The Mystery of the Silver Star (#86)

So this is how the Simon & Schuster digests begin: with the theft of a bicycle.

After reading the final digest, The Mystery of the Silver Star feels like part of a different series for two reasons. The most obvious is Silver Star is the product of a different era, both chronologically — it was written almost two decades before Motocross Madness — and in the conception of how a “typical” Hardy Boys book should be constructed. In Silver Star, the link to the previous paperbacks hasn’t been severed yet; Desert Phantom (#84) is mentioned early on, and all the previous paperbacks are listed on a front flyleaf. More importantly, Silver Star feels invested in the lives of the Hardys and their friends in a way later books don’t.

The Hardy adults are part of the story. Frank and Joe have to ask permission for long trips. (They sometimes are said to ask later in the series, but in this case, it feels like a hurdle rather than a perfunctory line of narration.) The family has a Gertrude-cooked supper together, and the family banters during the meal. Laura Hardy worries about her sons, coming up with chores to keep them at home when a psychic predicts disaster for them — I mean, she’s listening to a psychic, so the book isn’t perfect, but the concern is real, as is her belief in her sons.

The Hardys’ friends aren’t ignored. Callie has a birthday party at El Caballo Blanco, and she warns Frank not to miss it, like he did last year. The description of the party takes several pages, and one of the gifts involves an inside joke that goes on for far too long. Chet serves as an inspiration for a role Joe has to slip into so the Hardys can catch the villain off guard. The boys borrow Laura’s station wagon — geez, I can’t remember the last time that was mentioned — to go on a double date with Callie and Iola, and when they have to divert to New York, they make sure Laura knows she can use their van. By itself, this investment in the Hardys’ lives doesn’t make Silver Star a good book, but the effort makes it a better book.

But the second reason is one I haven’t touched on often while writing about the series. A few months before Silver Star was published, Simon & Schuster released the first few Hardy Boys Casefiles, a parallel series with a different continuity. In the first volume, Dead on Target, Iola Morton died in a car bombing meant for the boys, and Frank and Joe took on a group of assassins called, well, “the Assassins,” and work with / against “The Gray Man,” an agent of “The Network.” Joe vowed to kill Iola’s murderer; the boys use firearms — not in the casual way, like in the early books of the canon, but in the serious, gritty ‘80s way.

It’s kinda silly, but I get it: The Hardys must’ve seemed pretty hokey to the adults creating the series at the time. The Casefiles stories are a product of their era, and despite the series running twenty books longer than the S&S digests, the Casefiles were canceled almost a decade earlier, in 1997. (That’s what happens when you put a new book out every month, I suppose.)

Anyway, Silver Star attempts to differentiate the digests from the Casefiles. Instead of a bombing, the instigating crime is the theft of a bicycle — an experimental, top-of-the-line racing bicycle, yes, but still a bicycle. It’s hard to think of a larger disparity in crimes than the one between bicycle theft and assassination. When the stakes escalate, Frank tries to downplay their experience: “Kidnapping is a little out of our league,” he says (97). This has literally never been true; the Hardys rescued the kidnapped Fenton in The House on the Cliff (#2) and Chet and Biff in The Missing Chums (#4), and as recently as The Demon’s Den (#81), they’d battled kidnappers. Later, Silver Star’s plot veers toward Dead on Target, as it includes espionage and the cooperation of a spy, but even that is used to illustrate the difference between the two series: The spy is a CIA agent, not from the fictional, ultra-super-dooper-secret Network, and no one dies. The spy the boys capture has the decency to be embarrassed that he was outwitted by teenagers rather than committing suicide, like the Assassin did in Dead on Target.

***

Silver Star has its good points, but as I mentioned above, they mostly revolve around the depth of the supporting characters and Frank and Joe treating them like real people. Chet steals his early scene, using his double-dip ice-cream cone to impersonate a reporter and make fun of the set-up: “Bayport’s pride and joy, that duo of dynamite detective work, Frank and Joe Hardy! … Eighteen-year-old Frank Hardy, the brown-haired, brown-eyed older of the two — … give me your honest opinion. Don’t you think all of this hoopla is a bit much for just a silver-colored bicycle?” (2-3). Chet knows his friends are working because when they are on a case, Joe wears sunglasses — which hasn’t been true before — and because “Frank always comes off like a walking encyclopedia on topics he didn’t used to know anything about” (4), which is absolutely true.

As it turns out later, some of Frank’s arcane knowledge is that competitive cyclists sweat, and they drink water to replace the fluid. I mean, the narration specifically says Frank mentions this “to demonstrate his knowledge of cycling” (13). I don’t remember the ’80s that well, but I do know that we were told all the time when competing, even in more sedate sports, that we needed to drink water.

Is it any wonder Frank and Joe ditch Chet the first time he turns his back (for more ice cream)? He thoroughly broasted them. (Isn’t that what the kids say today?) And Frank and Joe can’t even come up with a decent parry when Chet says, out of nowhere, “I’m built for endurance, not for speed” (3). I mean, the possible put-downs for that out-of-nowhere line practically write themselves.

So racing cyclist Keith Holland asks Frank and Joe (through Con Riley) for their help. The setup has been done a bazillion times before in the Hardy Boys: Pranks / accidents have been following Keith during his long-distance charity race against Gregg Angelotti, and Keith, worried, wants Frank and Joe to get to the bottom of things. After chatting with Keith in his motor home, which is decorated like a kid’s bedroom with trophies and ribbons, Frank and Joe accept. As always when Frank and Joe investigate, things have to get worse before they get better. In this case, someone shoots Keith’s experimental super-bike, the Silver Star, during a race and steals the bike. Later, Keith disappears, leaving a note behind saying he’ll be back, but no one connected to him believes he left of his own free will. To find him, Frank and Joe solve the mystery of Keith’s neighbor, who has been arrested for espionage, and discover a rogue secret agent. Of course they find Keith and his bike, and they capture the spy. The end!

