Hide-and-Sneak (#174)

I have mentioned many times that I find the Bayport-based books that make use of the chums and explore the city are the best Hardy Boys books. Hide-and-Sneak, despite the mediocre, first-draft name, is another volume that supports my theory.

The story begins with Chet harassing Tony about the use of his boat. The boat’s name is never mentioned, but long-time readers of the series will remember it’s the Napoli. (I honestly don’t know whether Tony’s boat has ever been mentioned in the Simon & Schuster paperbacks.) Tony is too involved with his job at Mr. Pizza and moonlighting as a security guard at night at his father’s construction site to deal with Chet’s nonsense, though. (It’s been a while since the industrious Tony has worked for Prito Construction.)

Chet wants the boat because it’s a prerequisite for appearing in a student movie, as advertised in the Bayport Alternative. (Bold for an alternative paper to just label itself “alternative,” although I think a corollary of the Rule of Cool — nothing that labels itself “cool” can be cool — applies here.) Since his appearance in the sci-fi TV show Warp Space in Trouble in Warp Space (#172), he’s caught the acting bug — well, not the acting bug, because he has rejected working with local theater groups, like Frank suggested. I can’t blame him much; if working with the Hardys will teach you anything, it’s that you can’t think small; if you think small, you don’t get to go to Australia or Hong Kong or space. Also, the last time he was in a local play, in Cast of Criminals, Callie was almost killed over stolen diamonds. Since being with the Hardys means attempts on your life, again: You can’t think small. It’s the old scene-stealer’s adage: Might as well be murdered for a movie as a play.

Anyway, Frank and Joe have the Sleuth, “an older-model Chris-Craft boat that Frank and Joe had bought with their own earnings ad some help form their dad” (3). The Sleuth hasn’t been mentioned in literally years: It last came up in High-Speed Showdown, which was about six years before Hide-and-Sneak. It may have been even longer since the boys were paid for anything they did; in the original hardcover stories, they were paid all the time, but I’m having trouble remembering any rewards or fees they’ve collected since then. Still pretending their amateur status is intact for competitive purposes, I suppose.

The Hardys exist in a world in which money is ignored, which means class is as well — except as a signifier of a person’s worth. This becomes plain when the Hardys sign on for the student movie; no one asks if there’s any money involved for the actors. But for the actors, wealth is a proxy for class; the middle-class Hardys with their older but reliable motorboat are good, while Willow Sumner, who is using her father’s expensive powerboat, is a snobby bitch, and working-class Andy Slack and his friend, who have borrowed Andy’s father’s fishing trawler, turn to crime and treachery at the first sign of difficulties. (They are also so bad at both crime and treachery they come out of things with no money and are forced to switch sides back to the Hardys’.) The production itself has money woes, and the director is eager to smooch the hinder of the first rich person who will give him the time of day in order to increase the budget from shoestring to cruise-ship hawser.

I will give the Dixon full points for making the boys’ chief rivals a trio of girls without a) pairing them off with the boys or b) making one of them the fat one to match Chet / counteract Chet / be a lazy writer. Such arrangements happened occasionally from the ‘60s to the end of the Syndicate books, but they haven’t occurred often in the S&S digests. I mean, Joe takes the opportunity to get to know Willow’s friend Trisha Eads and ask her out — Joe calls her “fiesty” (106), so at least he has a type — but that’s just the way Joe rolls.

The movie, named Hide-and-Sneak, is improvised, lacking a script, to be filmed with digital cameras over three days on Barmet Bay. The actors’ goal is to find and keep the McGuffin, an unwieldy modern art project, while the cameras — one to each boat — capture enough footage to cobble together an interesting 80 minutes. I have my doubts, but that’s what the director and the producer, Joan Athelny, want.

