As Trouble at Coyote Canyon begins, Frank and Joe are flying into Durango, Colo., to help Mike Preston protect his horseback tour business, Teen Trails West, from “accidents.” How do Frank and Joe know Mike? Well, they don’t — Doug Newman, the windsurfer / meathead from Wipeout (#96) has recommended the brothers to Mike. How does a windsurfer in France know a guy running a wilderness tourism business in southwestern Colorado? “Apparently, they’re old friends,” Frank says (2), showing as much interest in how the two men are linked as I have.
I’m more interested in how recommendations work in the digests. Frank and Joe rarely get paid — they don’t get paid here, either — so what do people need to say to get their endangered friends and loved ones to “hire” Frank and Joe? If your business is about to go under, as Mike contends his is, then what’s to lose by giving a free tour to a couple of kids who believe they can help? I suppose they need someone to get their name to the person in trouble; Trouble at Coyote Canyon came out in 1993, when an Internet search on “free teenage detectives” would have been impossible.
(Speaking of 1993: at one point, a character says a guy he knew thought the Anasazi tribe disappeared because they were taken away by aliens. That’s a theory mentioned by Fox Mulder of the X-Files, which debuted in fall 1993.)
On the other hand, Frank and Joe must be well known: when they reveal their roles on the tour to their fellow campers, one of them says, “You mean you’re that Frank and Joe Hardy? … The detectives? I’ve read all about your famous cases!” (140). I suppose it could be that Frank and Joe are the selective ones; if you are from out of town and want them to investigate, then someone has to recommend you to the Hardys.
So what are Frank and Joe supposed to do for their free Western vacation? Well, Teen Trails West has suffered some accidents, and Mike thinks someone has it out for his business. Suspects abound: the business rival, the spoiled rich girl, a possible agent from the other business …
Books like this make me want to go back to my old format, in which I talked about funny bits and how the book aligned with previous Hardy lore: using martial arts (they don’t here) or where they say Bayport is (New York, just outside the city), how often the Hardys have ridden horses and if they have ever gone to Colorado — yes, before you ask: while camping in Danger on Vampire Trail (#50) and while investigating in Mystery of the Desert Giant (#40). They even visit a Shetland pony ranch in Mystery of the Desert Giant! Can you imagine? Well, you’ll have to, because it’s not like the writers of that period are going to paint you a word picture.
So there’s no point in recounting Trouble at Coyote Canyon’s plot. And it’s not a badly written book; it’s just one that sticks closely to the digests’ pattern. Someone’s making things hard on a small businessman (the backbone of America) by doing stupid things that look like bad luck or maybe sabotage, veering between annoying the victims and attempted manslaughter. Then Frank and Joe solve the case before someone dies. The end.
I want something different. I want Frank and Joe, during their snooping, spotting a couple of teens in the middle of hot monkey love, or maybe Joe and the stuck-up girl having a session of hate makeouts. I want Frank or Joe to pick up a rifle and think about having to use it. Just something — anything — different would be welcomed. But instead, we get something right out The Sign of the Crooked Arrow (#28) or The Secret of Wildcat Swamp (#31) or Mystery of the Desert Giant or The Money Hunt (#101) or … well, there’s not enough snow to make the original Hunting for Hidden Gold (#5) a direct comp, but it’s still pretty close.
Trouble at Coyote Canyon does have an insane prospector, but that's an incredibly Hardy Boys thing to wander across. The most surprising thing about Coyote Canyon is that the first knockout of either brother comes on pg. 133, and that’s the only KO in the entire book.
That being said, I want to go over a few things in Coyote Canyon:
One of the characters on the tour is Jessica Springer, a rich girl from Beverly Hills, the daughter of a movie director who has been in movies herself. Jessica is always portrayed as a jerk, and she is a jerk. But she’s not always wrong, and the book fails to acknowledge that.
