Carnival of Crime (#122)

So, a carnival of crime, you say …

The Hardys have danced all around the entertainment-industrial complex, but I don’t think they’ve investigated a carnival before. Automobile stunt shows in Fear on Wheels (#108), the circus in Three-Ring Terror (#111), a demolition derby in The Demolition Mission (#112), an amusement park in Danger in the Fourth Dimension (#118), and a Renaissance faire in Crusade of the Flaming Sword (#131), but not a carnival. Admittedly, the Hardys had worked for a carnival in the original Clue of the Broken Blade (#21), and Chet worked for Solo’s Super Carnival in The Mystery of the Whale Tattoo (#47), but no Dixon working on the digests remembers those hardback books. Also, there’s a winter festival in The Cold Cash Caper (#136), but that’s later in the series, and a winter festival has a whole different set of crimesolving issues.

You might not be able to guess the plot of Carnival of Crime from the title alone. The name suggests the carnival is propagating the crime, like Marvel’s Circus of Crime. (A Ringmaster with a hypnotic top hat would be completely optional.) Instead, it’s Hardy Boys Digest stock plot 1b, in which a business is in trouble because of “accidents” that look like sabotage but might not be (but totally are, because this is a Hardy Boys story). Once you know that, the story pretty much tells itself: a standard Reprobate Roll Call (I’ll get to that later), a crooked carnival game, and set pieces in the Tunnel of Love, Fun House, and Mirror Maze. You’re smart; you could’ve thought of this, although you might have had the sabotaged ride be the more exciting roller coaster rather than the Ferris wheel, and you might have laughed at your editor when he suggested a dangerous bumper car attack instead of dutifully trying to put menace into the least menacing attraction at a carnival. (I mean, even the “Guess Your Weight” guy can have an element of fat shaming to his attraction.) But that’s you; you’re principled, and you know what works.

I mean, a carny yells, “Hey, Rube,” at one point to set other carnies against the Hardys. It’s that sort of by-the-numbers book. I’m not saying you could’ve done better; I don’t know the quality of your prose and transitions. But with a professional editor, I’m not going to say you’d do worse.

So, as to the story itself: After Frank and Joe “just finished that business of the mine fires over in Pennsylvania” (35), the operator of Fairs to Go, Susan Bowman, calls the younger Hardys to investigate problems at the carnival, having heard of the Hardys through an unnamed friend. This “friend,” of course, is probably someone on the carny circuit who passes around the names of people who work for free. Fairs to Go is hemorrhaging money and Susan is a teenager who just took over the carnival because of her father’s heart attack, so it’s not like she has many options to combat the alleged sabotage. The Hardys do work for free, but they don’t bother to return Susan’s call; instead, without knowing who Susan is or what she does, they randomly run into Susan when they attend the Bayport Fair, which Fairs to Go is working.

Despite their being the same ages, Susan has to ignore Joe’s skepticism that she’s responsible enough for the job; Joe is unacquainted with responsibility, as being a teen detective is a pastime that carries no responsibility, not even the responsibility to not cause harm to your client’s interests or to take normal efforts to preserve your own life. But that seems like a small price for Susan to pay. In Joe’s defense, Susan claims to be “carny born and bred” (29), an unfortunate turn of phrase which calls to mind unsavory and probably unethical breeding practices involving sideshow performers, and she completely botches any chance Frank and Joe have to keep up their cover identities. Not that their cover identities — students writing a term paper about the carnival business, in this case — would ever fool anyone, let alone a group as legendarily suspicious of outsiders as carnies, but there are forms to be observed, you know? Just like we all pretend corporations are responsible citizens and ignore their rapacious need for profit — until we’re absolutely forced to stop ignoring it.

So who is sabotaging Fairs to Go? Here’s the Reprobate Roll Call:

• Ricky Delgado, Susan’s stepbrother. A business school dropout, Ricky thinks he should be running Fairs to Go. He has two goons, Boomer and Kenny. (I had to look up Kenny’s name because I keep wanting to call him “Esiason.”) Ricky and his goons confront Frank and Joe a time or two; during one confrontation, Joe gets offended when Ricky calls them “boy detectives” (45), a totally accurate description of the Hardy boys, and “turkeys” (67). Later, Frank discovers Ricky is shaking down the booth operators, building a “war chest” that will allow him to revitalize the carnival after he ousts his stepsister in a putsch. (He doesn’t say he plans to have Susan assassinated in her Mexico City exile, but honestly, he doesn’t have to: That’s implied. History has shown us that’s the inevitable course of carnival power struggles. Or is it Communist power struggles? I get confused sometimes. The one with more clowns.)
  
