the elusive Hack Attack cartridge, but he’s disappointed — as is Joe, for that matter, since the guy didn’t even buy him dinner first.

Frank and Joe finally figure out Nick’s mnemonic works only with the cartridge everyone wants; when they input the code, the game plays itself. They realize Nick was going to use it to cheat, but they don’t figure out the rest: that someone behind the scenes at the tournament has to have been involved to put the cartridge in Nick’s machine. When the kids inform the contest director of everything they have learned, he turns on them immediately. He and Chet’s kidnappers threaten the boys and tell them the criminal plot: Nick was going to cheat in return for a lifetime of games, while the contest coordinator would pocket the $50 Gs.

The kids escape to the New York subway system, destroying the rigged cartridge on the way. They lead the thugs into the tunnels, and all of them almost get hit by a train. The boys manage to leap onto the back of the train as it goes by, pulling the ringleader with them, and then dump the guy off at the police station.

In the finals, Joe plays the game of his life, but he loses to the freed Jason. Bill comes in third; Nick is DQed. In return for his phenomenal playing, Joe gets “a ton of Videomundo game cartridges” (147) that we will never, ever see anyone play. Perhaps that has something to do with how Joe feels; he ends the book by saying, “I don’t want to have anything to do with Hack Attack ever again” (148). He gets over this, of course, since he plays again in Mystery with a Dangerous Beat. Or maybe he just forgets! Memory loss seems a likely consequence of the number of blows to the head Joe has taken.

Terminal Shock (#102)

If you’ve read my recap of Dungeon of Doom (#99), you will not be surprised that I enjoyed how Terminal Shock begins: with Joe being a recalcitrant jerk and someone — Phil Cohen, in this case — calling him on it. Joe wants nothing to do with computers, both because he enjoys his ignorance and because he’s on Spring Break and has declared an embargo on learning: “I think it’s illegal to learn anything over vacation” (2-3).

“If you don’t take [computers] seriously, you’re going to be useless as a crime fighter,” Phil says (2), later adding, “Don’t blame me if your detective career goes down the tubes.”

“Hey!” said Joe. “I’ve been great without a computer until now, and I’ll continue to be great.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” said Phil (3). Man, that’s menacing — especially how he leaves it unclear whether he thinks Joe will continue to be great or whether he’s ever been great.

When Joe goes inside, Frank is using a “microcomputer” — ah, don’t ever change, 1990 — and a modem, which emits a “harsh, roaring sound” as it connects with a local BBS. Joe, always someone who will mock what you like, is deliberately obtuse, not understanding any of the technical information Frank tells him and sounding proud of it. When Joe pronounces sysop as “size op,” Frank corrects him: “sizz op” (6). It’s neither, of course: the second s is soft, and it’s “siss op.” I’m beginning to think Frank might be a newbie too, despite his lectures to Joe about BBSs (bulletin board systems) and modems and CPUs. However, he’s right to call Joe “a font of ignorance” (7), and Joe sounds like a fuddy-duddy: “Why can’t you just pick up the phone and talk?” he shouts at his brother when Frank wants to chat with the sysop (10).

Joe’s technophobia is pushed into the background when the mystery actually begins: the BBS’s sysop, Jim Lerner, sends a chat message to Frank, saying that he’s dying. The Hardys rush to Jim’s home, only a few blocks away, and find him unconscious. In his hand is a note saying, “ShE IS ILL” in block letters. (You can see it on the cover.) When the cops arrive, the boys are pushed aside: when they try to tell a cop they’re detectives, he tells them, “And I’m an astronaut. See you on Mars, boys!” (17). You’d think the Bayport Police Department would give their officers a briefing about what to do when they see Frank and Joe — or maybe they have, and sarcastic dismissal is their official policy. But you’d think with all the crimes Frank and Joe help the BPD solve, the cops would be a bit more accommodating …

Frank and Joe aren’t dissuaded, though. The next day, they return to ask Jim’s mom and his girlfriend, Becky, if they know anything. As they pull up to Jim’s house, they see a man sneaking out of Jim’s second-story room. Joe gives chase, and even though the thief trips over a convenient rake — classic slapstick — he still escapes Joe. However, Sideshow Bob did drop his ill-gotten goods: a box with two 3 ½" floppy discs. Ah, floppy discs, I remember thee. But I don’t remember them holding much information, and these two discs contain the entirety of Jim’s BBS, including the private e-mails between BBS users. The private info is encrypted, and everyone — including Phil — is impressed by Jim’s cryptographic skills. I, however, am impressed by whatever compression algorithms Jim used to get everything onto two disks, when the capacity of a floppy in those days was 1.44 MB. Not even a megabyte and a half! How did we run anything in those days?

At Bayport General, a doctor tells Frank and Joe that Jim has been poisoned by an experimental toxin, and probably only the person who administered it knows the antitoxin. Joe naively says, “I thought a poison was a poison,” which is stupid; he surely knew some snakes have more potent venom than others. Frank and Joe give the discs to Phil to crack, but when they get home, they find a note demanding the discs “or your lives are in danger!” (46). C’mon, dude: you have to make specific threats, or the Hardy Boys won’t take you seriously. They might not even know what case you’re talking about! While they and the cops are waiting to make the dropoff, Phil’s workshop is set on fire. Because of his ultra-cool, super-duper fire suppression system, it does no damage, though.