Frank maintains an arch, cool demeanor throughout the planning stages despite his clear interest in drama. He’s unfamiliar with the term “McGuffin,” but he has seen the Shore Point Players’ production of The Miracle Worker, which featured Willow as Helen Keller, and Fenton and Laura had taken Frank to New York to see improv. (He’s also the one who suggested Chet take to the theater.) Frank works out the power struggles between writers, director, and producer as if he has been reading Variety. Frank obviously has some interest in theater or movies; why else would he have seen the Shore Point Players’ do anything? And yet he has no interest in the stage. He stayed out of the cast in Cast of Criminals, The Giant Rat of Sumatra (#143), and The London Deception (#158). He doesn’t use the investigation in Reel Thrills (#127) to force an entrance into the movie world. What is Frank’s endgame?

Whatever it is, Hide-and-Sneak doesn’t do anything to advance it. Each team gets a doggerel poem leading them to the McGuffin. The clues point toward places like Merriam Island and Shipwreck Cove; the latter is new, but the former — and its lighthouse keeper, whom Joe mentions is now buried on the island — appeared in The Secret of Skull Mountain (#27), as Frank and the Sleuth ended up on the island after running out of gas. The boys also mention the Barmet Shoals, which appeared in The Phantom Freighter (#26). This is pretty tight continuity work for a Dixon who thinks the Hardys live on Oak Street (81).

Because Joe’s attempts to lose the girls’ boat gets the Sleuth pulled over by the harbor patrol, Willow and her friends get the MacGuffin first. The boys climb the cliff at Shipwreck Cove, which is the location of the construction site Tony had been guarding — still was guarding, actually, as he jumps the Hardys’ cameraman. From the cliff, they spot the girls in another cove, but they don’t see the McGuffin; Joe correctly surmises the girls are using it as an anchor, and before dawn the next day, he cuts it loose and steals it for his team. The other two teams tear after the Sleuth, which ducks and swerves between small islands, eventually hiding behind a yacht. But the yacht is deserted, like the Mary Celeste (Frank tells the story of the doomed ship as they investigate); when Chet spots the owner swimming nearby, they rescue him, and the story comes to a screeching halt.

Peter Buckmaster — a name truly worthy of the Stratemeyer Syndicate — is the owner of the yacht, a Wall Street bigwig, and the owner of the construction site above Shipwreck Cove. He sweeps up the director and the cast, taking them to his under-construction home, and the director’s obsession with getting more funding for Hide-and-Sneak stalls the production for an entire day — long enough for Joe to ask Trisha out and for Buckmaster’s entire financial empire to crumble. Once the news of his financial misdeeds hits the air, Buckmaster hops on his yacht, which explodes in a fireball before it can get far from the cove.

Suicide? Frank’s not convinced. He thinks a strange woman in disguise has been lurking around the movie, both before and after the explosion, and he’s sure someone’s still skulking around the construction site; he sets a trap, but the intruder escapes in the blinding rain when Chet has to save Joe from tumbling off the cliff. Another trap nets Buckmaster’s ex-wife, who is both the producer and the woman in disguise. She financed the movie to get extensive footage of Barmet Bay, where she suspected her ex-husband was hiding himself (and his money); she suspects Buckmaster faked his death.

While the Hardys, Chet, and Mrs. Buckmaster search for Buckmaster’s hidden money, they are interrupted by Andy and his friend, who decide to steal Willow’s dad’s boat. Frank uses his “martial arts” to deal with Andy and his knife, but Buckmaster returns from his watery grave with a gun. Andy and his friend throw in with Buckmaster, claiming to be capitalists like him; Buckmaster has Andy tie up his friend, Chet, and the Hardys before pistol-whipping him. “Now you know the first two rules of successful capitalism,” he tells Andy’s unconscious body. “Never do anything you can get someone else to do, and never pay for anything unless you have to” (122). Good advice for a villain too!