I mean, it’s not really that simple. Silver Star has a few complicating factors, of course. There’s a local psychic, Molly Frankel, whom everyone takes seriously — Frank says, “She’s always been legit” (37) — and who makes several doom-laden predictions about Frank and Joe and Keith. Someone plants a bug in the Hardys’ van, but they don’t notice the perpetrator until he jumps out — while the van is in motion — and they don’t find the bug for days; the spy escapes, even though Frank makes the van go so fast the tires squeal on dirt. (When they do find the bug, they crush it, rather than use it to spread misinformation, and the villain mocks the brothers’ jejune conversations during their final confrontation.) When a suspect resists their questioning, Frank “wished [they] had something that looked like a private investigator license” (30), never thinking, well, Frank might be able to get a license; the suspect calls Bayport “crime-ridden” (30), not even knowing teenagers are the city’s main crime investigators. At one point, Frank gets an address wrong, and he and Joe end up in the middle of ‘80s New York, where they are accosted by a gang of knife-wielding auto thieves who are scared away by their car alarm.

Once Keith vanishes, the documentarian filming the race admits he pulled the pranks, trying to build some drama for the narrative. Realizing their investigation has uncovered nothing of value, the Hardys head to Keith’s hometown, Boulder, Colo., to look into Keith’s next-door neighbor, Mariana Bornquist, whom the CIA has accused of espionage. The CIA initially arrests Frank and Joe for breaking into Mariana’s home, but one phone conversation with Fenton gets Frank and Joe out of custody and into the thick of the investigation. I like to think it wasn’t Fenton’s name or reputation that bailed out his sons but rather Fenton’s knowledge that the CIA isn’t allowed to conduct domestic operations in the United States, and the FBI should be in charge.

(Side note: The narration contends doughnut holes are a local delicacy in Boulder. They’re everywhere now, of course, but Silver Star was written in 1987. Does anyone know if this was true? I mean, Dunkin’ Donuts created the first Munchkins in 1972, and Tim Hortons introduced Timbits in 1976, but I don’t know how great their market penetration would have been other than the northeast / northern Midwest.)

Frank and Joe’s plan to capture Derek Willoughby, the spy who blackmailed Mariana into stealing weapons secrets, is complicated by the boys’ lack of operational intelligence, and Frank and Joe run headlong into the villains’ trap. Derek’s thugs kidnap the boys but find the tracker the CIA had planted on the boys without their knowing only halfway through the abduction. (It’s good to know the CIA suspects the boys are morons.) The thugs take the Hardys to Keith, Derek, and the bike. Derek is looking for the microfilm Mariana claimed to have hidden in Keith’s silver bike, now disassembled; Frank cooks up a cock-and-bull story to convince them to reassemble it, then rides out the door with Frank and Keith running behind. The CIA, in the area anyway because of the tracker, sorts things out, and Derek is humiliated. As he should be — not only was he foiled by teenagers, but the microfilm was in a bike in Keith’s Boulder garage, not in the super experimental Silver Star.

And that’s the end of the beginning for Simon & Schuster’s digests, and that’s the end of the end for me. Thanks for reading! I may be back with other posts, but don’t expect anything on a regular schedule. (Like you should expect that anyway, given this site’s posting history.)

Motocross Madness (#190)

So Motocross Madness is how the digests end: with Frank and Joe competing in a motocross competition while trying to find out who’s sabotaging the event.

On one hand, it’s an entirely appropriate ending. It’s a Bayport story, and Bayport is the heart of the Hardy Boys stories. The plot involves a multi-stage competition in which Frank and Joe succeed as talented amateurs; these pop every ten books or so. (See Warehouse Rumble, #183, Speed Times Five, #173, Training for Trouble, #161, or a dozen other books.) Frank and Joe make passing mentions of their history; Frank says, “I remember reading accounts of Hardys riding cycles as long ago as nineteen twenty-seven” (26) — 1927 being the year the first Hardy Boys book was published — and Joe says, “Sometimes I feel like we’ve been solving mysteries for the better part of a century” (40). Aunt Gertrude makes an appearance to worry about the boys’ safety, which is something she always used to do; when she gave it up, we discovered no one else really cared what happened to Frank and Joe. Joe also mentions that time “we rode down Bay Road to that House by the cliffs” (40), a reference to The House by the Cliff, the second Hardy Boys story (and still one of the greatest). Bayport continuity pops up in TV station WBPT and the Bayport Journal-Times, which evidently is a merger of two of Bayport’s newspapers.

Stephen D. Sullivan wrote Motocross Madness, and he’s probably the best candidate to write a send-off. (Well, maybe Chris Lampton, who seemed to specialize in Bayport-area mysteries, would have been a better choice, depending on your point of view, but Lampton hadn’t written a book since The Case of the Cosmic Kidnapping, #120.) The book has a few of his hallmarks: Callie, Iola, and Chet head to Jewel Ridge, Conn., and the motorcycle offered as a prize for the winner of the motorcycle competition is an O’Sullivan SD5, with SD standing for “Stephen D.,” one imagines.