After a brief meeting with Becky at Mr. Pizza, “a favorite hangout for Bayport teenagers” (57), they head to Digital Delights, a computer store where Jim worked. ("Digital Delights" conjures up a different sort of image in the Internet Age.) There, the brothers meet Jim’s bosses, their only real suspects: the pleasant Larry Simpson and the sour Jerry Sharp. (Larry says Frank and Joe are “celebrities,” while Jerry claims never to have heard of the boys.) Jerry’s prickly personality makes him a suspect; the brothers’ suspicion is increased when they see Jerry talking with the thief, who is posing as a deliveryman. Jerry gives them the wrong name for the thief, which they take a measured response to; usually, they would breaking into Larry’s office or home when given such a pretext, but for some reason, they don’t.

Probably because Larry keeps helping. He lets them paw through Digital Delights’ invoices — they’re selling computers to Canada and Eastern Europe, to the brothers’ amazement — and he explains user names by comparing them to CB handles. This isn’t the only time the Internet has been compared to CB, I think, but it’s strange to think of 21st-century technology being linked to ‘70s culture.

Becky, Phil, Frank, and Joe try to guess Jim’s password, trying what they know of Jim first and then asking other BBS sysops what his password is on their sites in case he reused a password. In a shocking lack of security, many sysops comply, but it doesn’t help. Then Phil realizes the scrap of paper with “ShE IS ILL” has been turned upside down and really means “711 51 345,” which, duh.

That’s the password, of course. In the e-mails, they learn of a “drop” at Cabot Hill; they and the cops foil the handoff, capturing the receiver and recovering a Workwell computer. (The person dropping the computer, who was in a helicopter, escapes.) The BPD asks for Phil’s help looking at the computer and Jim’s disks, showing we weren’t at risk for a BPD: Cyber spinoff. Phil notes new chips have been installed in the Workwell computer.

Frank and Joe poke around at Digital Delights, where a van is loaded with Workwell computers. Frank is pistolwhipped, and the van takes off. Joe and the concussed Frank follow, but they are run off the road. Continuing on to Jerry’s house, they find the van concealed nearby; while they are in the middle of accusing Jerry, Larry interrupts them with a gun. He tells them the entire story: a Canadian lab has developed super computer chips, and he’s using Digital Delights’ orders to smuggle those chips into Eastern Europe. He and his supplier used BBSs to coordinate their movements — poor, naïve, unimaginative Frank calls it “the ultimate in privacy” (128) — until Jim accidentally read one of their messages.

Rather than shooting his hostages, Larry hands the poison to Joe and tells him to drink it. Joe instead splashes it into Larry’s mouth. While he’s sputtering and spitting, the brothers overpower him. Still, Larry escapes after Frank reaches into Larry’s glove compartment and gets a mousetrap on his finger for his trouble. That’s some planning from Larry: trapping your glovebox with a mousetrap on the off chance someone will poke around in it.

Expecting Jerry to call the cops — they never ask him to — Frank and Joe pursue in their van; when a helicopter tries to force them off the road, Joe climbs from the speeding van onto the helicopter’s skid, and from there he climbs into the cockpit. He knocks out the pilot before realizing he can’t land the helicopter. The pilot regains enough consciousness to make a hard landing, and the car chase ends nearby when the police show up. The chase happens on Interstate 78, according to the BPD’s Con Riley, which puts Bayport in northern New Jersey, near New York — Newark, Jersey City, Elizabeth, or maybe even as far south as Perth Amboy.

Everything ends happily: Jim gets the antidote, and Joe agrees to take computer lessons from Phil … but with innuendo: “When Phil’s not looking, I’m going to stick a computer game in his disk drive” (152). Whatever turns you on, Joe — hopefully it turns Phil on as well.

Dungeon of Doom (#99)

I started reading Dungeon of Doom worried that it would miss the point when it came to discussing role-playing games. I ended it wondering why Joe was my favorite Hardy.

First, the role-playing game aspect. Chet invites Frank and Joe to watch him and the Greater Bayport Area Wizards and Warriors Club. Why would Frank and Joe want to spend an afternoon off watching a role-playing game? Playing an RPG — sure, I could get that. I do that. But watching? I dunno. If the game is exciting enough that Frank and Joe are interested, they should play; if it isn’t, they’d be bored either way. I suppose watching an RPG makes more sense than going shopping at the Bayport Mall with their girlfriends (also an option), but only a hairsbreadth more.

A role-playing game, for those who are unfamiliar, is a game without a board. Instead, a narrator of sorts tells a story in which the players are also characters. These characters are often heroic personas; at the very least they have abilities that exceed most people’s. The players influence the course of the story by the decisions their characters make. When something happens that involves some degree of chance and / or skill, like diving out of the way of a sudden attack or firing a weapon, players and the narrator (generically called a game master) roll dice. The dice can be the standard six-sided dice everyone is familiar with or dice with more sides: eight, ten, twelve, or twenty are the most common.

