The Dangerous Transmission (#184)

The Dangerous Transmission has precisely two things going for it: 1) a surprisingly metal cover illustration, with a raven, the scavenger of battlefields, holding an electric tooth in its beak, and 2) a title that could have easily fit in among the early Hardy Boys canon. (It’s a better title than The Secret Warning and more era-appropriate.)

That’s it, really. And it’s just those two specific elements — the cover itself isn’t great, and the title has flaws. Despite the picture that serves as the not-at-all fictional thrashcore band Electric Raventooth’s logo, the cover itself is dull, giving nearly as much room to the stultifying notebook-and-file-folder trade dress while minimizing the psycho corvid. The cover tag line, “Somebody’s got a sweet tooth for crime!,” is nonsensical, given that no sweets are mentioned in the book; that line has me primed for a criminal who has trained crows to steal either candy or cavity-filled teeth — both, maybe. The trade dress gives much too much room to that phrase for me to ignore it. Similarly, the book has no transmissions, either by radio or as part of an automobile, so it’s impossible to say the transmission is dangerous or perilous or even benign. The transmission doesn’t exist.

There’s a story that in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Superman editor Mort Weisinger thought readership would turn over every few years, so he’d recycle popular stories. I have no idea whether The London Deception (#158) was popular — I kinda doubt it, but I don’t have access to Simon & Schuster’s numbers — but the two books’ setups are identical. Frank and Joe are in London for a vacation, forcing an English exchange student who had stayed with the Hardys to pay back the hospitality. Rather than being drawn into the world of the London stage by high-school student Chris Paul, as they were in London Deception, this time they’re staying with London orthodontist Jax Brighton, who had stayed with the Hardys for a semester “a few years earlier” (2) while studying at Bayport College.

Jax isn’t just an orthodontist; he’s also a taxidermist, a pursuit he picked up because of his father, a professional taxidermist. This isn’t the first time taxidermy has appeared in the Hardy Boys: Taxidermy popped up as Chet’s hobby in the original Short-Wave Mystery (#24). In fact, it’s Chet’s second hobby ever, after old coins and the digging for them in The Melted Coins (#23). Setting the course for later stories, Chet makes his usual hemi-glutteal mess of his taxidermy efforts, creating a “lopsided” and “bulgy” (213) deer and then getting two pre-teen boys to finish the job. It would have been nice if the boys had mentioned this: “Boy, our friend Chet sucked at this!” they might have said. “But you’re actually good!”

Also something Frank or Joe could have mentioned: This is the second time they’ve come to the UK and immediately run into someone whose livelihood is teeth. In The Witchmaster’s Key (#55), Joe starts the book by getting a wisdom tooth pulled by Vincent Burelli, who is a) named after the book’s author, Vincent Buranelli, 2) is the book’s villain, and iii) is also known as “He-Goat.” I think any book would be improved by adding a guy named “He-Goat.”

Jax is making false teeth for an exhibit on the medieval period at the Tower of London, which means the Hardys get to tour the grounds with Jax and his friend, Nick Rooney, when there are no tourists around. It also means that when the exhibit catches fire and arson is suspected, Jax is politely but firmly questioned. Well, the police question him until Frank and Joe, who keep lurking around as Jax is questioned, drop Fenton’s name, and then that plot thread is snipped neatly off after Fenton vouches for Jax’s character.

But taxidermy and orthodontics aren’t all Jax has to offer the world. No, he’s invented the Molar Mike, which is a receiver / transmitter embedded in a false tooth and not — not, let me emphasize — a male stripper who wows the ladies with his gleaming teeth. Although Jax believes the Molar Mike is his ticket to riches, it’s actually the beginning of his troubles: a break-in that ends with an assault on Frank, a lawsuit from his downstairs neighbor over the Molar Mike’s creation, another break-in that sends Jax to the hospital, the Molar Mike’s theft and ransom for 100,000 Euros. (Euros — or “Euro dollars,” as they’re referred to on pg. 79, are the only currency mentioned; maybe this Dixon or his editor thought the UK had switched to Euros from pounds, because there’s no reason for Frank to pay for his “lemon drink” with Euros. In fact, there’s no reason for Frank to have Euros at all, unless he was going to the Continent later in the trip.)