On the other hand, I don’t believe the plan was to make Motocross Madness the final book. When the Casefiles series was axed seven years before, Simon & Schuster had at least one completed (or nearly completed) book in the pipeline, and nothing about this book screams “grand send-off.” The lack of an intentional sendoff is not surprising; little about the digests suggests any sort of overarching plan. Chet, Iola, and Callie are barely mentioned; the only pal present is Jamal Hawkins, who I think is a great character but who would be an odd choice to represent the Hardys’ chums in a final book. The continuity notes could have been bolted on, and Sullivan writing probably was a coincidence.

Motorcross Madness is an inoffensive book, with few of the previous books’ gaffes that made me chortle and make feverish notes. But the mystery itself is half-baked. Sullivan needed more space to develop the story, whether to check on the condition of a competitor whose motorcycle literally explodes in the middle of a jump or to explain how Frank and Joe knew the motives for some of the incidents or to explore the effects of a bridge collapse in the middle of a race. Still, Sullivan keeps the story moving, which excuses a lot of problems.

So Frank and Joe get roped into a charity motocross competition by Jamal, who — in addition to being an small-plane pilot — is also a pretty good amateur motorcycle racer. Since the event uses smaller 125-cc bikes and is designed to raise money for the medical expenses of the daughter of a motocross track owner, Frank and Joe don’t need too much convincing. (Today, Corrine Fernandez and her family would head to GoFundMe, which is far less of a hassle than designing, promoting, coordinating, and operating a motocross competition. See how far we’ve come with health care in just 14 years!) The prize is the O’Sullivan, which is similar to post-war BSA motorcycles. The O’Sullivan’s real attraction, however, is that Corrine’s father restored it, in part, with pieces from the garage of Gus Metzger, who designed a super-engine that was destroyed in its first run. Metzger also destroyed the engine’s plans before the first run and died before he could build a second engine.

The problems start early. While Frank and Joe are signing up, a helmet-clad trespasser bulls his way out of the track’s office and past the brothers. They can’t be arsed with stopping him or chasing him, which gives me Spider-Man flashbacks. (The non-burglar doesn’t end up killing their Uncle Ben or even their Aunt Gertrude.) Someone uses a small fire at the pre-race party at the VFW to clear the room while he / she / they commit petty theft. During the first day of competition, one of the two top pros at the event is knocked out of contest and into the hospital when his motorcycle explodes during a stunt jump. No one seems to care; the Hardys don’t interview him or check in on the investigation of the explosion; they don’t even visit the fellow in the hospital. Someone tries to steal the first day’s gate, which the brothers do care about; they recover the money but lose the thief. On the second day, someone smacks Jamal on the skull, ties him up, and takes his place on the track, racing badly to eliminate him from the competition. But Frank and Joe discover Jamal and alert track officials; before the impostinator can be unmasked (unhelmeted, I guess), he leads Frank and Joe on a merry chase through a nearby construction yard and escapes.

The suspect list is too long to list — or really, the suspects are too indistinguishable to care about. Only Justin Davies stands out, and that’s because of his unspecified grudge with Jamal. We don’t know how Justin and Jamal’s enmity started, but it has escalated; Jamal says Davies “nearly ran me over at a crosswalk last week. Then he tried to make it look like my fault” (45). Before one of the races, Davies uses his motorcycle to splash mud all over Jamal, which causes Jamal to start a fistfight with Davies. With all due respect to Sullivan, I doubt Jamal would have responded with violence so quickly; he’s an upper-middle–class African-American kid who probably endured more and has been blamed for most of it. (As evidenced by Davies trying to make the crosswalk incident look like Jamal’s fault.) He’s never shown a hair trigger before. I have to imagine it would take a shaved-head fellow like Davies using the n-word before Jamal flew off the handle; I also have no doubt Davies probably has used the n-word in Jamal’s presence.

In any event, a reprobate roll call would be useless. Equally useless would be delving into the accuracy of the motocross stunt names Sullivan uses, like “no-footed can-can” and “cowboy split” (61); the former seems legit, the latter not, but I don’t care. Anyway, the final event — an endurance race — starts without Frank and Joe having made any real headway on whodunnit or why. (I mean, they suspect someone wants the O’Sullivan, but that’s a no-brainer.) During the endurance event, thugs on a motorcycle knock out Jamal and another racer in an attempt to steal their rides. Frank and Joe — in the middle of the race, no less — defeat them, tie them up, and rejoin the race. The two thugs are revealed as outclassed competitors who faked injuries to drop out and concentrate on their thieving.

Frank and Joe regain some of their track positon, but as they pass over a bridge, it collapses behind them. They do not seem to care about the effect this will have on the competitors they passed. They end up tied for third, with Corrine’s brother, Paco, winning over the remaining pro, Amber Hawk. (I will give Sullivan considerable credit on one front: The competitors are pretty evenly distributed between men and women, and no one suggests the women / girls are at any disadvantage against their male competitors.) At the unveiling of the O’Sullivan, a masked rider steals the prize, racing off toward the construction site again. This time the Hardys capture him, burying him and the motorcycle under cement dust.

So the mystery’s solution is that there were two different groups working the competition, which would have been interesting if Frank and Joe had figured it out beforehand. The robbery-type crimes were perpetrated by the two Frank and Joe caught on the track. The ones that were designed to eliminate competitors were perpetrated by the father of another competitor, who wanted his daughter to win the O’Sullivan; he also sabotaged the course — including the collapsing bridge — to help his daughter. When that didn’t work, he turned to grand theft motocross.

So why is the O’Sullivan so danged important? Well, it’s because of the parts from Metzger’s garage — specifically, the gas tank. While Metzger burned the blueprints for his supercycle, he used the gas tank to sketch the original design, making the tank valuable … assuming its use as a, you know, gas tank, didn’t also destroy the sketches.