  
• Raoul Duchemin, former Fairs to Go strongman. Injuries have reduced Raoul to a general laborer, but Raoul is unhappy because carnival show business is the only business he knows. He’s also a moron, but there’s no evidence that that makes him unhappy. He has a “crush” (33) on Althea, the Ferris wheel operator, and he glowers at any man who looks twice at her. That was probably supposed to be a menacing (to the Hardys) plot point in 1993, when Carnival was published, but a quarter century has made his attempts to control the romantic life of a woman who has no interest in him into something incredibly creepy.
  
  
• Cecil Farkas, who runs the shooting-gallery game. Frank and Joe expose his rigged game almost as soon as they enter the carnival — he feeds chipped BBs into the rifle, making it almost impossible to hit the target, so I learned something about gaffed games — and of course he’s going to hold a grudge after Susan gives him his walking papers.
  
  
• The four Fratelli Brothers, a clown family. They are almost always in character, which means “amusing” disinterested people who just wish they’d go away. I don’t think I need to say more than that, really.
  
  
• Mystery culprit.

Since Ricky is too obvious a villain, you will be unsurprised to learn that “mystery culprit” is the winner of the Hardy Detecting Sweepstakes. (For those of you who were wagering, Mystery Culprit pays $25 to win, $10 to show, $3 to place.) This Dixon does give the mystery a twist by having Ricky’s goons betray him to work with Morris Tuttle, Susan’s father's partner / business manager. Tuttle had been cooking the books for years, and to conceal his crime, he was sabotaging the business and siphoning money from Fairs to Go to pressure Susan into selling her family’s interest. He also put a hose through his office window to destroy the business’s computer and claimed he had no backups. (Of course he had backups; of course the boys find the “diskettes,” which is perhaps the most ‘90s thing about this book.)

Given that the villain is a middle-aged guy who projects an aura of benign concern throughout, how is the menace delivered in Carnival? Joe avoids the deadly threat of the aforementioned bumper car attack. When the Ferris wheel is stopped, Joe momentarily slips out of his gondola to try to prevent a young boy, whose lap bar didn’t lock, from winning a Darwin Award, but he fails at the rescue attempt, never reaching the child, and has to leap back in his own gondola. (The kid didn't really need rescuing, so the three-page “action” sequence was pointless.) One of Ricky’s goons attacks Frank in the Fun House; Frank defends himself, but he doesn’t use his “well-honed martial arts instincts” (143) until they’re needed to capture the culprits at the end of the book. Boomer shoots a Roman candle in the Tunnel of Love at Frank and Althea —

No, it’s not like that. You know it’s not like that. Frank would never canoodle with a girl other than Callie. Althea suggested the Tunnel of Love as a place to privately discuss Ricky’s perfidy. (The attack works, frightening her into silence.) However, Joe would totally take a girl other than Iola into the Tunnel of Love, and Iola’s reaction would have given the book a believably terrifying element.

In the final move by the villains, Joe gets sapped while investigating Kenny and Boomer’s trailer. (Joe’s rationale for the B&E? “Uninvited visits always pay off,” he thinks as he picks their lock [106].) The villains dump him in the Mirror Maze with an unconscious Ricky, then set the maze is set on fire. It’s not a bad plan, as far as it goes; Frank and Joe were suspicious of Ricky, and the bound Joe next to Ricky might have given investigators the idea that Ricky had abducted Joe and both had been the victim of an accident. I don’t think any real investigator would believe that — it’s too convenient — but this is Bayport. I can’t imagine the Bayport Police Department has a great reputation, given how much of its work it outsources to teenage boys.

On the other hand, angering the Great and Powerful Fenton Hardy by harming / killing one of his sons seems less like tempting fate and more like demanding one’s own destruction from an angry and powerful god.

*****

Usually, this is where I’d end this post, but this Dixon makes a major misstep I have to talk about.

When you’re dealing with circuses and carnivals, you have clowns. It’s difficult get rid of them, and no matter how much you spray or put out traps, the best you’re likely to do is drive them into a neighbor’s property until that neighbor drives them back. But given the near-mandated presence of clowns, a writer should use creepy clowns, a reliable threat that readers and protagonists will respond to. Even though this Dixon doesn’t want to lean into the shifty reputation many carnies have — Susan calls them “friendly, honest people,” even though carnivals “attract a few crooks” (30) — you can’t cover clowns’ inherent creepiness, no matter how much clown white you use. Early in the book, Dixon uses that creepiness as a plot point, when Joe sees a clown through the Hardys’ kitchen window: “a ghostly white face with exaggerated, brightly colored features. It’s huge red lips were fixed in a demonic grin. … a clown from a horror film” (35).