The most famous role-playing game is Dungeons & Dragons, a fantasy-themed RPG. In Dungeon of Doom, Chet and his new friends are playing Wizards and Warriors, an obvious analogue. (Wizards and Warriors was also the name of a 1987 Nintendo game, a 2000 Windows video game, and a short-lived 1983 TV series.) The game master is called the Wizard Master (in D&D, the role is called a Dungeon Master). The book's description of game play is largely within the realm of what you’d expect a fantasy RPG to be like. Each character has stats — in Dungeon of Doom, stamina, strength, and intelligence — that determine how well the character performs tasks related to that stat. Some characters swing swords; others use magic. Standard stuff, really. There’s even a rules lawyer in the group: someone who knows every rule and is willing to use them to get the most out of the game.

Other aspects are unusual at best. The Wizard Master rolls dice for everyone, which is atypical but not unprecedented. All the players are dressed up as their characters; today, that’s called “cosplaying,” and it isn’t unusual, but few people do it when the only people who see them are a small group of fellow players. Chet’s character uses karate, which is dumb for a European-type setting, but even the original D&D had a class of characters who used martial arts. The only spell used has the stupid name of “Fribjib” and turns people into frogs; most spells in fantasy roleplaying have names that relate to what they do, poetically or literally. One of the teens is described as a “champion” W&W player (5), which is strange — RPGs are cooperative, not individual, and rarely does anyone win.

So the RPG is OK. But Joe — Joe’s the worst.

I have that written down a lot in my notes, although usually it’s expressed in saltier language. (I may have compared Joe to a specific bodily sphincter.) When Chet greets the brothers wearing his costume, Joe says he looks “even dumber than usual” (2). When the GBAWWC starts playing, Joe asks Frank, “Is this weird or what?” (8). After being pressured into playing W&W because of a player absence, Joe’s character dies almost immediately because he didn’t bother getting other players’ input, and he whines about it; he almost resorts to fisticuffs when another player razzes him about it. Later, when one of the players is enjoying the villain's game-turned-real-life too much, Joe says, “Maybe you should get out more … Stop playing so many games. Start living a life” (75). This paints the picture of a person who doesn’t want you to like something because he thinks it’s weird — a classic jock bully.

Later, Joe tells Chet he wouldn’t fit through a hole that is “only wide enough for a small Buick” (18). He accuses one of the other players, Derek, of being the villain before there’s any evidence, just out of personal animosity. He assaults Chet to get him to stop singing because “the echoes in this room make it sound like there are four of you … and one of you sounds bad enough” (49). Whenever Derek trades insults with Joe, Joe responds with violence; when Derek meets Joe’s challenge and defeats him, Derek apologizes for the violence, but Joe says, “That and a handful of quarters will buy me a soda” (74) When Derek offers good, constructive ideas on how to get Frank out of a partially triggered death trap, Joe says, “Get lost … I don’t want your help!” (79).

He’s really the worst! If a secondary character acted like him, we’d suspect that character of being the villain. We’d expect him to be the villain.

In contrast, Derek’s a delight. It’s amusing to see Joe fall apart in front of someone as accomplished, in his own way, as the Hardy boys. Derek is the county swimming champion and a football player. He has scholarship offers from MIT and Harvard, where he will study physics or molecular biology. When he tells the others this, Joe says, “I think I’m going to be sick” (37).

Derek needles Joe repeatedly, but he’s funnier than Joe, and he never tries to escalate the situation into assault, which is Joe’s default setting. When Derek finally snaps and challenges Joe to a duel with (fake) swords, he apologizes for thrashing Joe, who’s a sulky dink after being outclassed. (Why didn’t you remember your fencing lessons from the revised Clue of the Broken Blade [#21], Joe?) Derek’s gibe about Chet’s weight is gentle. When he and Frank boost Chet into a hole, Chet says, “Here goes nothing.” Derek’s reply is, “I’d say you’re a little more than nothing, Morton. How much do you weigh?” (62). (Frank’s rejoinder is funny, if a tad crueler: “That’s a state secret … if the Russians found out, they’d build an army of Chet Mortons and eat the rest of the world into submission.”)

Derek has two bad moments: the first is when he says a girlfriend he broke up with “was hardly [his] intellectual equal” (37), which sounds snooty at best and sexist at worst. But he’s a teenage boy; it’s not like he’s probably going to be that good at expressing his emotions. Besides, she might not have cared for intellectual exploration, for all we know, and he’s bad at expressing his opinions of that.

The second bad moment is when he decides to be friends with Joe, the worst person in the world. He even offers Joe tickets to “the big game” in New York (148). He’s even willing to ditch his current girlfriend to go with Joe. What sport is the big game? Who knows! Whatever it is, Frank’s jealous. Stupid, Derek, stupid. You’re going to regret this.

So that’s about it … oh, wait, that’s right. There’s a mystery here.