At one point, the teen tourists are told they might see coyotes on the trip. Joe’s excited by the prospect, but Jessica says, “Coyotes are boring” (7). Jessica is right: they are boring, as wild animals go. I grew up in the lower Midwest, and in the fall and winter, I heard coyotes howling almost every night. People keep trying to call her “Jessie,” which Jessica — rightfully — resents and corrects. (I would too, if I were in her shoes.) She sniffs when Mike tells her his wife, Dottie, cuts both their hair; I imagine their hairstyles to be extremely utilitarian and not up to the standard of even an average teenage girl — or these days, any average teenager. Everyone laughs at her when she falls over her saddle after her stirrup is positioned too high, which is just mean.
Like I said, she’s supposed to be unlikeable, but a “nice” character keeps telling his friends he wants to put all sorts of creepy critters in her bed roll. (I think we’re supposed to read something crypto-sexual into the “nice” guy’s desires, but I can’t swear to it.) We’re supposed to understand that it’s an extreme, not acceptable response to Jessica’s snobbishness, and I appreciate that. But Jessica is the bad guy because she’s verbally unpleasant; she doesn’t do or threaten anything physical, like the “nice” guy does.
Greg, the guy who wants to put something shocking into Jessica’s bed, claims to be a musician, although he actually plays the accordion. I find it hard to believe the tour would allow him to lug that big of an instrument out on the trail, but evidently Mike has no policy against bulky “musical” instruments. The villain, on the other hand, has a more sensible policy, interrupting one of Greg’s impromptu concerts: “Before he could start to play, the silence was shattered by the sound of three closely spaced gunshots!” (93).
The brakes have failed on several of the vehicles Frank and Joe have been in during the series. Trouble at Coyote Canyon has a special distinction: it is, I believe, the first time the brakes have failed on a horse-drawn wagon (specifically, the chuckwagon).
As I mentioned, Trouble at Coyote Canyon has plenty of suspects, one of whom calls Frank and Joe “out-of-town muscle” (10), which I appreciate. Later in the book, the worst act of sabotage happens: two-thirds of the tour’s water supply is destroyed. The tour leader plays down the significance of this but privately confides to Frank and Joe that it’s pretty bad. But later, with clouds rolling in, the group makes no attempt to catch any water in buckets. “These cloudbursts generally end as quick as they begin,” Mike says (115), but not even trying to get a little water — which could make a difference in a life-or-death situation — suggests the danger isn’t as great as Mike made it out to the Hardys.
While on the five-day tour, the camp provides food and drink. Somehow, after the water supply is depleted, the campers are still given orange juice for breakfast. For some reason, “orange juice” is not listed among their assets in staving off dehydration, but more importantly, how did they keep orange juice cold for several days on the trip? I don’t think standard coolers can keep orange juice cold for multiple days on the trail.
Saturday, July 2, 2016
Trouble at Coyote Canyon (#119)
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
A Few More Notes
***
You may have noticed I included the price tag on the image of Wipeout’s cover. That’s my copy, and I like those little reminders of the book’s past. I had no idea what “Hills” was, but I like knowing the book was sold by Hills at a discount. (Hills was a discount department store chain founded in Ohio in 1957; it was regionally successful, but it was bought out by Ames in 1999. Ames went out of business in 2002.) I also appreciate that Hardy Boys books were, at that time — a time I remember! — sold at full price for $3.50. I also like previous owners’ names printed or carefully signed inside the front cover or on the front flyleaf; it gives the book a bit of history. But former library copies are right out; those things are used and abused.
***
Early in Spark of Suspicion (#98), the previous book, Cast of Criminals (#97), is mentioned. I bring this up for two reasons: 1) most of the digests don’t mention the books preceding or succeeding them, and ii) because it’s taken only a dozen books for the old practice of linking the books to become strange. Is Cast of Criminals mentioned in Spark of Suspicion because the two books share an author, or was it because of an editorial mandate to tighten references between the books? Spark of Suspicion doesn’t go so far as to mention the next book (Dungeon of Doom) at the end like the books in the Stratemeyer Syndicate days did.
***
Whoever wrote Danger on the Air (#95) may have also written Spark of Suspicion (#98). Besides WBPT being in both books, Mr. Pizza appears as well. More superficially, both books take place in Bayport. It’s possible the editor tied two books close together in sequence together, but I think it’s more likely that a single author is the link.