The suspect pool is limited. There’s a soccer coach from Toronto, who is pushy and aggressive but is so obviously a red herring I’m not going to look up his name. There’s also “AA42,” a former Soviet secret agent Frank spots following them in London; the Hardys learn her code name because Fenton tracked her down a few years before, and they have access to his casefiles. She’s eliminated from suspicion because Fenton tells the boys she’s a double agent now, helping … I don’t know, somebody — “basically on our side,” according to Fenton (125). (I doubt she’s an asset to either side; in her home territory, she’s easily spotted and identified by two American schoolboys.) I’m not sure how Fenton knows so much about her or why she’s in her files; maybe he’s still working with SKOOL against UGLI, as he was in The Secret Agent on Flight 101 (#46).

Still, a goon is hanging around her, and the thug pulls Frank’s arm hard enough to strain his rotator cuff. This man is never mentioned again as a threat or suspect again. Despite his pain, Frank doesn’t seek medical attention for his injury immediately, setting a bad example for all the boys reading Dangerous Transmission. Instead, he treats his injury with a “tube of medicine” (70), presumably Icy-Hot or Ben-Gay or some other similar brand. He eventually does go to the hospital, but when Joe gets kicked in the ribs and knocked onto the Underground tracks, he too uses the tube of medicine to seek relief. I would say the boys are being too masculine for their own good, but the head injuries might be taking their toll, causing them cognitive difficulties; when Jax is knocked unconscious while retrieving a stuffed raven, falling with the raven on his chest, Frank “smacked the stuffed raven away” (71) like he was afraid the raven would attack him or Jax. Maybe he’d seen the electric tooth on the cover and was afraid it was the raven that was electric.

Oh! When Joe is kicked onto the tracks, the attacker loses his custom-made athletic shoe. This is a clue that goes exactly nowhere.

That’s because this Dixon has failed to set up that the actual criminal, Jax’s friend Nick, has prescription shoes. I mean, there’s enough in the book for the readers to realize Nick probably isn’t on the up-and-up — he’s the only other person who could have set the fire in the Tower of London, he’s worked all over the world and has “contacts everywhere” (108), and he knows enough karate to take care of the Hardys — but nothing about his shoes. Anyway, Nick is caught ridiculously easily at the ransom drop, so we don’t need to talk about him or Dangerous Transmission again.

Although I will mention plug London tourism. As Dangerous Transmission mentions, you can make brass rubbings in the crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields; it’s a classy souvenir, and I have a rubbing hanging in my hall. The Tower of London is also a neat place to see if you’re in London, even if you do have to visit while other tourists are there. I also recommend Sir John Soane’s Museum, which Frank and Joe don’t visit but should have; that place is chockablock with all the things a 19th century collector would have found interesting, including a mummy. I don’t know what to make of the Black Belt, a fictional karate restaurant Frank and Joe visit. At least I hope it’s fictional; I’m not quite prepared for a restaurant that hosts karate exhibitions and has such an on-the-nose name to emerge from a Hardy Boys book into real life.

The London Deception (#158)

You know, it’s really great the Hardy Boys, those plucky underdogs, get to travel to Europe —

Oh, that’s right. They just went to Italy in the previous book, The Lure of the Italian Treasure. Unlike last time, The London Deception describes why they’ve been allowed to head abroad without supervision: They’re visiting Londoner Chris Paul, who stayed with the Hardys while he was an exchange student at Bayport High School the previous year. Why haven’t we seen or heard about Chris before? Because Chris came to Bayport last year, and no Hardy Boys books are set last year. Duh!

Also, Chris is boring. His only personality trait is ribbing the Hardys about American inferiority, and we all know he’s trying to mask his inferiority complex.