The plot gets going just after Joe’s character (Sir Joe) dies and he (the real Joe) tries to assault Derek. Tim Partridge, one of group’s members, says another member, Barry, is probably trapped in the Dungeon of Doom. It turns out the Dungeon is where they play sometimes; it’s located on the outskirts of Bayport, in a mine abandoned because it was partially flooded by the Bayport Reservoir. This reservoir must have been built to replace the Tarnack Reservoir, which was new in 1948 when it appeared in The Secret of Skull Mountain (#28). The Tarnack Reservoir, located 20 miles from Bayport on Skull Mountain, replaced the Upstate Reservoir as Bayport’s water supply.

All I can say is that I’m glad the Dungeon of Doom has nothing to do with steam tunnels under a university.

Anyway, Barry suspected something weird was going on around the Dungeon, and he arranged to meet Tim near it. But when Tim got there, he found a note warning him away. Frank and Joe want to go to the police immediately, but the GBAWWC doesn’t: if the police are called in, they’ll lose their Dungeon, and it would be a shame to do that if it’s a false alarm. Derek says they’ll check out the dungeon, then call the police if anything is wrong. Frank and Joe reluctantly agree to this sensible compromise.

Once they arrive, though, a cave-in traps them in the Dungeon. You have to expect that when you go underground with the Hardy Boys! (See The Flickering Torch Mystery, #22; The Submarine Chase, #68; Cave-In!, #78; The Roaring River Mystery, #80 … that’s not as many as I thought. I must be missing a few.) The dungeon / mine has been set up to serve as a real physical / mental challenge for the kids by a “Secret Wizard Master.” Traps include such classics as the carpet-over-the-pit trap, which Joe falls into immediately, and the shifting-room trap, in which a room is balanced so that when enough people shift to one side, the room tilts and dumps everyone down a shaft. Classic RPG traps, both of them. (The Secret Wizard Master also uses the no-key trick: the kids reach a door they don’t have a key for, so they sit down to figure out the “trick.” The trick is that the door isn’t locked.)

They also have to deal with morons within their ranks. When they find food left by the Secret Wizard Master, Frank makes the unilateral decision to drop it into a mine shaft on the off chance it’s poisoned. Chet lunges at the food and drops the group’s only light. Only by luck does the lantern not fall into the shaft as well.

The Secret Wizard Master, it becomes apparent, is one of the GBAWWC. So now we’ll dive into the suspect pool!

• Pete Simmons: He’s the real Wizard Master, and according to Win Thurber, he had access to the published adventure the Secret Wizard Master based everything on. Pete says the adventure was stolen before he could see it. More damningly, Pete is a psychology student at Gates College; he’s writing a paper titled “The Role-Playing Game as Adolescent Bonding Ritual.” I admit, with a title like that, I thought he was engineering everything to get more material.
  
• Win Thurber: A small kid who attends Bayport High School, although Frank and Joe don’t remember him. (Win says everyone knows the Hardy Boys, though.) He works at Bergmeyer’s, a department store in Bayport Mall, and gets stuff to outfit the Dungeon at a discount. He enjoys games more than anything else, and Frank and Joe accuse him of enjoying their predicament too much. He explodes at Frank and Joe when they condescend to him about his love of games and lack of friends. “Maybe you just haven’t tried,” Frank says. “Try some clubs at school. Make some friends” (76). Joe offers to throw Win a pizza party at Mr. Pizza with their friends: “Maybe you’ll get along with them.” Ugh, popular people have no idea how hard high school is.
  
• Derek Hannon: He’s delightful — witty, an athlete, and a brain. He’s only on this list because Joe hates him. If Joe hates him, though, that must mean he’s awesome.
  
• Tim Partridge: The 14-year-old who warned them something was wrong. Since his mother was expecting him at home, he didn’t go into the Dungeon.
  
• Barry Greenwald: Tim’s classmate. He disappeared before the story began — or maybe he only wanted people to think that.

It turns out the Secret Wizard Master is Win, who is really a high-school dropout who is much older than he appears. He has been stealing consumer goods from Bergmeyer’s and storing them in the mine. He and his two goons capture the GBAWWC when the fun of the Dungeon of Doom runs out. Win’s plan is to make the kids swim in the cold waters of the reservoir until they drown, which will keep their bodies hidden for a long time. Despite Joe’s “nasty personality” (129) — hey, Win might be a murderous crook, but he’s not wrong — he accepts Joe’s offer of a sword duel before the executions. He handily defeats Joe, just as Derek did, but he’s not prepared when Joe kicks him in the knee. He stumbles backwards into a strut keeping water at bay. The strut fails, and it’s a race against time to get out.

Well, the Hardys and the GBAWWC are racing against time. The readers will likely be checking their watches as the ending is drawn out. But everyone manages to swim to safety, and the good guys catch all the bad guys. Win’s goons are put in jail, Win is released to his mother (despite him being a legal adult), and Chet raids the police snack machines.

The story ends with Chet suggesting a new hobby for himself — spelunking — now that role-playing games have proved too much for the couch warrior. But spelunking isn’t a new hobby; Chet spelunked his way into danger in The Mystery of the Chinese Junk (#39). Joe tells him to “keep his ideas to himself,” although I’m not sure whether that’s because he has cave-related trauma, because he’s sick of Chet’s hobbies, or because he remembers Chet was a spelunker before, even if Chet doesn’t. In any event, it’s nice to know Joe remains consistent to the end: a jerk.

