Lost in Gator Swamp (#142)

Hi! This week I decided to do something different, mainly because it will give me more time to do other things. I bought an app called LitBot 2999 from ConHugeCo, which promises to analyze texts in a real, nearly human-like manner, using electronic sources. I hope you enjoy the results as much as I enjoy the time I’m doing something else!

Sometimes it only takes a few pages to realize how awful a book is. In the case of Lost in Gator Swamp, it takes less than two.

Gator Swamp begins with Frank, Joe, and Chet riding in a hydroplane piloted by Dusty Cole to the Swampland Rodeo in Florida. That sentence has a lot to unpack, like one would unpack a suitcase full of slightly rotten tomatoes and spiders.

“Rodeo” is an inauspicious start. Why would the Hardys wander a thousand miles from home to watch a rodeo, even if it takes place over several days? They have been lured to this rodeo to sate Chet’s burgeoning cattle-roping hobby, but the Hardys themselves have no real interest in the sport. Yes, spending time with a best friend is one thing, but the Hardys don’t have to enable every damn hobby Chet comes up with.

The next bit of trouble is “Florida.” The Hardys have been to Florida before — Panic on Gull Island (#107) was their most recent visit, but they went to the Sunshine State frequently in the ‘80s— and “Florida” goes with rodeo like “pizza” goes with “motor oil.” Florida is more of an agricultural state than those outside of the state usually think, but it’s not a cowboy state, and the area where this rodeo is held — the swamps around Miami — is a thematically poor place to hold a rodeo. It’s also a poor area to be a cattle rancher, and cattle ranching is the occupation associated with rodeo.

Swamps are also an unthematic place for a guy named “Dusty” to be living, as swamps are not dusty locales. Oh, people named Dusty can live in the swamps; that’s no crime. But this particular pilot / rodeo competitor / fishing camp operator, Dusty Cole — the pun is marginally preferable to “Dusty Rhodes” — seems too perfect a fit for the swamps to have gained the nickname Dusty.

It’s true that life isn’t thematically consistent. It isn’t consistent at all, really. But a Hardy Boys book is literature, of a sort. It has needs beyond what is possible. It needs to come together into a coherent whole, and it needs not to make readers ask questions about rodeos in a swamp before they can get into the story.

And then — then! — Franklin W. Dixon uses confusing terminology. “Hydroplane” is usually used to describe a boat, one that has a lifting surface that elevates it out of the water, similar to the ferry Frank and Joe protected in the revised Mystery of the Flying Express (#21). (That ship was a hydrofoil, though.) The term is sometimes misused to describe an airboat, those swamp boats with a big fan in the back. According to Wikipedia [UPGRADE TO SCHOLARLY SOURCES FOR ONLY $20 / MONTH!], though, a hydroplane is sort of a speedboat. The author, on the other hand, thinks a hydroplane is a seaplane, specifically a floatplane — like the plane the Hardys flew in The Viking Symbol Mystery (#42) and were passengers on in the revised Hidden Harbor Mystery (#14). That definition shows up on the Wikipedia disambiguation page for hydroplane, but “floatplane” and “seaplane” are much better terms.

That’s just page 1. On page 2, readers are treated to this ham-handed characterization:

“Egrets!” Frank shouted. He glanced at the travel book he had brought with him from the Bayport Library.
“Anybody else hungry?” Chet asked, stuffing a handful of potato chips into his mouth.

The author makes his point in the most obvious way possible: Frank is studious and boring yet prone to random ejaculations, while Chet eats to get attention; paradoxically, Chet’s constant use of food as a proxy for a personality has caused people to grow tired of Chet’s eating displays. It’s just so disconnected and stupid and lazy and stupid and stupid and stupid and stupid —

(Sorry. LitBot got hung up there, and I can’t get it to restart. I think it may have committed suicide. I’ll have to write the rest myself.

Once the Hardys get to the colorfully and unbelievably named Frog’s Peninsula, they learn a mystery is afoot. A bank has been robbed in Miami, but the airboat the thieves stole for their getaway is found at the bottom of Florida Bay. Everyone thinks the thieves are dead, claimed by the storm that sank their pilfered boat, but not the Hardys! No, no. The Hardys figure the thieves are still around. Clever boys! Unfortunately, they can’t see the thieves, even when they look them in the eyes, and it takes them a while to figure out the bank robbers have stuck around Frog’s Peninsula.