Anyway, while on their two-week trip to Jolly Old, Frank and Joe get roped into helping Chris’s father prepare for the premiere of his play, Innocent Victim. Dennis Paul is directing the play, and he’s cast Chris in the title role. Despite being open about how much the Paul family is involved in the play, he’s trying to hide that Innocent Victim is a vanity production, which the theater world looks down upon, by inventing a producer no one sees. The only glimpse we get of the production is a courtroom scene, putting me in mind of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, but that is probably because of my limited knowledge of the theater.

Joe can’t imagine being a performer. “If I was on that stage in front of all those people, my stomach would be doing back flips,” Joe says. “I’d be sweating bullets!” (4). In Danger on the Air (#95), Joe is overwhelmed by the attention he receives after saving a man’s life on TV, so this sort of reaction has been mentioned before. That being said, Joe’s been on stage before, in a minor role as a Baker Street Irregular in the eponymous play in The Giant Rat of Sumatra (#143). (The other actors say he’s not very good.) Frank and Joe had small roles as policemen in Homecoming Nightmare, put on by the Bayport Players’ in Cast of Criminals (#97). Joe was part of a “burlesque orchestra,” led by Chet, at their high-school graduation in The Great Airport Mystery (#9); the graduations were ignored, so we should perhaps ignore Joe’s performance. More seriously, he played guitar in a gig at the Hessian Hotel in Track of the Zombie (#71), and the same book mentions he “often” plays guitar in student concerts at BHS. In the revised Flickering Torch Mystery (#22), he’s part of a combo called “South Forty” with his brother and friends; he plays guitar at a folk / country rock gig in that book.

Joe’s scared of something else as well, although it’s hard to tell if it’s Iola or the play’s technical director, Jennifer Mulhall, or women entirely. Jennifer, who is described as “young” but someone who “radiated confidence and commanded respect” (4), singles Joe out for special attention. She also gives Joe a *wiiiiiiink* as she tells him good night at one point. Joe seems to like Jennifer, as Frank says, “I kind of figured you liked being around her” (95), which causes Joe to blush, but that’s as far as his responses go; he does nothing else, not even thinking of Iola, around Jennifer — not even when she saves him from falling off a building. (Admittedly, he does give her a hug when he rescues her, tied up in a closet, but that’s a little creepy; she doesn’t have much say in the matter.)

Anyway, the production of Innocent Victim has had a run of unfortunate “accidents,” just like you’d expect for a location / business that is used as a locale in the first few chapters of a Hardy Boys book. Jennifer’s assistant, Neville Shah, broke his wrist before the book begins, and he eventually quits. So does the stage manager. In the first chapter, three spotlights blow while Jennifer is leaning off a catwalk adjusting other lights, and she goes over the edge, with only Joe’s strong arm and quick reflexes saving her. Upon investigating, Frank thinks the spotlights’ malfunction “might have been sabotage” (19), which should go unsaid — it’s an insult to the readers’ intelligence to suggest otherwise. Later, a fire (and the excellent sprinkler system that douses it) damage the production’s costumes, and the theater’s sound board is stolen.

The theater’s resident ghost is spotted in the control booth when both the spots overheat, and the theater people immediately bring up the supernatural. (Even Frank has trouble maintaining his skepticism — “Even I’m beginning to think this ghost is for real,” he says [39] — but that’s less a product of the plot and more a result of slipshod writing.) I wanted London Deception to be a full Scooby-Doo: a real-estate scam pulled off by using a supernatural natural legend and a person in a costume. The villainy is centered around a real-estate scam at a theater with a ghost legend; the owner of the theater needs Innocent Victim out so he can sell the theater to a soccer player who wants to open the second location of his restaurant in the remodeled theater in time for the World Cup. But even though the villains have a former circus acrobat amongst their number, they don’t commit to the ghost bit, and that’s disappointing. Perhaps it’s because the ghost, the wife of a former owner of the theater who committed suicide, is just a ghostly presence rather than a true g-g-g-ghost! I understand even villains have to work with what they’re given, but Mr. Jeffries, the owner, needed to start playing up the ghost’s malevolence as soon as he hatched his stupid, stupid plan.