Danger on the Air (#95)

Plot: After an on-air interview at WBPT is interrupted by an explosion, Frank and Joe stick around to find who is terrorizing the station.

“Borrowing” from the past: Frank and Joe head for Mr. Pizza and the mall after Joe saves a man from death; the mall and an unnamed pizza shop show up in The Blackwing Puzzle (#82). Mr. Pizza, which is managed by chum Tony Prito, shows up frequently in the Casefiles — the Hardy Boys Wiki lists three of the books it appears in — and I’m betting it shows up in other, later digests. All I can find in my notes is an appearance in The Prime-Time Crime (#109), another TV-related mystery. (Checking again, the wiki mentions Spark of Suspicion, #98.)

In Danger on the Air, Frank and Joe spend a lot of time at WBPT — serving the Bayport area since 1953 — but it never appeared in the Stratemeyer books (#1-83). However, WBPT is an important part of Prime-Time Crime and is mentioned in Beyond the Law (Casefiles #55).

Frank and Joe (and Chet) are referred to as football players; I went over Joe’s football experience in Daredevils (#159). Joe also plays college football as a field goal kicker in Foul Play (Undercover Brothers, #19).

Frank jumped on the football train later than Joe and Chet. Joe first played in The Sinister Sign Post (#15), with Chet serving as an eligible receiver, but the text specifically says Frank wasn’t a member of the team. By 1953’s The Crisscross Shadow, Frank’s a three-way player who is the punter, quarterback, and captain; Chet was a two-way player, lining up as a center on offense and wearing #34. The Yellow Feather Mystery (#33) mentions Frank has been on the team for three years, meaning he either joined as a sophomore or skipped a year somewhere along the line. He’s a star in The Mystery of the Whale Tattoo (#47), a member of the offensive backfield in The Shattered Helmet (#52), and a participant in The Clue in the Embers (#34), The Mysterious Caravan (#54), The Vanishing Thieves (#66), and The Blackwing Puzzle (#82). Chet also was listed as a center in The Wailing Siren Mystery (#30) and The Mystery of the Aztec Warrior (#43), a lineman in The Arctic Patrol Mystery (#48), and as a player in The Secret Agent on Flight 101 (#46), Danger on Vampire Trail (#50), The Mysterious Caravan, and The Blackwing Puzzle.

The Hardys almost get thrown off Barmet Cliffs, near the Westview Apartments; Barmet Cliffs are said to be honeycombed with caves and full of abandoned mine shafts in What Happened at Midnight (#10). Bayport’s Grommet Park is mentioned as part of a blown ransom handoff; a few of Bayport’s parks have been mentioned in the canon, such as Seaview Park, which was also part of a ransom payoff in Mystery of the Samurai Sword (#60), and Bayport Memorial Park and its “Alfresco Disco” in The Apeman’s Secret (#62). Although it’s not a park, Shorewood Nature Center, a nature preserve, appears in A Will to Survive (#156).

After saving a man’s life on local TV, Joe is besieged by autograph seekers at the mall. He is overwhelmed by the attention, but I’m not sure why. Frank and Joe have received a great deal of publicity over the years, and they are even referred to as “local celebrities” by a TV producer early in Danger. In The Sting of the Scorpion (#58), we learn Frank and Joe have fans, and the brothers give an interview to a reporter from the New York Daily Star. Their travel plans are on TV in The Arctic Patrol Mystery, and they’ve been told their exploits have been read about by people in upstate New York (The Night of the Werewolf, #59) and California (The Four-Headed Dragon, #69). Joe made the front page of the Bailey Herald for saving his father’s papers from a fire in The Secret Warning (#17). Their picture has been in the paper “quite often,” according to The Crimson Flame (#77), and they’ve been interviewed for TV “half a dozen times” (The Blackwing Puzzle).

In Danger Frank and Joe mention a few previous crimes they’ve solved, although I don’t think they are referring to any published adventures. Frank mentions a bank robbery in which blurry videotape of the robber was their only evidence for a while. The Hardy boys fought bank robbers in the The Missing Chums (#4) and The Secret Panel (#25), but both mysteries are so old videotape could probably have been used for identifying or deterring robbers. The High Rise Bandit robbed apartments in the Westview Apartments “a few months ago,” but neither Frank nor Joe mention capturing him or her. When an interviewer asks the boys what was their “most exciting” mystery was, Frank responded, “I guess it was that time we discovered this ring of smugglers —” That could refer to a previous book, although there’s nothing to narrow it down; for that matter, “ring of smugglers” could refer to almost any previous book.

Where Is Bayport?: It takes two hours for the boys to get from Bayport to Manhattan by train. On Amtrak’s Northeast Regional schedule, two hours from New York to the east is somewhere around or east of New Haven, Conn. (Despite New Haven’s declining population, it is and always has been too large to be Bayport.) It takes about two hours to get to Philadelphia, so if Bayport is in New Jersey, it would be the near southern end, although no Amtrak routes seem to run directly from southern New Jersey to NYC. On the North Jersey Coast Line run by New Jersey Transit, two hours from New York gets the rider to about Asbury Park, N.J., although at certain times, trains can reach the line’s southern terminus, Bay Head, in a little more than two hours.