But the good news is that Corrine’s family not only has the money from a successful fundraiser, but they also have the O’Sullivan and the gas-tank designs. Frank and Joe have the pleasure of competing and another mystery solved under their belt. The last page has a note of finality to it; when asked what they are going to do next, Frank says, “Who knows?,” and Joe asks, “A long vacation, maybe?” (154). Jamal hopes they will “both be ready to rev up and race new criminals” (154), which may be a hint about the new series; the Undercover Brothers ad on the inside back cover, which faces the final page, claims the brothers will have motorcycles.

As for me? Well, I was a little disappointed by the finale, but I did learn that “Klaxon” is a trademarked term, as Sullivan capitalizes the word. According to Wikipedia, a Klaxon is specific warning siren — think the “ahooga” of a submarine as it dives. This is a small consolation, though.

But I’m not done! I have one last digest to go: the first one. I’ll be back in two weeks for that one.

One False Step (#189)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, there’s no “but,” really.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hidden Mountain (#186)

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

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

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

Plus, Chet owns a shortwave radio.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trouble Times Two (#167)

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

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

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

Conclusion: This means something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Crisscross Crime (#150)

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Case of the Cosmic Kidnapping (#120)

I like the digests’ habit of giving Chet jobs instead of just hobbies; the teenage years is the time when someone can flit from job to job and not make it look like he’s incompetent or a serial killer. In the digests, Chet has been a DJ (Rock ‘n’ Roll Renegades, #116), an airport shuttle driver (Spark of Suspicion, #98), a salesman for an ersatz Amway (Tricky Business, #88), a zoo intern (The Search for the Snow Leopard, #139), an ice cream salesman (The Mark of the Blue Tattoo, #146), and maybe a few others I’ve forgotten.

In The Case of the Cosmic Kidnapping, Chet is a cook and assistant manager at “Happy Burger,” a new diner. Assistant manager! Who would put Chet in charge of other human beings? Or, for that matter, put him in charge of ordering supplies or bookkeeping or anything else that requires close attention and dedication? I mean, I’m not making Chet’s shortcomings up out of thin air: on page 3, after being told he’s botched the books again, Chet reveals he doesn’t know how to use a calculator (or perform basic math, maybe): “It’s that electric calculator he’s got back there. I can never remember when to press the plus key.”

It’s addition, you moron, not differential calculus. It’s pretty evident when you should press the + key. Your boss, Fred Hawkins, is right to yell at you, although sternly telling Chet to clean his station and to “try to eat only five hamburgers a day” (5) hardly counts as treating him “pretty rough,” as Iola claims. She also says, “Even Dad doesn’t hassle you that much,” although I’m not sure how to take that. Does that mean Chet and Mr. Morton have an adversarial relationship? Or are the readers supposed to realize that, given Hawkins’s mild rebuke, Chet’s relationship with his father is probably normal?

Chet reveals to his chums (Joe, Frank, and Callie) and Iola that Happy Burger is doing poorly, business-wise, so that does help explain why someone with no experience and no prospects is given a position of authority. Not even the rest of the Hardys’ teenage crowd wants to hang out at Happy Burger, as they all prefer Mr. Pizza.

But Chet’s qualifications soon become moot, as the Hardys, their girlfriends, and Chet see Hawkins seemingly abducted by a UFO. Chet claims this is “a close encounter of the third kind” (11) but that’s not true; the third kind involves human contact with an extraterrestrial entity. Since the kids can’t confirm that anyone was driving the UFO, it’s a close encounter of the fourth kind: Abduction.

The Bayport Gazette is on the scene soon after the police decide to ignore the kids’ UFO report, and a story in the next day’s paper makes Happy Burger the most popular place in town. UFOlogists, the media, and random curious bystanders flock to the Happy Burger, keeping Chet busy and making Happy Burger — at least temporarily — a success. The Gazette has to be considered a success as well; it’s never appeared in a Hardy Boys story before, from what I can tell, and it’s created a media event out of a bunch of stupid kids seeing a UFO.

Fenton and Laura are in Europe for both work and pleasure, and Gertrude (back to being “plump,” as she was in The Smoke Screen Mystery) warns them to be careful after they decide to look for Hawkins. Given Happy Burger’s success, the police and the boys are leaning toward the idea that Hawkins staged his own disappearance. Good to see some competence being displayed! And then after showing that bit of competence, Frank and Joe spend 40 pages wandering around Happy Burger and the shopping plaza it’s in. What do they discover? Well, Happy Burger is deeply in debt — no surprise there — to a guy named William Harbison and … nothing else, really. They avoid the media, even though they worked at both radio station WBBX in Rock ‘n’ Roll Renegades, which Joe mentions, and they recorded spots for TV station WBPT in Danger on the Air (#95) and Spark of Suspicion, which neither mentions.

The brothers do meet the cast as they wander aimlessly for what feels like forever: Hawkins’s wife, Clarissa; author Hodding Wheatley, who writes about UFOs; and fringe UFO devotees, including the belligerent Carl Thurmon. Since this book was published in 1993, the same year The X-Files hit the air, the people who believe in UFOs are seen as kooks. Frank and Joe don’t consider the possibility that Hawkins’s disappearance is an abduction at all.

After Frank and Joe joke about Joe learning to be a detective from TV shows — I’m not sure Frank is joking — the brothers visit Harbison, who’s a loan shark. Joe plays the tough detective role to the hilt, growling at Harbison and invading his personal space to intimidate him. They get nothing but a denial from Haribison, but I admit: Joe acting like a bit of a thug is a nice technique and a good change of pace. Also, it made me laugh.