But perhaps I’m jumping to conclusions. The narration also mentions the Liberty Bell Diner. The boys and Fenton stayed in the Liberty Bell Inn in Shield of Fear. I linked that book’s authorship to Vincent Buranelli because the author named motels after obvious points of reference for tourists. The use of “Liberty Bell” for a place for travelers to stay makes Buranelli a suspect for the authorship of Spark of Suspicion. But Spark of Suspicion calls Phil Cohen “lanky”; Buranelli knew he was “slight” in Danger on Vampire Trail (#50). On the other hand, he called Phil “wiry” in The Witchmaster’s Key (#55), and “slight” could be considered a synonym for “thin” rather than “thin and small.” Also, almost twenty years separate Spark of Suspicion and Danger on Vampire Trail … Hmm. This isn’t as far-fetched as I thought.
On the other hand, none of the evidence I mentioned rules out a decent editor’s involvement.
***
I didn’t want to mention this in my post on Spark of Suspicion because it seemed to demand more seriousness than that post could carry off, but the book’s ending reads much differently after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. The parallels are undeniable: a bomber with a badly thought-out grudge decides to explode a bomb that will hurt random people at a public celebration of a local patriotic holiday. The differences are that the Boston Marathon attack was real and that Hardys, being fictional, were able to wrap up things cleanly without anyone being harmed.
Friday, March 4, 2016
Wipeout (#96)
It’s not often I wish for more explanations of exotic customs in a Hardy Boys book, but I have to say I wanted more information about how the sport of windsurfing works. Is it a racing sport? Is it a sport like skateboarding, in which tricks are judged by experts? Some combination of the two? (I was afraid it would be the last.)
Windsurfing is a big deal in Wipeout (#96). Frank and Joe head to Almanarre, a real place on France’s Mediterranean coast, not too far from Toulon, that even today draws windsurfers. (The story doesn’t mention it, but the place is a tourist haven: Almanarre is by most definitions part of the Côte d’Azur, known to us Americans as the French Riviera.) The Hardy brothers have been called to France by Doug Newman, who has a windsurfing school in Bayport. Because why not? Why not windsurf in Barmet Bay? Why not have a school for windsurfing in Bayport, a city that for a third or half the year is unsuited for the sport?
Anyway, Doug’s fiancée Catherine is concerned someone is out to get Doug on the eve of the Almanarre Cup, which is a big windsurfing competition. This competition is important because if Doug wins, it will be his third consecutive title, and “The Almanarre Cup is his for keeps” (2). What does that mean, though? He’ll be forever remembered as the competition’s premiere champion? He’ll own the competition and its profits? He gets to keep the competition’s large, ornately engraved trophy forever? Turns out, it’s the last, although the mechanism for giving him the trophy isn’t specified. I suppose we’ll have to assume the event’s bylaws specify the first person to win either three total or three in a row gets the trophy forever and ever.
Doug pooh-poohs the concerns about his safety, but he’s concerned about the spate of (tame) vandalism that hit the villa Catherine has turned into an inn for windsurfers. If words gets around that the inn is jinxed, no competitors will want to stay there. Security at the villa is a joke — “We pay a lot of attention to security,” Doug says (14) in the same paragraph that he mentions they give keys to the high-security area to everyone — and what Doug and Catherine need more than Frank and Joe is a house detective.
As a digression: I miss the idea of a house detective. Not the reality; the house detective was probably just as often a goon meant to hassle patrons as he was a serious means of crime deterrent. But the idea! There’s a guy looking out for crime in the hotel. He has connections to the police and other private detectives, and if something is stolen from your room, he can get the word out. The wheels of justice will be turning immediately! If you are attacked, someone will be only a few floors away from saving you! It’s a great idea. Plus, it allows me to say, with a straight face, the words “house dick.”
Anyway, Doug’s confident about Frank and Joe’s ability — as detectives. He doesn’t think they could be elite windsurfers: Great windsurfers “know what the wind will do before the wind knows. Like detectives” (7). Unfortunately, when it comes to detection, Frank and Joe are unable to know a hawk from a handsaw in Wipeout, no matter if the wind is north-northwest, southerly, or from any other direction. To be fair, the solution to Wipeout is a bit more complicated than in most books, but the answer to part of the mystery stares them in the face throughout, and they just can’t see it.