At one point, the time of sunset is mentioned: 8:40 p.m. (actually, 15 minutes before 8:55 p.m., but I did the math). You might think that could narrow the possibilities, but unfortunately it doesn’t add up; even on the longest day of the year, none of the candidate cities has a sunset that late. You have to move to the north or west to get a sunset after about 8:30, and unfortunately, that isn’t conducive to selecting cities along the Atlantic seaboard, where all the cities are either south or east of New York (latest sunset: 8:31 p.m., EDT — remember to add an hour for daylight saving time in the chart).

Priorities, man: After meeting movie star Wayne Clintock, Frank and Joe can’t wait to relay their brush with fame to the people they know. Frank thinks of Callie, his girlfriend, first; Joe counters with Chet, their best friend. In Joe’s position, I probably would have thought of my girlfriend next, if for no other reason than through the power of suggestion, but Chet has been referred to as the brothers’ best friend, so I guess I understand. But the next person Frank thinks of is Aunt Gertrude.

Gertrude. Why …? But … The purpose of telling people about celebrities you’ve met is to impress them or to share something with them because you’re so close. I’m not sure how Gertrude rises to the top of either list for Frank, but it happened.

I’d buy a ticket to that: Because Clintock is a movie star, Frank and Joe bleat about the films he has starred in. Drop Zone: Danger sounds like a rejected Hardy Boys title, while Hogan’s Law, War in the Streets, and The Last Blast are unremarkable titles. (There’s something of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 feel about all of them.) Clintock’s most recent film, Badge of Honor, shares a name with the fictional TV series in the movie L.A. Confidential, although Danger came out before the movie or the book it was based on.

Beat the Hangman, however, is a movie I’m intrigued by, and one I’d actually stop to watch a few minutes of if I came across it on cable. Clintock plays a “mysterious gunman” in the movie, which, along with the name, suggests it’s a Western. The name echoes the title of the 1953 film Beat the Devil, although that John Huston / Humphrey Bogart film was a parody of film noir, so there’s probably not a connection.

Those were the days: A cameraman mentions WBPT was originally supposed to be the flagship station of a fourth television network: the McParton Network, named after its founder. In the discussion, the boys and cameraman mention ABC, CBS, and NBC, but evidently this Dixon or the publisher had no confidence in Fox, which became the fourth network when it began primetime broadcasts in 1987. When Danger on the Air came out in 1989, Fox had network programming for two hours on both Saturday and Sunday nights. In fall 1989, it expanded into Mondays, and it had expanded into all nights by 1993.

Although skepticism that a fourth network could be sustained was abundant when Fox started, other networks outside the big three of ABC, CBS, and NBC existed in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Paramount, for instance, launched in 1948 but went off the air in 1956. The DuMont Television Network was the most successful, running from 1946-55, debuting two years before ABC’s and CBS’s television offerings. DuMont was done in by a variety of factors: getting the short end of AT&T’s limited broadcast technology, lack of a radio network to solidify finances and recruit talent, competition from its corporate partner, Paramount, and ABC, NBC, and CBS monopolizing the three VHF stations in most markets, forcing DuMont to expand into UHF channels, which many TVs of the era could not receive. Like McParton’s fictional network, most the video of DuMont’s shows were destroyed.

Privilege rejected: In New York, Frank tries to get an appointment with the head of Mediatronics, an electronics company. The company’s busy president, however, rejects Frank’s idea of a meeting out of hand — as almost any corporate leader would, no matter what previous books tried to tell us.

Questionable grasp of “hottest”: The villain plans to sell the original recordings of Mrs. Brody’s Boardinghouse, long thought lost, to a television station for a half million dollars. “Some people,” he says, “… believe that the revival of ‘Mrs. Brody’s Boardinghouse’ is going to be the hottest thing on television in years.” I will point out it’s not the villain who thinks this but whomever he’s going to sell the tapes to. However, I highly doubt the 35-year-old reruns of a black-and-white series would be “hot,” even if they hadn't been seen since they originally aired.

The child doesn’t drop far from the family eaves: After catching Frank and Joe eavesdropping, Ettinger, the head of Mediatronics, angrily asks the boys whether their parents taught them any manners. He fails to take into consideration that Fenton, as a private detective, probably taught the boys to eavesdrop.

Enhance!: The Masked Marauder, the criminal who opposes the Hardys in Danger, is caught on video tape. Of course the image is from a distance and blurry; of course a video technician is on hand to gradually improve the image through successive iterations until the suspect is clearly seen. No one yells, “Enhance!” but they might as well have.

Maybe the Hardys should be in charge of the police: When a producer at WBPT goes missing, Frank and Joe try to interest the Bayport Police Department in the case. As the Masked Marauder has already been caught, the police decline to investigate; Con Riley shrugs and says, “We’ll do our best to find her, but … If you guys hear from her again, get in touch with us right away.”