The next day, the media attention has only grown, with Sandra Rodriguez, host of Mysteries Today, doing a live show from the “tiny town” (83) of Bayport. No details about Mysteries Today are ever given; is it syndicated? Is it a show about the paranormal, or is it more Unsolved Mysteries? All we learn is that Rodriguez has a boyfriend — “Mr. Matt Hunk Everton” (74), as the jealous (or attracted) Frank calls him — who is also a helicopter pilot and Vietnam vet. Someone claiming to be the aliens interrupts MT’s signal, saying Hawkins will be returned in Bayport Meadows soon, but all they find is a letter on Happy Burger stationery, saying “Help.”

For their next magical trick, Frank and Joe decide to follow Matt’s helicopter. “It shouldn’t be too hard to tail a helicopter” (90), Frank says, forgetting that helicopters fly much faster than city traffic, don’t have to follow roads, and never have to stop for lights or stop signs. Other than that, sure! But of course it works, as the Hardys trail the helicopter to its landing spot at an abandoned farm. After Matt drives away, the Hardys break into the barn, finding the fake UFO inside. A metal hitch at the craft’s top allowed the phony ship to be towed by a cable from a helicopter — Matt’s helicopter, of course. Matt returns and tries to threaten the Hardys with a gun, but Frank and Joe easily disarm him. The gun wasn't loaded anyway.

Matt confesses all: The kidnapping was all Hawkins’s idea, although he needed Rodriguez’s show’s backing for funding. After Hawkins signed a letter absolving Rodriguez and Matt of all wrongdoing, they agreed to help. But Hawkins was supposed to reappear in Bayport Meadows, and now he’s truly missing.

This calls for someone to jump to a conclusion, and since about 50 pages remain in the book, the Hardys jump to the wrong one. They follow Harbison to the man who gives him money to loan, Amos Woodworth IV, a prosperous legitimate businessman who is, reassuringly, also a smuggler. Haven’t had one of those in a while, and it’s nice to know they can still pop up. Unfortunately, goons discover Frank and Joe snooping around Woodworth’s home as fake pool men, and worse yet, Woodworth recognizes them as “those detective brothers everyone talks about. The Harley brothers” (115). Luckily, though, he gives them a stern talking to and makes them promise to let him know when they find that welcher, Hawkins.

The brothers go to Clarissa, who admits she learned the kidnapping was a fake. At the Hawkins home, Joe spots the angry UFOlogist, Thurmon, in a picture of a Vietnam veterans’ gathering — the same one at which Hawkins pitched his loony plan to Matt. With the help of Thurmon’s fellow UFO enthusiasts, the Hardys track down Thurmon and a tied-up Hawkins at an isolated cabin. Frank and Wheatley nearly talk Thurmon down, but a TV report playing in the background reveals Frank is a detective (and Joe’s brother; Thurmon hates Joe, as all hotheads do). In the ensuing scuffle, Frank gets a bleeding head wound, and Thurmon burns the cabin down, but the fake UFO, towed from Matt’s helicopter, shows up as Thurmon is about to kill Frank. Amazed at seeing what he has long sought, Thurmon lets his guard down, and Joe emerges from the UFO to subdue the violent kook. The police are close behind.

Everything ends well. Hawkins isn’t arrested for anything; he merely has to apologize. I’m sure he did something wrong, though. I suppose he didn’t file a false report, but he knew one would be filed, and he did waste Bayport Police Department resources looking for him, even though he wasn’t in danger. Or maybe not — the BPD didn’t seem to care about Hawkins’s disappearance, so perhaps they didn’t spend any time looking for him. Woodworth is investigated for his loansharking, and Hawkins’s loan is transferred to a legitimate bank at a better interest rate. I’m not sure that’s how it works, but then again, I’m not acquainted with this state’s stringent usury laws. Rodriguez seems to suffer no consequences for organizing a hoax and then broadcasting it as if it were a real story. At least Thurmon is arrested for kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon … but not attempted murder or arson, despite having the Hardys — super witnesses! — to testify. Well, I guess a plea bargain from Thurmon makes more sense than Hawkins and Rodriguez getting off without consequences.

Remember, kids: Crime does pay! Just make sure it’s non-violent crime that doesn’t victimize any private citizen. Then you too can pull your generic hamburger stand out of the toilet and into prosperity!

The Smoke Screen Mystery (#105)

I’ve read The Smoke Screen Mystery before, but I don’t remember it at all — not a plot development, not a red herring or stupid suspect, not a jot or tittle — and that surprises me. Yes, I read it more than a dozen years ago, but I believe I should remember more of it, because I’m convinced it was written by the ghost of Dr. John Button (or maybe Dr. John Button, Jr.).

Button, for those of you who don’t know, wrote two of the worst books in the Hardy Boys canon: the original Disappearing Floor (#19) and The Mystery of the Flying Express (#20). He also wrote three others: The Secret Warning (#17), The Twisted Claw (#18), and The Clue of the Broken Blade (#21). Those last three were mostly mediocre, but The Disappearing Floo and The Mystery of the Flying Express … they were full of non-sequiturs and botched continuity. The digests aren’t big on continuity, but this one stretches the series’s approach to continuity from “relaxed” to “you’ll be happier if you don’t think about it.”

Examples? you ask. Sure!

• Aunt Gertrude is a “heavy-set, middle-aged woman” the boys call “Aunt Gert.” Gertrude Hardy has been described as “slightly plump” (The Disappearing Floor), “portly” (The Mystery of the Flying Express and The Melted Coins, #23), and “solidly built” (The Secret of Skull Mountain, #27), but in almost every other book her weight is mentioned she’s “angular” or “bony.” When her age is mentioned, she’s almost always past middle age (or hinted to be), and she’d never let her nephews get away with calling her “Gert.”
  