Frank and Joe investigate — of course — and according to a private investigator hired by Jeffries, Frank and Joe “have some fame as amateur sleuths” (43), which is good to know; in the last ten or so books, that’s varied. (The idea their career would be secret never made any sense to me.) Frank sounds like he’s learned some investigative tricks in London Deception; when he questions a member of the cast, he manages to frame his questions to her in a way that doesn’t sound accusatory. Shockingly, that’s a big step forward. Also a step forward, at least technologically: To investigate the theater’s history, Joe “surfs the internet” (38) and searches for the Quill Garden Theater. Joe gets sixteen results, which is both ridiculous and possible for 1999. Using Google today, I found 844,000 results on that phrase (although only three when using quotes around the term), and the theater doesn’t even exist in my world.

Since Frank and Joe are in a foreign country, they get to sightsee — well, they traipse through London landmarks while investigating, which is almost like sightseeing. They go on a Haunted London tour, and they follow suspects to Madame Tussaud’s, the Tower of London, Victoria Park, and the Boleyn Ground (unnamed in the story), the home of the West Ham United soccer team. That’s the way I like to see new people and places: while completely distracted!

I apologize for this digression, but I did research, and by Dixon, I’m going to use it: Footballer John Moeller wants to open his restaurant’s second location in preparation for the next World Cup, which Moeller intimates will be in England, but that doesn’t make any sense. Deception was published in 1999; the year before, the World Cup was in France, while the next scheduled one, in 2002, was scheduled to be held in Japan and South Korea. England hasn’t hosted the World Cup since 1966, and it isn’t among the scheduled future hosts. I think the author was hoping American kids wouldn’t know or care about the World Cup schedule, but that’s playing with fire — given youth soccer participation rates, American kids were probably much more likely to know about the World Cup than American adults.

However, the author was much more knowledgeable about the Premier League, the top league of English (and occasionally Welsh) soccer. The fictional Moeller plays for West Ham United (“the Hammers”), a London-based team that has generally been mediocre or worse since London Deception was written. (West Ham, as Dean Thomas’s favorite team, is the only soccer team mentioned in the Harry Potter series.) Every year in the Premier League, the three worst teams are sent down to the second-best league (now called The Championship), and three Championship teams are elevated to the Premier League. West Ham was relegated from the Premier League after the 2001-02 season, spending three seasons in the second tier, and then again after the 2010-11. West Ham spent only one year in the less-prestigious Championship that time before returning to the Premier League.

Frank and Joe discover that soccer hooliganism is a real thing. The boys almost get trampled during a scuffle, and they get thrown into the stadium’s detention area, which is filled with hooligans, for trying to approach Moeller after the match. West Ham has links to hard-core soccer hooliganism going back to the ‘60s. Surprisingly, according to Wikipedia, West Ham hooliganism isn’t restricted to fights with opposing fans: They also fight one another, which is only unusual to an American in that these hooligans organize themselves into factions to do their in-fighting.

In Deception, West Ham is defeated by Chelsea, another London-based team. Chelsea has been one of the best clubs in English soccer, a charter member of the “Top Four” group (now the “Big Six”) that has dominated the sport this century. Chelsea has won five league championships in the 21st century, finishing outside of the top four (in a 20-team league) only five times. No wonder West Ham loses!

Back to the story … Despite a lack of brain power — when Jennifer goes missing, Frank and Joe ignore a consistent tapping sound in the theater, and they let Jeffries get the last word in a detective / villain exchange near the end — they catch Jeffries, Shah (aka Anacro, the Human Spider), and the play’s former stage manager with the help of Moeller and the London police. The Hardys don’t even have to resort to karate to catch these effete London theater villains; Frank uses a mannequin’s arm to smack the stage manager, and Joe uses “powerful punches” (145) to knock out Shah.

Of course, Innocent Victim turns out to be a hit, and the most chill powerful West End producer, Mr. Schulander, shows up to dangle funding in front of Dennis Paul. A happy ending!