That’s a solid hook, and it would be genuinely frightening if that clown kept popping up, leering at the boys and doing something violent or frightening. In this case, the clown lures Joe into an IED: a firework under a metal can, triggered by a tripwire. No one is hurt, and the bomb — powerful enough to toss Joe “into the air like a dead leaf” — is accompanied by a threatening note with a pun. Con Riley and the police show up, but they cede their authority to Frank and Joe. The boys, showing their usual legal acumen, hold on to the evidence (for no real reason) and decline to press charges (because vigilante justice is the best justice — who needs the authorities mucking things up?).

The horror clown plotline is mostly forgotten, though — Frank glimpses the clown later in the book, and Joe finds clown white in Boomer and Kenny’s trailer. Other than that, the brief promise of something genuinely frightening without being too kid-unfriendly is forgotten.

Three-Ring Terror (#111)

In 2016, it’s kinda sad to read about the Hardy Boys working a circus mystery.

In the Hardys’ heyday, circuses and the Hardy Boys series were extremely popular. But by 1991, when Three-Ring Terror was published, neither had the cachet they previously held. The Hardy Boys were still popular, of course, but with the original series up to #111 and a dozen titles being published per year across two series, none of the individual books felt as special as they once had. At the same time, the number of circuses was shrinking as their costs rose and ticket sales fell. Today, more than a decade and a half into the 21st century, the Hardy Boys have had their second reboot in less than a decade and seem to be looking for a hook that will attract young readers, while ethical concerns (like the treatment of animals) are chipping away at what little appeal the modern profusion of entertainment options have left circuses.

I believe I’m going to try to forget about that line of thinking and start talking about what happens in the book.

Anyway: Three-Ring Terror. The cover makes it look like some sort of cloning and / or time travel book, with Frank and Joe fighting in the background while Frank and Joe perform on the trapeze in the foreground. But that’s not what the story is about!

Chet wants to be clown, and when the Montero Brothers Circus hits the Bayport Arena with their circus training program, he has his chance. He gets a “clown internship” (4), and he’s planning to spend the entire winter vacation learning the trade; when I was a kid, that would have been extremely unimpressive, as winter vacation was usually about ten days long if you counted Christmas and New Year’s Day. Anyway, Chet’s so eager that Frank and Joe don’t remind him of his numerous hobbies or his propensity for dropping them. In fact, they’re sold on his enthusiasm being more or less permanent: “Boy, you’re serious about this clowning thing,” Frank says after letting out a whistle (26).

Actually, Chet’s already been a clown before, performing as Chesterton the Great for Solo’s Super Carnival in The Mystery of the Whale Tattoo (#47). The last time Chet worked for a circus, in Track of the Zombie (#71), he manned the refreshment stand for the Big Top Circus, which seems like a step back. On the other hand, he planned to stick with the circus for the entire summer, along with Biff Hooper, Phil Cohen, and Tony Prito, so who knows what he got up to? OK, he probably quit after two weeks, either because something else caught his fancy or the Hardys needed his help, but the possibility remains he might have performed in some capacity at the Big Top Circus.

When the Hardys first are introduced to Montero Bros. Circus, Frank and Joe are amazed by the tiger act, although whenever tigers pop up in a Hardy Boys book, I can’t help but remember the boys bringing down a tiger by winging rocks at it in the original Disappearing Floor (#19). The tiger is forgotten when a mystery gets its hooks into them: a juggler drops a ball covered with rhinestones and gropes through Chet’s bag for it, and when Frank confronts the juggler about him rifling through Chet’s stuff, the juggler pushes Frank into the refreshment table and makes a break for it. The juggler escapes easily, while Frank is soaked with soda and punch — ha! — but the boys find a secret code inside the ball: CN / 1220, JL / 103, GU / 214.

The boys are on their own, as Fenton is in Philadelphia “to run a check on someone” at police headquarters (perhaps calling in a favor from Commissioner Andrew Crawford that his boys earned in Shield of Fear [#91]), and Gertrude and Laura are in New York to visit friends (23). They can’t consult ask their father for help, then, or even get a hot meal when their simple secret code mystery is superseded / confused by sabotage at the Montero Brothers Circus. OK: Paul Turner, dean of Circus U. and a member of the circus’s board of directors, doesn’t want to believe the series of accidents is anything malicious, but listen, all y’all, it’s sabotage.