• Frank and Joe have become volunteer firefighters after taking a 16-week course. When would Frank and Joe have time to take a 16-week course?
  
• They still have time to play pick-up hockey. Sure, they sound like aliens impersonating hockey fans — “These blue eyes need lots of rest so they can focus on winging that puck past you and into the goal net!” Joe says (16), his automatic translation protocols malfunctioning — but why hockey? It’s not a sport either of them has played in the canon.
  
• Callie and Iola have jobs: Iola works in a real-estate developer’s office, and Callie’s a stringer for the Examiner. Sure, that’s fine — they should have part-time jobs. But neither of those jobs stick, and neither has shown any proclivity for those kinds of work.
  
• The Examiner! Bayport has had a bunch of newspaper over the years, most prominently the Times, but never before has it had an Examiner. (See Maximum Challenge for a list of newspapers.) Why couldn’t the author have used one of Bayport’s other fishwraps?

Maybe I’m being too sensitive. I dunno. But "Gert"? Becoming firefighters on top of detectives, “students,” athletes, and all the rest? Hockey? A new newspaper? It … it’s a bit much for me. I’m going to go lie down for a while.

Back now. Anyway: Frank and Joe, volunteer firefighters. I would have thought the movie Backdraft might have inspired the plot, but no: Backdraft came out in 1991, while The Smoke Screen Mystery was published in 1990. No luck there. During their training and brief time on the job, the brothers have become great at their job … well, maybe it’s more that their co-workers aren’t that good. At one point, for instance, Frank explains to a fire inspector what a Molotov cocktail is, and the inspector doesn’t slap him silly.

When Frank and Joe are off duty, Joe is eager to check out all the new pizza and burger places in Bayport. He and Frank manage to visit Pizzaworks (which all the kids agree is awful), Pizza Your Way, and Burgerworks. (No mention whether Pizzaworks and Burgerworks are affiliated in any way, other than authorial / editorial laziness.) The boys also meet Iola at the Bayport Diner, but that’s not new: it first appeared in The Jungle Pyramid (#56) before being mentioned in four more mysteries in the canon.

Iola works for Donald Pierce, the former White Bishop of the Naughty Hellfire Club and later leader of the cyborg Reavers. Pierce’s buildings are being burned to the ground, evidently while he’s busy trying to kill mutants; after the Examiner blames him for the fires, he “hires” (no money changes hands) Frank and Joe to find out who’s really behind the arson. The boys take the case, with Frank saying they haven’t handled an arson case in a while. I couldn't remember any arson cases in the canon, but firebugs have been involved in six cases in the canon — most recently The Swamp Monster (#83).

Strangely, Joe does not immediately want to blame Pierce for arson; perhaps even he realizes blaming Iola’s boss would not be healthy for his relationship or his body. Frank and Joe’s friend and fellow firefighter, Kevin, becomes their chief suspect, mostly because Pierce fired Kevin from a job as a super. Another piece of evidence against Kevin is that he’s always late to fight fires, which is strange: This might be evidence Kevin’s a poor firefighter, but why would an arsonist be late to fight fires? If he set the fires, he could be right on time — he could even be early, although he’d have to be a stupid criminal to do that.

When Joe falls through the ice while the Hardys and another friend, Scott, are playing hockey, waiting for Kevin, even more suspicion falls on Kevin. But they aren’t thinking straight. Perhaps it has something to do with their very lax attitude toward hypothermia, as they allow Joe to sit on the ice, wet and freezing, while Frank rubs his feet to restore circulation. They then leisurely stroll to the van — Frank takes the time to find the missing “Thin Ice” sign, show it to Joe, and debate who’s responsible — before going home to get a change of clothes for Joe.

They don’t suspect Scott, for some reason, despite the extravagant lifestyle he’s living on a grocery-store salary. Aren’t investigators supposed to look into the finances of possible suspects?

The arsonist takes a break from burning Pierce’s buildings to set fire to the Hardy garage. Well, kinda set fire to the garage: the arsonist hits it with a Molotov cocktail, and Frank puts out the fire with a fire extinguisher after riding home on a fire engine. Frankly, Gertrude should have been able to handle the small blaze, but she wilts in the presence of the fire, and she worries how Fenton and Laura will react to the damage. (It seems mostly cosmetic, a blackening of the wall farthest from the house.) This is even more evidence that the Ghost of Button has replaced Gertrude with someone — perhaps something — else. Gertrude beat up intruders and sassed everyone; there’s no way she should be reduced to seeking comfort from a neighbor at a small fire. Besides, the Hardy property has seen much worse damage; I mean, the back of the house was gutted by fire in The Flickering Torch Mystery (#23), and Gertrude’s window was broken by a gas bomb in Tic-Tac-Terror (#74). This is negligible in comparison.

The flannel used as the Molotov cocktail’s fuse matches Kevin’s shirt, so he remains the primary suspect. Even a discussion with Kevin can’t clear him. But later, when Joe pursues an investigatory B&E at Kevin’s, he encounters a masked intruder who drives away in the arsonist’s van. Even the Hardys aren’t stupid enough to think Kevin would break into his own home wearing a ski mask. Still, Kevin bugs out of Bayport soon after, and the Hardys are unsure what to think.