While Buckmaster takes the powerboat, removes the bilge plug from the trawler, cuts the Sleuth loose, and makes his getaway with his ex as a hostage, Chet gets another hero moment: He crawls over to Andy’s knife and uses it to cut Frank loose. After everyone is free, Andy and his pal go for help while Joe retrieves the Sleuth and hotwires its damaged ignition. They set out after the powerboat, but unable to catch up with it, they attract the harbor patrol by shooting a gas can they have tied behind their boat with a flare gun. I would think the flare would be more than enough to attract police attention, but I am not a boy detective!

The combination of the harbor patrol attracted by the explosion and police alerted by Andy catch Buckmaster. Chet, after his two hero moments, takes the Hardys’ advice to try out for a production of South Pacific. Frank and Joe decline to do any more acting, ending the book by telling Chet, “If you’re going to be a star, it’s better to shine alone” (135). It’s good advice, even if Chet will never achieve anything without the Hardys, but at least that exit line allows the book to wrap up more than 10 pages early, just like End of the Trail (#162).

Rock 'n' Roll Renegades (#116)

So Joe gets yet another “job” in Rock ‘n’ Roll Renegades: he’s a disc jockey at WBBX, which evidently plays classic rock.

Joe started out as a summer intern at WBBX, but he was promoted when a DJ, Keith Wyatt, proved unreliable. After getting the job, Joe immediately becomes insufferable, explaining such difficult-to-understand radio slang as PSA (“public service announcement”) to Chet and Frank. But he’s getting respect from the station management, as Joe’s show is the most popular in his time slot among listeners 12 to 25. (It’s an odd age range, mixing pre-teens with adults.) Also, Chet is intimidated by the grade-school math Joe uses to make the music and pre-recorded segments, like the news, run on time.

On the other hand, Chet references Joe’s bout of stage fright in Danger on the Air (#95) to put the youngest Hardy in his place. Joe’s witty rejoinder is to call Chet a “spazzo,” and I have to admit, the boys’ verbal sparring here is excellent. Teenage boys always give each other crap, even if they’re good friends, and that’s what Chet, Joe, and Frank do here.

For those playing along at home, WBBX hasn’t been mentioned before; the only radio station that has been mentioned is WMC in The Mystery of the Flying Express (#20). In this book, WBBX has been around a while, but since its first record played was “I Am the Walrus” from Magical Mystery Tour, the station can’t be older than 1967. (Side note: “I Am the Walrus” was actually the B-side of “Hello, Goodbye.”) WBBX, as of 2026, is in reality a FM oldies station in Pocomoke City, Md.

The mystery begins when a pirate radio station, Skull and Bones, knocks WBBX off the air during Joe’s shift by broadcasting at WBBX’s frequency. While Frank discusses the situation with Bill Crandall, the station manager, a fake grenade crashes through the window. Frank rushes outside and finds the fired DJ Keith Wyatt, who denies throwing the grenade and calls Joe a “wimp” (does being a DJ require a superabundance of masculinity? Do DJs have to engage in combat with other DJs, like in Anchorman, or vicious callers? Perhaps toss control boards through windows?). Frank and the police are forced to accept Wyatt’s protestations of innocence. Crandall and the FCC ask the brothers to investigate so that they can jail the pirate leader, Jolly Roger.

As Joe is about to end his shift, he gets shocked by a booby-trapped control board. He’s fine, of course — he has been shocked badly four times in the canon, including getting hit by lightning in The Disappearing Floor (#19) — and he waves away Crandall’s offer of an ambulance. That should teach Wyatt not to call Joe a wimp (if Wyatt had anything to do with the sabotage, which he didn’t).

Frank suggests they follow Wyatt to the Seven Thirty club, which Joe immediately remembers: “Oh, yeah … It’s a real dive, in a crummy neighborhood” (34). How do you think Joe knows about dive bars? Is he secretly a hipster who thinks it’s ironically cool to visit run-down bars? Does Iola crave the danger presented by the sleazy environs and rough habitués and insist Joe accompany her, flirting with thugs and lowlifes and forcing Joe to fight them?

Oh, sorry, drifting into fanfic again. I really should look into something that will stop me from doing that. Do you think electroshock would work? I mean, it has no effect on Joe, as we’ve established, but he’s a Hardy, impervious to tissue damage and learning.