The reader will not be fooled. With weird lights, strange animal behavior in the swamp, and suspiciously acting newcomers, the villains and their motivations couldn’t be more obvious if they wore trucker caps with “Bank Robbers Do It in the Swamp (‘It’ Refers to Searching for Lost Loot)” written on them. In fact, headgear does play an important part in this book: Frank, Joe, and Chet suspect one of the rodeo riders of being a thief because he wears a distinctive cowboy hat that one of the thieves wore. But, as it turns out, hats can be worn by people other than their owners. An astonishing twist!

Frank, Joe, and Chet also spend an inordinate amount of time suspicious of a local Native American, Reuben Tallwalker. Reuben is obsessed with the spiritual and ecological status of the land, yet for some reason the kids think Reuben might be a bank robber. It is not their finest moment. I can only imagine their thinking has been swayed after Reuben makes a slashing gesture across his throat toward the Hardys. (He thinks the Hardys are behind the strange happenings in the swamp.)

So Frank, Joe, and Chet, with help from Reuben and other locals, solve the case. Along the way, Frank and Joe are asked to square dance by a pair of girls, who are never described, never named, and their reactions to their partners taking off after a suspect go unnoted. (While dancing, they “dig for the oyster” [35], which is not as interesting as it sounds.) The boys hit the swamp highlights — they survive a couple of alligator attacks, and Joe almost drowns in quicksand — and steal a pedal boat, which sinks when a disguised robber attacks it. No one gets mad about the theft or lost boat, though; the boat’s owner actually apologizes for getting angry at them.

To his credit, Frank does quickly connect the dots between an alligator stolen from an alligator farm and the big gator that shows up near Dusty’s fishing camp. And when the boys need information about the robbery to continue with their unauthorized, unpaid investigation, Frank comes up with the idea to call Fenton, who can get information from anyone in law enforcement.

No other adults believe their hunches, of course, and Chet and Joe are partially discredited by the thieves’ unexplained bilocation. But they continue with their investigation. Chet and Joe board the thieves’ boat as they are about to recover the lost loot in another storm, and they free a pair of captives from the hold. (Joe gets a job offer from the police officer he frees; unsurprisingly, he ignores the chance to join a backwater police department.) Then, with an advantage of two-to-one over the thieves, they completely botch everything, getting only a partial message to allies before being recaptured. Frank manages to steal — er, borrow — Dusty’s hydroplane and makes it in time to rescue the captives after they are thrown overboard by the thieves. And who do you think catches the bad guys?

The Coast Guard, of course. The Coast Guard cutter’s presence is never explained; it’s doubtful they were summoned, as the people Joe contacted lost their radio during the conversation and were still struggling to get it back when Frank stole the plane. Presumably the Coast Guard was performing storm rescue efforts and happened across the chaotic scene with two boats trying to bring down a hydroplane.

All in all, Gator Swamp is a sad entry in the Hardy Boys series and a rough hour or so of my life when I could have used something uplifting. That’s to say nothing of the effect this book had on LitBot 2099 … Poor LitBot.

Panic on Gull Island (#107)

Plot: Iola is missing on Spring Break, and Joe and Chet eventually head down to a Florida motel to find her.

“Borrowing” from the past: Iola Morton is Joe’s girlfriend — it even says the pair are “going together” on the very first page. That reasonable and natural description of their relationship may not seem remarkable, but it was never used in the first 50 Hardy Boys books. Never. Instead, there were euphemisms like Iola being Joe’s “special friend,” “best girl,” “regular date,” even “staunch supporter.” It’s also revealed in Gull Island that Joe gave Iola a watch engraved with the romantic (for him) inscription of, “To Iola, From Joe.” This is the first thing, as far as I’ve known, that he’s ever given her.

Iola is kidnapped in Panic on Gull Island. In the original canon, Iola was particularly resistant to such shenanigans; she was tied up, with the rest of the Mortons, in The Ghost at Skeleton Rock (#37), and that’s it. As for injuries, her hair was singed in The Clue in the Embers (#35), and she was knocked out after hitting her head on a boat’s gunwale, which caused her to fall into Barmet Bay in The Secret of Pirate's Hill (#36). (The ‘50s weren’t great for Iola.) She was also pulled underwater in Tic-Tac-Terror (#74). Falling into the bay was the worst thing that happened to her … until she was blowed up in the first Hardy Boys Casefile, Dead on Target.

The Hardys are chased by some Doberman pinschers during Panic on Gull Island. The Hardys have been chased by dogs for years, starting with a Russian wolfhound named Chan in Footprints Under the Window (#12) and continuing too many times to get into. They had previously been menaced by Dobermans in the first paperback adventure, The Night of the Werewolf (#59), and the revised A Figure in Hiding (#16).