The danger begins almost immediately, with Doug getting loopy and drowsy on the drive home and almost driving the car into the Mediterranean. Frank and Joe’s quick-ish reflexes — Joe is almost defeated by his seat belt — save them all, but after they get to Catherine’s villa, roofing tiles almost crush Catherine, Doug, and Frank. Joe manages a simul-tackle of all three, saving them. While investigating, they run into Philip Barstow, a villa guest who Joe finds so irritating he “wanted to help him down the stairs with a friendly boot” (21). Later, they meet the two French workmen who had been putting the tiles on the roof. Both are stereotypes: one wears a stupid beret, and the other has a cigarette dangling from his lip. Fortunately, they don’t say much, so we don't hear their outrageous accents, and we don’t see them eat, so there’s no reason to dwell over their probable meals of stinky cheese and wine. They proclaim their innocence, of course, and since they were nowhere near the tiles when they fell, Frank and Joe believe them.
As a note: The Hardy Boys have been to France before without encountering stereotypes; they were in Paris as step in their investigation into war-torn Zebwa in The Revenge of the Desert Phantom, a truly bizarre digest that was frequently mentioned in the digests for a while because that’s the story in which they acquired their battle van. Also, Frank and Joe were beaten up by a gang of waiters in Desert Phantom, which adds to the book’s inexplicable nature. That humiliating beatdown doesn’t prevent Frank and Joe from traveling to France later in their careers; they visited a castle in Provence in The Castle Conundrum (#168) and Paris in Passport to Danger (#179).
After Philip, a board designer, and Doug have a nice burn contest, Doug’s chief rival, Ian, accuses Doug of sabotaging his board. The two almost come to blows. Frank and Joe actually decide to investigate rather than just accusing people, such as Philip, of being responsible for the vandalism. In Catherine’s late uncle’s art studio, Frank finds a sketch of a face that looks familiar; when Joe returns for it, it’s gone. Frank also overhears that Catherine is in debt and taking loans from her uncle’s friend and art dealer, Emil Molitor, who warns he might have to buy the villa from her so she has the money to satisfy her debts. Molitor also wants to do a photo exhibition of the Almanarre Cup trophy, which was designed and engraved by Catherine’s uncle.
To make sense of the case, Frank and Joe decide to turn to Fenton’s advice. Fenton told his sons, “When you begin an investigation … all you have is questions — lots of them. Try asking yourself the questions first. Then move on to other people” (46). Oh, if only Frank and Joe followed (or remembered) this advice in other books. In this case, the technique doesn’t do much other than get Frank and Joe to direct their questions to each other before they just accuse everyone of everything, but that’s enough. In fact, this book implies Frank and Joe have been acting like idiots in other volumes; later in the book, for example, Catherine says, “Accusing people of doing something often ends by leading them to do just that” (94).
Omigod — what if Catherine is right, and the Hardy family is the reason Bayport is so crime-ridden? After all those years of Fenton — and later his sons — accusing people of crimes, they have only led those suspects into misdeeds they would never have otherwise done? It would be a clear case of accusatory entrapment! This makes the Hardys the villains of the series!
Putting that revelation aside ... At supper, the inn serves couscous, which the brothers claim never to have had. Ah! But Frank and Joe have had couscous before, while in Morocco for the The Mysterious Caravan. In that book, “cous-cous” was described as semolina served with raisins, carrots, chick peas, turnips, lamb, and broth; in Wipeout, Catherine describes it as “sort of tiny pasta … steamed over vegetables. … Sometimes … we eat couscous with meat” (48). Not as delectable as the meal from The Mysterious Caravan, but the digests never possessed the McFarlane-level devotion to food the original canon did. Times move on, and in Wipeout, they are offered harissa, an extremely hot sauce. Someone doses Doug’s food — his special health food, not couscous — with harissa, and he blames Ian.