The interesting question here is whether Frank and Joe are justified for taking over crimefighting in Bayport because of police incompetence, or has Frank and Joe’s hypercompetence taught the police to not even try? I lean toward the latter, but that explanation requires a bit too much metaknowledge about the characters.

Opinions: A lot of Danger that is not focused on the mystery is devoted to fame. Should we want it? What are its pitfalls? What are its privileges? Joe is sure he wants to be a movie star, but he freezes up during an interview on live TV, and he’s overwhelmed by a crowd of autograph seekers after people watch him save a man’s life on TV. Joe seems to be fine with the kind of fame that makes him recognizable or gives him access to secrets, but he’s terrified of fame’s other aspects.

Frank and Wayne Clintock deal with other aspects of fame. Frank is unable to secure an interview with Ettinger, despite being a renowned teen sleuth and the son of Fenton Hardy, and he’s actually unrecognizable enough to sneak into the Mediatronics offices. Clintock has to deal with the ignominy of people seeing his awkward teenage years in Mrs. Brody’s Boardinghouse after he’s spent decades building his reputation as a tough action hero; when you’re famous, nothing is forgotten. And because everyone thinks they know him and his motivations, he becomes the prime suspect for the attacks on WBPT. Everything works out in the end, but fame certainly complicates his life.

That being said, the author stops looking at the fame aspect once the investigation kicks into gear, with no one really noticing or contacting Joe a day after his on-air lifesaving; it would have been interesting seeing how friends and family dealt with Joe’s fame other than Chet kidding him about it. This aspect of the story gives way to a better-than-average mystery, with someone using technology to cover his tracks, and Frank and Joe learn about the differences between appearance and reality on TV. They won’t remember the difference by the next book, but that’s OK.

Grade: B. Enhance!

The Secret of the Island Treasure (#100)

Plot: Hurd Applegate sends Frank, Joe, and Chet to represent his interests in digging up a buried pirate treasure in Barmet Bay.

“Borrowing” from the past: The return of Hurd and Adelia Applegate! Hurd showed up in the first Hardy Boys mystery, The Tower Treasure, where he and his sister, Adelia, were robbed of valuable jewels and securities. He blames the father of one of the boys’ friends, Frank and Joe investigate, Hurd thinks they’re incompetent fools, etc. You know how it goes — a story as old as the hills. He pops up again among the auto thefts in The Shore Road Mystery (#6). In his next appearance in the series, The Great Airport Mystery (#9), he and fellow rich eccentric Elroy Jefferson bail the boys out of jail. His last appearance was in While the Clock Ticked (#11); Hurd gets mixed up in their investigation of death threats to Raymond Dalrymple when he claimed Dalrymple stole his stamps. Hurd saves the boys from a bomb, and the boys find Hurd’s missing stamps. A good time was had by all.

The Hardy Boys also return to Tower Mansion, the site of their first mystery (the theft of $40,000 worth of Applegate’s jewels and securities). In The Secret of the Island Treasure, Frank even mentions Joe falling off the stairs up the tower. Before this story begins, Applegate has sold the mansion, and it’s being turned into condos. Hurd reveals his father, Major Applegate, was the mansion’s first owner.

The Tower Treasure was also the basis for a serial on The Mickey Mouse Club in 1957, titled “The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure.” In that case, the boys, played by Tommy Kirk and Tim Considine, were looking for a pirate treasure, as they are in The Secret of the Island Treasure. The introductory song, used in each of the 19 segment,s mentions Applegate’s treasure as “gold doubloons and pieces of eight”; while speculating what the treasure might be in The Secret of the Island Treasure, Joe asks, “Gold? Jewels? Old Spanish doubloons?”

Just as in The Mystery of Cabin Island (#8) and The Secret of the Lost Tunnel (#29), when there’s a simple substitution cipher to be solved, Frank’s your man. Frank manages to decipher a code on a dug-up stone for the location of the treasure.

History is just one fictional thing happening after another: There is a lot of Bayport’s maritime history in this one, and all of it is made up out of whole cloth. Damien, the archaeologist along with the expedition, tells the boys Barmet Bay was discovered by Dutch explorer — fictional, of course — Henrik Schuusten in 1574. (Possibly a play on the name of publisher Simon & Schuster?) Chet chimes in that Schuusten named it Baarmuter Bay, after some important person in the Netherlands. That seems to be fictional as well. (Also: Chet gets to know something neither Frank or Joe knows? Shocking!) Also, as far as I can tell, the Dutch made no major North American expeditions to the New World until the early 17th century, when Henry Hudson claimed New York for the Netherlands.

Damien also says the ocean near Barmet Bay was extensively patrolled by pirates in the 17th century. As for the pirate who left the treasure on Granite Cay, an island near Bayport, he lists the fictional Henry Dafoe as the chief suspect, although he also mentions Captain Kidd.

Damn teenagers: Frank, Joe, and Chet are told to report to the marina “bright and early” for a day of treasure hunting. Although Joe does arise, chipper, at 7 a.m., they don’t arrive at the marina until 9. That is not, by any stretch of the imagination, bright and early. That’s when bankers show up for work.