Do you care?: Joe seems slightly concerned but not exactly upset when Chet tells him Iola has disappeared. The first thing he does is drive to the airport to pick up Frank and Fenton — like they couldn’t have hailed a cab — and the narration notes that Iola’s disappearance would “affect him as much as it did Chet.” Such a effaced way of expressing the thought — it allows the sentiment to be interpreted as an expression of possible grief (or joy, when she is found) as much as it does legal troubles the disappearance could cause them (did you have anything to do with it?). Nobody else seems too worked up either. It takes the adult ostensibly looking after Iola and her friend Daphne Garnett two days to call the Mortons. Two days! The Mortons send Chet, rather than a responsible adult, to investigate. And Fenton tells the boys to drive all the way down there — a 24-hour trip that leaves them exhausted — rather than flying them down there.

On the other hand, Joe is so worked up over Iola’s disappearance he can’t muster the will to make a fat joke while he and Chet wait for Fenton and Frank to arrive. Frank, on the other hand, doesn’t miss a beat, going for a joke about Chet’s appetite minutes after surviving a crash landing on a passenger plane.

Separation of Frank and Joe: At the beginning of Panic on Gull Island, Fenton and Frank are returning from a detecting trip to Chicago. Why was Joe left behind? To make some calls and talk to a “friend” from the telephone company about some things. He could have done that from Chicago! Besides, Joe doesn’t have any friends that Frank doesn’t have, right?

What are you driving, a wheelbarrow?: At about 3 a.m., Chet estimates he and the Hardys are 300 miles from the Florida border and about 18 to 19 hours from Gull Island. The fictional Gull Island is somewhere between Naples and Sarasota. That’s … that’s incredibly slow.

Since they’d just eaten, they wouldn’t have to stop again until Florida, at least — about five hours away, since the speed limit back then was probably 55 mph. But to get from the Florida border to Fort Myers, Fla. — which is between Sarasota and Naples and closer to Naples, the more southerly city — is between 300 and 350 miles, depending on the route. Most of it would be on the interstate. Even with highway driving, eight hours would be a long time; Mapquest estimates it at about five and a half, although the speed limit is higher now. So will they be taking four to six hours of meals and bathroom breaks on such an important trip? I suppose they could actually, you know, rest, which would add about that much time to their ETA, but they are three teenagers driving on the interstate. The whole point of multiple drivers is not to have to stop to rest.

Long arm of the Syndicate: The Stratemeyer Syndicate, which created and controlled the Hardy Boys series for decades, revised the books in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. One of the things they wanted to do was have Frank and Joe more respectful of the police (and other authority figures) and to make those with authority more worthy of respect.

In Panic on Gull Island, the Hardys and Chet are stymied in their investigation by the worst lawman ever. The deputy sheriff obviously wouldn’t know a crime wave if it bit him in the hinder. He decides a kidnapping, a boat theft, destruction of a private dock, vandalism, and a boat explosion are not only unconnected incidents but not crimes at all. He responds to the kidnapping concerns by saying that since there was no ransom note, there obviously was no kidnapping — financial gain evidently being the only reason for kidnapping a pretty teenage girl that he can conceive of. And that’s putting aside the possibility that the case was murder! The only question is whether the deputy is incompetent or corrupt, but the end of the story suggests (in its omission of the deputy) that the readers were never supposed to regard the deputy as corrupt at all. Still, he’s pretty awful.

On the other hand, everyone else is stupid in how they handle him. The locals seem to think he has no superior, with no one mentioning appealing to the county sheriff’s office. One local suggests running against him in an election, but that’s asinine — deputies are generally appointed by the sheriff, who is the one who runs for office. It takes until two-thirds of the way through the book before anyone mentions the state police, let alone any other level of law enforcement. In a technical sense, even if the deputy believed Iola was kidnapped, that crime is the jurisdiction of the FBI rather than a county office. No one even mentions talking to insurance companies and their investigators about the crimes.

In the end, though, it shows how little everyone wants to get Iola back that no one alerts the media. There might not have been a 24-hour news cycle in 1991, but I guarantee that the disappearance of a female teenager on Spring Break would have caused a firestorm of attention on the case. Things would start happening. But no one thinks about putting pressure on the police by even threatening that. No, no — that would interfere with Frank and Joe’s “investigating,” which mainly involves trespassing and crashing parties.