After that, the campaigns against the inn and Doug increase in intensity. Someone puts wax on the inn’s stairs to injure somebody, but it’s cleaned up before anyone is hurt. Frank is caught with a counterfeit franc note Catherine gave him; Frank finds the portrait on the bill strangely familiar. You might be able to figure out why, and most likely, even from my sketchy description, figure out who’s responsible. Frank can’t, though. While out on the sea, Doug is knocked off his sailboard by a low-flying plane; later, his sailboard’s mast breaks, smacking him in the head, and Joe has to rescue him from drowning. Frank and Joe find someone snooping around the inn’s grounds at night — by coincidence; it’s not like Frank and Joe were keeping watch to prevent the nightly incidents of vandalism — but while pursuing the prowler, a broken staircase rail causes Joe to almost fall into the Mediterranean. After rescuing Joe, Frank returns with his brother to find Philip fighting a fire in the shed where all the windsurfers keep their equipment. As the brothers return to their room, they find a note pinned to the door that warns if Doug goes on the water the day before the competition, he “will not come back alive” (89).
So Frank and Joe spring into action! Suspecting an air attack, Frank impersonates Doug while Joe charters a helicopter. When a plane flies close to Frank on Doug’s sailboard, the helicopter flies toward it. The plane takes too long to avoid the helicopter’s charge and crashes into the sea. The French civil aviation authorities are very lenient, giving the pilot of the airplane a fine and the helicopter pilot a stern questioning. Well, I say civil aviation authorities, but the helicopter pilot calls them “gendarmes” (103). Frank and Joe, the architects of an airplane crash and near mid-air collision over a crowded stretch of water, escape without being questioned.
After slipping away from the French authorities, whoever they are, Frank makes a brilliant deductive leap: the crimes are being committed by more than one person or group, although he knows who none of them are. When a heavy statue almost falls on Catherine, Catherine and Doug accuse Ian. Ian runs, of course — when the lynch mob is coming, you don’t think about how much rope it has on hand before making a break for it — and Frank manages to corner him in a room. Ian jumps off a balcony 30 feet from the ground. Frank expects Ian to be dead on the stones below, but that seems unrealistic for a top athlete. A thirty-feet drop would probably result in injuries, perhaps severe ones, but Ian’s in good enough shape he would most likely survive. Right?
Anyway, Ian has instead dropped to a lower balcony, which unfortunately for Ian is locked. Frank catches him, and Ian denies everything except putting the hot sauce in Doug’s food. Ian and Doug have a moment of rapprochement, and while Catherine is considering selling the inn to Emil, Doug admits the attacks against him have been staged by his secret agent, Tom Highgate. That’s one mystery solved! But who’s causing the problems at the inn?
That mystery has to be put off when the actual Almanarre Cup competition begins. Doug wins on a tiebreaker over Ian — it turns out it’s one of those competitions where a routine of stunt tricks are judged — but before Doug can celebrate his victory, the trophy is stolen. The gendarmes put up roadblocks, but a nearby fire soon taxes their resources, and they open the city up again. Immediately after the roadblocks are lifted, Frank sees the inn’s roofers putting a large box in the back of their van. Suspecting the trophy is in the box, Frank and Joe immediately take off after the van on their motorcycles. They lose the van briefly, but they discover the trophy has been transferred to a black sedan when the sedan tries to run them down. Frank’s motorcycle is destroyed, but he rides behind Joe until the car collides with a tractor on a one-lane bridge. The man behind everything? Emil Molitor, who is also a counterfeiter.
Before the chase, Frank finally realized the picture he saw in Catherine’s uncle’s studio was the same as the man on the franc note, and it turns out Molitor was interested in Catherine's affairs because he forced her uncle to make new plates for counterfeit money. Unfortunately for Molitor, Catherine’s uncle hid the plates, then died, leaving the only clue to the plates’ location engraved on the trophy. (Frank and Joe find the clue but decline to dig up the plates. Too much work!) So to get access to where the plates were most likely hidden, Molitor tried to force Catherine out of business with a little sabotage, arson, and attempted murder.
Frank and Joe have solved the case — and without the help of the French authorities! In return, Frank and Joe receive a lifetime of free room and board at Catherine’s inn as well as free surfboarding lessons any time they want at Doug’s new surfboarding school in Almanarre. As non-monetary rewards go, that’s pretty good: a free place to stay on the Côte d’ Azur. If they ever get married — HA! — that would make an outstanding honeymoon destination.