You might think being underage would make my little Iola fantasy implausible, but Frank and Joe waltz into the Seven Thirty club without opposition, so I see no reason why the Seven Thirty Club would get uptight about an underage girl. Anyway, Frank and Joe immediately spot Wyatt. He’s relatively forthcoming, telling Frank and Joe that Jimmy Collins hires DJs for Skull and Bones, and he also gets in a shot, calling the brothers “Hardydum and Hardydee” (36). (The insult doesn’t make sense, but Joe still bristles.) The discussion degenerates into an insult contest — Joe wins on points — before Wyatt’s burly friends chase the Hardys away. Joe actually gets to use a karate kick during the escape, but the truth is they had to flee. Hopefully, they edited that part out when they to the story to Iola and Callie at Mr. Pizza later.

The next day, the Hardys get a ride to the SS Marconi, the home of Skull and Bones, from the irritable and insane Capt. Steelheart. Collins hires Frank and Joe as the DJ combo of “Big Brother and the Renegade Kid” (57); when Wyatt shows up looking for a job, the Hardys convince him not to rat them out by promising to do Wyatt a favor. (I’m sure they will never pay off this favor.) While they work for a totally illegal radio operation, Chet fills in at WBBX with delightful radio incompetence; as a bonus, he receives a gas bomb on his first day.

Frank and Joe’s next step is to find out who owns the warehouse Capt. Steelheart uses as his base. For some reason, Frank and Joe are able to find property records at the library instead of the courthouse; the records and a friendly librarian tell them the warehouse is owned by former radio station owner Ben Harness, who now is a record producer. After Harness’s secretary stonewalls them, Frank and Joe track Wyatt instead. They find him heading out on Barmet Bay on a motorboat. Frank and Joe follow in … in … in …

A rented motorboat. No mention is made of the Sleuth. Honestly, I don’t think the Sleuth has been mentioned yet in the digests; looking over my notes, it seems the Hardys’ motorboat appears only in Crime in the Kennel (#133) and High-Speed Showdown (#137). (During a hovercar chase in The Secret of Sigma Seven [#110], Frank mentions his love of speedboat racing without mentioning the Sleuth.) Wyatt meets a mysterious man; when they follow that man’s boat to his estate, they are quickly caught and “frisked with professional efficiency” (91). (Which is more than Iola and Callie can hope for — zing!) The rich guy is Harness, who allows Frank and Joe to annoy him with questions for longer than I would have, but even his patience runs out eventually. Frank and Joe conclude Harness is working a payola scam with Wyatt.

Frank and Joe think they’re getting somewhere, but Crandall pulls the rug from under them: WBBX is going under, so who cares if they find out who Jolly Roger is? Station owner Charlie Horwitz, who just bought out his partner, promises to give Joe a recommendation if he ever applies at another station, but everyone — even the reader, especially the reader — knows that’s not going to happen.

Of course Frank and Joe soldier on; of course they’re in over their heads. After pulling all the circuit breakers at Harness’s offices, they pose as electricians to look at his records. They learn the Jelly Roll Corp. is renting Steelheart’s warehouse, but Jelly Roll is as fake as Chet’s latest diet plan: the only thing at the company’s address is a wrecking ball, which someone tries to use as a blunt object against them. They manage to escape, of course.

While working their shift at Skull and Bones the next day, Joe figures out who Jolly Roger is when he matches Horwitz’s signature to the address on the envelope the gas bomb was mailed in. Unfortunately, Frank doesn’t cut his mike while they’re talking; Collins stops the revelation from hitting the airways, but he calls his boss to take care of the Hardys. Horwitz and his bodyguard arrive on his yacht to take care of the Hardys permanently, then Horowitz decides to eliminate Collins and Wyatt as loose ends as well. Just as the explanations end and the executions are about to begin, Steelheart and his men set off an explosion on the Marconi. Horwitz was using Steelheart’s smuggling operations — golly, it’s nice to have a smuggler in the books again — to blackmail him into cooperating, so Steelheart decided to blow up his own ship to spite his blackmailer. Steelheart isn’t all that stable.