Seriously, Iola, you might want to think about finding better friends.

Com-put-tor: The Hardys are on the cutting edge of technology; they take a portable phone (which gets stolen), a fax machine (!), and a portable computer (which if I remember those days correctly, was only barely portable). But that’s not all; by connecting through Fenton’s computer, they’re able to find a client list for a local car rental agency (primitive hacking?), and when they go to the police in Miami, all the current real estate owners are listed on a computer by the parcel they own. Given that many counties haven’t made that leap twenty years later, the Hardys are very lucky.

Gator gonna getcha: In the book, Alligator Alley — the highway that runs between Naples and Miami across the Everglades — is described as a narrow road, with a soft, sandy shoulder. One mistake, according to Joe, would end with the van in the swamp.

As originally constructed, the road was indeed a two-lane highway, but now it’s a four-lane toll road, part of Interstate 75. It’s long and straight, and in the middle of the night, it could serve as prime territory for someone wanting to see how fast their vehicle can go. Interestingly, the change from two to four lanes came during the time Gull Island saw print; Gull Island was published in 1991, and the expansion took place between 1986 and 1992.

Hurricane … No?: I am shocked — shocked! — that there is no hurricane in this book. There’s plenty of wind and rain, but there’s no hurricane. I know that Spring Break does not fall during hurricane season, but logic has never been a concern as far as the Hardys are concerned.

Do you remember what happened in previous cases, Frank?: Frank leads Joe to trespass on a suspect’s property. He tells Joe, “The worst that can happen … is he’ll tell us to get off his property.” That sentiment is interrupted by a charge from the suspect’s guard dogs. Also, they suspect the man of being involved in a kidnapping; shouldn’t Frank have considered getting abducted a possibility? Not to mention worse fates, like being injured or killed?

Chet seems to have figured things out, though. When Frank and Joe ask him to pose as a cable installer and tell him, “Just check out the person’s reaction to the name. That’s all,” Chet says, “Every time you say ‘that’s all,’ I seem to get knocked out or tied up!”

Joe is not a lawyer: At one point, when Joe picks up a real estate contract and starts browsing it, the narration notes his lack of legal knowledge. For an “amateur” private investigator and someone his mother wanted to be a lawyer, his ignorance of the law is amazing. He enters a man’s house; because the door was unlocked, he claims that he isn’t guilty of breaking and entering, although that doesn’t matter. He hands over a pair of thugs who tried to run him off the road to police, claiming they’re guilty of aggravated battery; that’s not what trying to knock someone off the road with a vehicle is, and the reader never sees them commit aggravated battery. And finally, he obtains a confession from a suspect with the threat of letting the man drown; obviously, Joe has never heard of “duress.”

This is still better than Frank. To stop the criminals from escaping, he steals a speedboat and destroys it by ramming it into the criminals’ boat.

Oh, this time you’re interested: At the end of The Secret of the Island Treasure, Frank and Joe reject Hurd Applegate’s offer of another mystery, which involved finding a lost silver mine in Latin America. In fact, they run away like little children at the mention of the boogey man. But when their local contact in Panic on Gull Island talks about a sunken treasure galleon, they are all over that action.

Opinions: I think the Dixon for this book was trying to write a James Bond story for teenagers rather than a Hardy Boys book. There was little or no help from the police — in fact, when the Hardys do secure their cooperation, they act rashly and violently before the police arrive. They attend a party to try to gain intelligence. They ignore the law to go where they want to go. They talk with the chief suspect, with each side knowing the other’s true intentions but with each maintaining a patina of civility. There’s a nice semi-tropical location as well. The villain even has a pool full of sharks, like Largo has in Thunderball. As you can imagine, it doesn’t work very well, especially since the sharks don’t eat anyone.

The Hardys’ remarkable resistances and powers are taken to ridiculous extremes. They wander into Miami off Alligator Alley and hand over a couple of thugs to police, and instead of having to answer a lot of inconvenient questions, the police take their word for things — and the boys don’t even have to invoke the name of Fenton Hardy. The boys and Iola are also gassed with the pesticide methyl bromide (also known as bromomethane), with Joe and Iola falling unconscious; they are both revived without complications. However, methyl bromide at those concentrations should have caused some sort of complications, since the pesticide is highly irritating to the eyes, skin, and linings of the nose and throat. It’s not just a random knockout gas: it’s a chemical gas meant to kill things.

Grade: C-. One of those books whose plot falls apart if you look at it wrong, and not in a fun way.