Pot. Kettle. Black: Frank nearly gives himself a hernia while trying to throw an anchor overboard, evidently surprised that an anchor would be heavy, even though, as Joe says, “It’s supposed to hold the boat in place.” Frank then calls Joe a “dipstick,” which is both accurate and charming.

Weirdly, it seems Chet has stolen some of the brothers’ intelligence. Besides knowing about Barmet Bay’s history, he also has timely survival advice: when Joe falls in quicksand and complains that the harder he tries to escape, the more he gets sucked in, Chet tells him, “Then stop trying to get out.” I find this inversion of roles both disturbing and strangely alluring.

Why does Franklin W. Dixon hate Joe?: Maybe it’s an alliance of Franks, but the worst thing that happens to Frank is that he almost falls down the stairs in the tower. Joe falls into quicksand, gets knocked out and almost drowns when the mining pit floods, is the one who almost gets caught by a partially severed rope trap, and is the one who falls unconscious when the pirate poison gas attack is sprung.

Your edumacation for the day: The island treasure plot is largely stolen from the real-world treasure hunt on Oak Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. In many ways, that’s fitting, since many parts of the Oak Island story are probably legends rather than fact.

It’s also fitting since the Oak Island story begins with three teenage friends in 1795. The three discovered a depression in the dirt on Oak Island beneath a tree with a tackle block on one of the branches, suggesting someone had hoisted something into a hole that had since been filled and settled. The walls of the pit had visible pick marks, there was a layer of flagstones just below the surface, and every ten feet, there was a layer of logs. The boys gave up at 30 feet, which is a hell of a feat for three boys. Remarkably, there are no records of this attempt until 60 years later.

About a decade later, another attempt was made by different hands; this time they dug down to 90 feet, finding logs every ten feet and a layer of charcoal, putty, and coconut fiber at 40, 50, and 60 feet. Before they gave up, they found a stone (since lost) with a coded description translated to say, “Forty feet below, two million pounds lie buried.” The pit flooded before more digging could be attempted; it was believed a channel (never found) lined with coconut fibers between Mahone Bay and the pit allowed the pit to flood when the protective seals (putty, charcoal, and coconut fiber) were removed. No one has ever gotten closer, and the bottom of the pit collapsed (either through a booby trap or natural means) in 1861. More modern technologies have given tantalizing glimpses below, but no one has actually found anything of value on the island.

In The Secret of the Island Treasure, many of those details are kept. The diggers find flagstones, one of which has a coded message that says, “Twenty feet below lies the greatest treasure of them all.” The flooding trap is unsealed when they open a door, but Damien quickly defeats it with cement at the source of the channel. There’s also a wooden platform (albeit one with a door in its middle.) On the other hand, they didn’t find the skeletons of pirates on Oak Island, so The Secret of the Island Treasure is one up on them there. They also didn’t find a treasure chest booby-trapped with poison gas, but exhaust from pumps in the pits tended to have the same — albeit more deadly — results. Four members of the Restall family excavation died from fumes in the 1960s.

Bad archaeology is what he needs: It’s obvious Damien has sold out to the Man on this one. When the Hardys, Chet, and other workers start unearthing skeletons at the bottom of the pit, Damien doesn’t even try to do any real archaeology work. Just put them in the bucket and keep using those big shovels to get to the bottom, boys! Don’t worry about spade marks on skeletons or disturbing artifacts! Get the treasure!

Read more in the Pansy-atic Adventure Series!: At the end of the novel, Hurd tries to interest the boys in finding a hidden South American silver mine. Uncharacteristically, Chet is gung-ho about finding it, but even more uncharacteristically, Frank and Joe want absolutely nothing to do with it. Cowards!

Opinions: When you’re going to steal, steal from the best, I always say. The Oak Island Treasure is a story worth adapting to the Hardy Boys, especially as the generally hemi-glutteal attempts made at finding the treasure in the 19th century matches up with the general standard of competence in the Hardy Boys. Using characters from The Tower Treasure for the 100th book is also a great idea; Hurd and Adelia should show up more often, but of course, they don’t. Not hip, those old people.

The actual treasure hunting is done briskly, taking a total of 60 pages (and three days) to get from ground breaking to GOLD! There’s not much mystery here — the culprits are kinda obvious if you care about such things, and I can totally understand if you don’t — but that’s not a problem when you’re digging up trapped treasure chests and pirate skeletons every few pages. I could have done without the hurricane threat, but it wouldn’t be a Hardy Boys book without some sort of natural disaster; besides, hurricanes follow the boys around (see Hurricane Joe, #11 in the Undercover Brothers series, Typhoon Island, #180, The Hidden Harbor Mystery, #14 revised, The Secret Warning, #17 revised, and The Four-Headed Dragon, #69). Hurricane Celia is supposed to be the worst to hit Bayport in 20 years, but, eh, who knows? It just sort of blows in one evening and out the next, as did the storm in Hurricane Joe.

Grade: A. Nostalgia + excitement = one of the best, if not the best, digests.