A chase between Steelheart’s barge and Horwitz’s yacht ensues, with everyone including the bodyguard chasing Horwitz. (The bodyguard didn't appreciate being abandoned on a sinking ship, and he puts bullet holes in the yacht’s gas tank in retaliation.) Joe not only ends up knocking Horwitz out, but he also sneers at the unconscious man — sneering is what villains do, Joe — and calls him “cream puff” (146). Thus ends Horwitz’s brilliant plan to cheat his business partner out of half of WBBX (Skull and Bones would have gone off the air after the sale was final) while thumbing his nose at old rivals, like Harness and Steelheart.

Another successful mystery. But when Joe wants to return to his “job,” he finds that Chet and his malapropisms are even more popular than Joe was among the youth. Ah, the fickleness of the entertainment business! Also, the fickleness of Chet and Joe, because neither of them will ever talk about their radio careers again.

High-Speed Showdown (#137)

Power boat racing has reached Bayport in High-Speed Showdown. Unsurprisingly, the Northeast Nationals are also plagued by sabotage. Really, you have to wonder why any organization would hold an event in Bayport. Are the hotels that great? Is the convention center huge? Are the women more attractive?

I’m thinking the answer is massive bribes. Massive, IOC / FIFA-level bribes, with piles of cash, drugs, and complimentary subscriptions to Field & Stream.

Given everything bad that happens at Bayport events, it’s the only real explanation. High-Speed Showdown supports that hypothesis, as the corruption in the powerboat racing circuit the Northeast Nationals is part of is an open secret. The racers, owners, and crew are allowed to bet on all the races, and while the assumption is that each person would bet on their own boat, they are not restricted to betting on themselves. If a governing body allows wagering among participations, corruption is always a danger, as some bright fellow is going to figure out it’s more profitable to lose than to win.

(In addition to the implications of gambling, the book is hazy on the mechanics of gambling as well. At one point, a private investigator based in Las Vegas tells the boys incorrectly what 1-to-4 odds means. The PI suggests a $1 at 1-4 returns an additional dollar on a win, but on a loss the bettor has to kick in an additional $4. This is incorrect. If you bet $1, that’s all you can lose; if you win a $1 bet at 1-4, you’ll receive a an additional quarter.)

When you think about speedboat racing, in which massive, finely tuned engines are harnessed to the lightest hulls possible, you also think of safety, and safety is foremost in High-Speed Showdown. The boys always strap in safely before riding in power boats. The narrator makes sure readers know the Hardys and other boaters know how to pass each other on the water. Before saving a man from drowning, Frank strips off his shoes and shirt and mentions that swimming with jeans is difficult. (Did the drowning man keep them on for modesty’s sake?) The brothers have a fire extinguisher on the Sleuth that allows them to take care of a fire on a powerboat. When a speedboat wrecks, Frank stops Joe from going to the rescue: “Let the marshals handle it … if a bunch of civilians like us run straight into the path of the racers, we’ll have a real disaster” (125). When the throttle on the Sleuth breaks, Joe’s first instinct is to shut off the engine rather than flail about with the controls. In the end, as the suspect escapes in a motorboat in the crowded waters of Barmet Bay, Frank elects not to pursue: “Too late! Let him go. He can’t escape. Besides, by trying to run away, he’s just proving that we were right about him” (147).

And then there's safety of a different kind, as when one of the adult crew members, recalling Frank and Joe’s 15-year-old schoolmate Connie, tells us he’s not into young women: “Cute kid, but way too young for me” (85). He’s totally lying, of course, but at least he’s being cautious about what he says in front of wintnesses.