Turner’s job is endangered as more “accidents” occur (such as short stilts being sawed partially through, causing Chet to fall *gasp* five feet), and Frank and Joe are stumped by the both the sabotage and the code. But that may be because their brains had a bad reaction to clown white or something: they find “Bo Costello” and “Clown Alley” remarkably funny names, for instance, and after Turner is stuck in a cannon, the opening of the barrel pointed out of reach above their heads, their rescue is delayed for the minutes it takes them to recall the ladder Turner just used to climb into the cannon. Their work ethic is also top-notch again: when they have an indication that something important, perhaps another act of sabotage, will happen at the circus the next day, they decide to take a night off and watch the circus instead: “One night’s not going to make a difference … we need some R and R [after less than two days of work],” Joe says (97).

Eventually, Frank and Joe link the letters in the code to three people: trapeze artists Carl Nash and Justine Leone and Turner’s assistant Georgianne Unger. Nash and Leone are just performers, but Turner thinks Unger might want to oust him in a circus coup so she can take his job. Turner also says Bo Costello, the director of admissions, would be a better choice to take his job.

(Note: “Circus coup” is one of the coolest things I’ve typed in a while.)

The revelation about the initials doesn’t shed any light on the code itself, so the brothers argue about the code’s purpose and meaning. Joe comes up with a cockamamie theory, but he defends it against his brother’s reasonable objections; when Frank comes up with his own hunches, Joe gleefully punches holes in them. It’s the rare sort of not-nice brotherly interaction between Frank and Joe that rings true while maintaining their partnership, and that’s very much to Three-Ring’s credit.

The only progress they make is to ID the juggler who dropped the ball, Ralph Rosen. The boys spot and chase him a couple of times, but he eludes them. The second time he escapes because Frank and Joe are in clown costumes, but they discover Rosen has just handed another rhinestone-encrusted ball to Leone, who admits she’s supposed to give the ball to Nash. There’s no code inside the ball, but one of its rhinestones does turn out to be a real diamond — so add jewel thefts to the crimes in the book.

Oh, about the clown costumes … early in the novel, Joe is adamant that he will not be a clown: “No way will I put on a clown costume,” he says (41). But he already has performed as a clown, as part of the Big Top Circus in Track of the Zombie. (He was also a clown for the school variety show in the same book.) When Chet invites them to the circus, Joe is afraid Chet will show up in his clown getup: “You wouldn’t embarrass us like that, would you?” (89). When Frank suggests wearing clown costumes to blend in, Joe says, “No way are you getting me in that [costume]” (106). Of course he wears the costume; he protests the wig and clown white separately, but gives way both times. Unfortunately, the comedy of the situation is underplayed, with the author not really referring back to Joe’s embarrassment after he dons the costume.

Back to the mystery: Nash is definitely implicated, as he also was the best suspect for a break-in at the Hardy home; the burglar fled through a window in a very trapeze-like move, and the thief roared away in a car with Texas plates. (Nash is from Texas.) Nash showed up to relieve Chet at the refreshment table the first night, after Rosen lost his juggling ball, so Frank and Joe surmise that might have been a botched handoff between Rosen and Nash. Since Costello assigned workers to the refreshment table, Frank and Joe use a safety pin to perform an investigatory B&E to Costello’s office. (Not even lockpicks! I’m disappointed Frank and Joe didn’t come prepared.) They note dates that correspond to numbers in the code — December 20, January 3, February 14 — marked on Costello’s calendar, and then the realize the letters correspond to appreciations for each city the circus is in on those days; Bayport is abbreviated BP, which becomes CN by moving the first letter one forward in the alphabet and the second two back, while Indianapolis goes from IN to JL and Fort Worth is transformed to FW and GU.

As soon as they make this revelation, Frank and Joe are discovered by Costello and Nash. They tie the two up while they admit the code refers to handoffs of stolen jewels; Costello fences the gems in a different city from the handoff. To get rid of the boys, Costello rigs a fireworks explosion in his office, then he and Nash take off. Frank and Joe manage to escape before the pyrotechnics go off, of course, and they easily find Costello and Nash, who aren’t even trying to hide.

The criminals make a break for it, and they climb onto the trapeze to … well, it’s not really clear what the two are going to do after making it onto the trapeze platforms. The narration hints they’re going to try to escape on a catwalk, but that’s not clear. The brothers climb up the trapeze after them and manage to subdue the crooks. This sounds absurd — two newcomers to the trapeze being able to work at such a height and outfight experienced trapeze artists — but Joe and Frank worked the trapeze in “Big Top” Hinchman’s circus in the original Clue of the Broken Blade.

Rosen isn’t captured at the end, most of the evidence the boys needed was in Costello’s office when it blew up, and no one explained why Costello’s gang needed such complicated handoffs, but other than that, everything’s wrapped up neatly. Great job, kids!