Pierce fires the brothers for lack of results — although what does “fire” mean, when you aren’t paying someone and they aren’t using your influence to gain access to anything? — but Frank and Joe stay on the case. They manage to find the arsonist’s van and link it to Scott, although they don’t understand his motive. The revelation that Pierce worked at a New Mexico bank at the same time as Dawson, the Examiner’s publisher, opens a new angle for investigation. Info gathered by Iola indicates Pierce has been blackmailing Dawson for years. The conclusion is obvious: Dawson hired Scott to burn Pierce’s buildings, which allowed Dawson to lambaste Pierce in print. Frank and Joe don’t confirm this until a tense confrontation at Pierce’s office, in which Scott and Dawson hold Frank, Joe, Iola, and Pierce at gunpoint. (Dawson started his campaign against Pierce because he was furious Pierce kept blackmailing him for embezzlement after the statute of limitations ran out. Like the revelation that you built your fortune on embezzlement wouldn’t be worth keeping secret!)

While Pierce’s skyscraper in a cornfield starts burning — Bayport’s town council refused to let him build the twenty-story building downtown, for some unfathomable reason — the kids and Pierce are rescued by a police helicopter, and Con Riley arrests Dawson and Pierce.

And the reason Kevin was always late and unwilling to talk about it? He was trying to get a job with the New York Fire Department, and he didn’t want to jinx it by talking about it. Good to know he was willing to risk jail for a jinx. It’s not the dumbest part of The Smoke Screen Mystery, not by a longshot, but it’s still pretty dumb.

As bad as The Smoke Screen Mystery is, it does have a bit of foreshadowing: Iola says, “If I didn’t have to work during vacation, I’d definitely take off for Florida” (2). The book’s conclusion pretty much guarantees the end of her employment, and Iola takes off for Florida over spring break in Panic on Gull Island (#107) — with disastrous consequences, of course.

A Killing in the Market (Casefiles #18)

Plot: Aunt Gertrude’s new boyfriend is murdered, leaving Gertrude the prime suspect.

“Borrowing” from the past: This is not the first time this blog has seen Gertrude’s love life, as unpleasant as it might seem. In Past and Present Danger (#166), an old friend — reporter Clayton Silvers — mentions Gertrude was once engaged to a local business owner, who died before the wedding. (The engagement was first mentioned by Fenton in The Phantom Freighter #26.) In A Killing in the Market, Gertrude is romanced by investment banker Cyril Bayard (real name: Henry Simone). I don’t want to say anything about Gertrude, but a couple of men have already died to get out of relationships with her. If it happens again, it’s a pattern.

Killing mentions a few locations in Bayport, such as the Cliffside Heights neighborhood, Archer Street, Bay Road, and the Shore Inn, but none of them have appeared in the original canon. Nearby towns such as Bridgefield and Kirkland (destinations for trains from New York through Bayport) are also new, although Bridgeport and Bridgewater have popped up in the past.

Lives of the American privileged: As I mentioned in the review of Past and Present Danger, books that focus on Gertrude tend to shuffle Laura off the stage at an early spot. In Killing, Fenton takes Laura on a month-long vacation, and when Fenton returns to investigate Simone’s murder, she’s shuffled off to the neighbors’ house.

Good in a crisis: After Gertrude is arrested, Frank and Joe fall back on their all-purpose solution: investigation! A more practical course of action might be to a) call Fenton, who is on vacation with Laura, and b) to get a lawyer for Gertrude. The latter might be a result of the Hardys’ family prejudice toward lawyers, as Fenton doesn’t advise Gertrude to talk to a lawyer, even when she seems about to confess to murder.

But given how quickly Fenton gets results, you can only guess that Frank and Joe just wanted a rest from Gertrude — just a few moments of peace and quiet, and if she has to be incarcerated for them to get it, then by God, Gertrude’s getting prison time. One can see the direct link from this lack of human compassion to a relative in need to the boys’ insistence on investigating “their case,” in the face of nuclear annihilation, in The Pacific Conspiracy (Casefiles #78).

On the other hand, perhaps Joe just doesn’t give a damn. He says Gertrude’s too old for love — not to her face, of course, but to Frank. (Frank rightly calls him a “rotten nephew” a few pages later.) He runs down Cyril / Henry just because he’s an investment banker, since “the papers are full of stories about swindlers — guys who work for these big-and-mighty companies and steal clients’ money left and right!” Joe is right, but that’s hardly helpful, since Gertrude’s money is already gone. When Cyril / Henry’s house is ransacked and Cyril is gone, Joe says “maybe” he’s still alive.

Lying to the police, in this case, is considered a blessing: When asked about her last evening with Cyril / Henry by Officer Con Riley, Gertrude says, “We went for a long walk the night before last. Please, you’re not going to ask what we talked about, are you?” Because she’s not going to think up a lie quickly enough, since there was little talking during the activity “walk” is a euphemism for (Lothar of the Hill People knows the euphemism well, although Lothar was a couple of years after Killing was released).

Sentences that have never been seen in a Hardy Boys book before: “‘You’re awfully quiet, Aunt Gertrude,’ Frank finally said as they stopped for a traffic light.”

Is it weird that I find normal male / female interaction in a Hardy Boys book odd?: In Killing, there is a moment of genuine, indisputable romantic contact between a boy and a girl. It isn’t a playful peck, or some cheeky “reward” for lifesaving. Frank “wrapped his arms around [Callie] and touched his lips to hers.” The description lacks passion or artfulness, and the scene is interrupted by Joe, doing his little brother duty, honking the van’s horn and mocking his brother’s moment of intimacy.