(Another competitor, whom we are supposed to hate, is not so cautious around Connie: “I can handle her kind anytime” [33]. He means he can physically assault her if he needs to, not that he can seduce an underage girl. Take your pick about which is more awful.)

Maybe Frank and Joe have just decided to be boring. They use notecards to try to link facts in the case rather than making their usual random association of incidents. After learning of a lead in Las Vegas, Frank and Joe contact a PI in that city rather than flying out there. Frank’s so cautious he worries he might have upset a member of student government. Does student government have actual power at Bayport High School? Would cool kids (i.e., kids with lives outside school) care about anything student government can do? Not in a just world, which is obviously the world the Hardys live in.

The stakes are very low; no one is injured, except for a guy who has a Hardy Boys concussion and another who was either poisoned or ate bad shrimp salad. The most jeopardy the boys fall into is when they are attacked by men with baseball bats, which is admittedly dangerous for most people, but it’s the kind of thing Frank and Joe handle all the time. The second-most peril they are subjected to is when a firecracker explodes under their van’s hood while they are still in the parking lot. The narration tries to sell this as something shocking by saying Joe heard “a high-pitched whistle … the sound of something deadly coming from under the hood” (117), but that sounds like a bottle rocket, not an M-80. The third-most danger is trying the peach chutney Aunt Gertrude put on their chicken sandwiches.

I won’t go into the suspects except to mention they are all powerboat racers (one of whom has the “gratitude of a weasel” [143], which is well known as the most ungrateful member of the weasel family) or owners plus a couple of student protestors. The actual criminal is a complete surprise — unless you’ve read The Masked Monkey or The Stone Idol or The Vanishing Thieves, in which the criminal thinks Frank and Joe aren’t that bright and hires them to investigate the crimes he himself committed. To be fair, this is one of the books in which Frank and Joe’s career is not widely known; one of their high-school classmates has “heard rumors around school that they’re amateur detectives or something” (35). Magnusson, the event organizer, is surprised when Frank and Joe ask for a copy of a threatening fax, as if he expected them to spend their time investigating running into piers and falling off docks.

But they don’t. They’re too cautious for that.

Actually, one suspect I’d like to discuss is Susan Shire, powerboat racer and television actress. The story isn't that interested in her, not so much dismissing her as a suspect and competitor as just forgetting about her, but Frank and Joe do mention she appears in the TV show Brisbane Lane. What kind of show do you think it is? We’re probably supposed to think it’s a Melrose Place clone, but I think there are other possibilities. Indiana Jones-type adventure show with an Aussie protagonist? Daytime soap? A spy show, set in Australia? I like all my Australian ideas, although the major hitch with them is that the name of the Australian city doesn’t rhyme with “lane” — it’s pronounced BRIZ-bin (or BRIZ-bn).

Weirdly, the book is more circumspect in naming (fictitious) entertainment sources in other places. At one point, Aunt Gertrude says she’s “going to watch a rerun of one of my favorite shows” (55), then asks if Frank and Joe would like to join her. They demur, in part because she won’t even name the show. Later Joe challenges Frank to “a computer game … I’ll spot you two power pills and an invisibility spell” (57). Frank accepts the challenge, whatever the challenge is.

Despite the possibility of high-speed crashes, High-Speed Showdown is kinda dull, and it doesn’t take advantage of the competitive aspects of the sport. I mean, look at that cover, which promises a dull time; it looks like the Sleuth is blathering nonsense to Frank and Joe while they irresponsibly tow a rubber raft that had a couple of cardboard life-sized standees in it. It’s the kind of book that dramatically asks, “Would their meeting with Magnusson leave enough time for a prelunch snack?” (6).

Some might take exception with my stance. For instance, the Amazon page for the book has a single review, which gives the book five stars; the review, which I reproduce here in full, says, “good.” Hard to argue with that, but I won’t budge from my stance.

Unless someone wanted to try to sway me with IOC-levels of subscriptions to Field & Stream … throw in a couple of years of Outdoor Life, and I might be singing the praises of High-Speed Showdown.