You don’t measure up, Callie: Despite a male member of the Hardy family showing his approval for Callie by touching her, Gertrude pointedly asks Callie to stay in the van while the police question Gertrude about Henry’s murder because “it’s family business.” Well, it’s an investigation; of course that’s family business. I suppose dating Frank for 60 years isn’t enough to qualify Callie for membership in the Hardy clan, though. You’ll just have to wait for that ring, Callie! Of course, Callie’s waited so long even Miss Havisham would say, “Really, I think you’d better move on, dear.”

But still, she’s subject to the will and whims of the Hardy family. When Frank and Joe head to Henry’s funeral, Joe is afraid Callie will follow them; Frank says that won’t happen because he “had a long talk with her.” Of course; she wouldn’t dare disobey you, Frank.

Girls! If they’re not getting blown up, they’re bossing you around: After a day of investigation, Frank finds a message on his answering machine from Callie, who wants to know how their day went. Joe jokes, “So she can tell us how we could have done it better!” It seems an incredibly defensive thing for Joe to say; perhaps he misses having someone to share his adventures with.

Do you pay attention to where you live?: Greenwich Village reminds Frank of a “citified Bayport.” Really — a citified Bayport? The middle and upper-class nature of both make sense, but the Village has a bohemian, liberal, arty reputation, which Bayport does not. Bayport is the crime capital of the East Coast, and even its better-off part of the city is infested with criminals.

Opposite reactions: When Frank and Joe poke their nose into the murder investigation, two suspects have completely different reactions. Dodgy accountant Justin Spears hands over his clients’ confidential information with barely a demur, while swindling stockbroker Norman Fleckman offers them tobacco products, then tries to kill them. Fleckman also tries to go the bribery route before the murder attempt, dangling such well-known enticements as “jazzy clothes” and a “hot new car” in front of the boys. Joe claims he just “panicked,” but those are the sort of reactions one has to extreme intimidation, but it’s not like Frank and Joe are burly thugs waving guns and / or indictments around.

Premature exultation: While the boys are in New York, the boys use a ticker-tape parade for the World Series champs as cover for their getaway. However, no New York team won the 1988 World Series — in fact, neither New York team won the Series between 1986, when the Mets beat the Red Sox in seven, and 1996, when the Yankees took their first championship since 1978 (their longest drought since the team won its first World Series in 1923). In 1988, the Yankees finished fifth in a mediocre American League East, 3 ½ games behind the Red Sox; the Mets won the National League East, but lost in the playoffs to the eventual champions, Los Angeles, in seven games.

Always be prepared: When Gertrude is accused of using one of her knitting needles to kill her boyfriend, she protests, “Why would I bring a knitting needle on a walk?” Con Riley doesn’t answer, logically enough, that she always seems to have her knitting needles, even when she and the boys investigate Cyril’s ransacked house.

No wonder the boys have so little respect for civil rights: Fenton has no ideas what Constitutional protections offer people. When the Bayport police are exploring theories of the murder, Fenton protests that they must enter into the investigation assuming Gertrude was innocent until proven guilty. Well, no, Fenton; the police can formulate theories that lead them to believe a suspect is as guilty as sin. It’s the press, judges, and juries who must make that assumption. Riley is too polite to tell Fenton he’s an idiot.

That makes no sense: When Joe is firing up the van to pursue a suspect, Frank cautions Joe to drive more carefully: “A little less speed will get us there as fast.” I’m not sure what science classes Frank has taken, but evidently physics wasn’t one of them.

I do envy your skills, Joe: To foil the criminal, Joe makes a not-very-convincing attempt to switch briefcases that involves the cooperation of a random woman stopped on in a traffic jam. The trick works, and after the criminal is arrested, the woman slips Joe her business card, then gives him a wink and a smile. This is remarkable, as the woman is probably — given her business paraphernalia — at least five years older than Joe, who had involved her in a situation with a gun-wielding murderer who set fire to his own motorcycle to show how serious he was.

Opinions: A story about crooked investment bankers is even more relevant today than it was in 1988, and if anything, the story makes the cheats seem a little too innocent (except for the murder attempts). Yes, these guys are bilking people out of their money, but no one in this book is Bernie Madoff; additionally, nothing these people are doing is likely to bring around a worldwide financial crisis. It’s just mainstream financial malfeasance, and as a warning to the young that Wall Street is not to be trusted, Killing works well. One has to think the book was partly inspired by the Black Monday crash the year before (October 19, 1987).

This one would be a good mystery except for the people in it. There’s a murder, the cops reach the logical conclusion, and there is a point in the book, about two-thirds of the way through, when it’s obvious who the murderer is. But the characters … Joe is a massive jerk, the suspects are nervous and insane, going from 0 to murder in about ten seconds. The chief suspect burns his own motorcycle to destroy evidence, blames Frank and Joe, then when the police show up, he claims it was childish high spirits and declines to press charges. Insane.

But Gertrude is the biggest disappointment. Faced with the largest challenge she’s ever seen in a Hardy Boys book, she crumbles. That seems alien to those who have read the series from the beginning. Gertrude falling to pieces seems so out of character; she should be sniping at the police, sarcastic, giving them a hard time, and telling the boys to do something useful. Maybe she gets a little weepy once or twice; maybe not. I’m not inflexible. But Gertrude falls apart early and stays useless through the rest of the story; the only non-weepy acts she undertakes are lying to the police and acting guilty. The last time we see any spirit from Gertrude is when she’s angry with Henry for standing her up, and she tells Con Riley that if he’s alive, she’ll kill him. Con says she’s “upset and confused,” which is polite; we all know she’s just Gertrude, but unfortunately, she’s not the real Gertrude for long.

Grade: C-. Dixon probably just panicked.