Warehouse Rumble (#183)

With only nine more books to go — the last eight, #183 to #190, then first book, #86 — we’re in the home stretch. I’ve read four of those books before, so the end feels even closer than it actually is …

Warehouse Rumble is one of those books I’ve read already. I wrote about it a little in my post on the Top 10 Cool Things the Hardy Boys have done, and it occurs to me I was a bit unfair in my dismissal of the book — or maybe my reevaluation is a symptom of my Stockholm Syndrome with the series.

In Rumble, Chet entices Joe and Frank with the promise of “fame … fortune … all the usual stuff” (2) if they audition for Warehouse Rumble, a new TV show in which contestants compete in physical and mental challenges against a post-apocalyptic background. Since Bayport High is closed for a teacher conference, Frank and Joe agree. (Callie and Iola would rather work at a food pantry during the school vacation, which is on-brand for early-canon Callie.) Chet also convinces Daphne Soesbee, a friend who has appeared in a couple of previous stories and who also just happens to be nearby, to be his teammate in the competition. The rest of the book focuses on the on-set goings-on, which is more behind-the-scenes skullduggery than a reality TV competition.

Rumble is another of Stephen D. Sullivan’s contributions to the series, and now that I know what to look for, the signs are clear. He inserts his own name into the narrative via returning BPD Officer Gus Sullivan from Trick-or-Trouble (#175). Daphne mentions her mother and her mother’s bookstore, also from Trick-or-Trouble, and Spy that Never Lies (#163) / Trick-or-Trouble villains / red herrings Jay Stone and Missy Gates make their third appearances. Daphne also mentions her Creature Cards prowess from Trouble in the Cards (#165), which spurred a rivalry with a new villain / red herring, Bo Reid.

Another tipoff? The name of robbery victim Ms. Forbeck is a reference to fellow author Matt Forbeck; a brief perusal of his Wikipedia page turns up the name of Ree Soesbee, and suddenly Daphne’s unusual surname is explained. What’s the connection between Sullivan, Forbeck, and Soesbee? Well, all three have written licensed novels (novels based on IP owned by others); more specifically, all three have written young-adult Dragonlance novels in the years just before Warehouse Rumble came out.

I’m not sure why Warehouse Rumble made me cast my mind toward the cool things Frank and Joe have done over the years, given that a similar conceit — Maximum Challenge (#132), in which the Hardys and their chums compete in a TV show with physical challenges — felt like a run-of-the-mill happening in Frank and Joe's life. Perhaps it’s because I prefer Warehouse Rumble’s post-apocalyptic aesthetic to the generic athletic competition in Maximum Challenge. Perhaps it’s because Rumble still feels au courant, and Challenge is an American Gladiators pastiche that was published just before Gladiators went off the air in 1996. I don’t know.

It certainly isn’t the promise of intellectual challenges. Rumble is scant on the details of the puzzles the contestants have to solve, but it doesn’t skint on describing the physical challenges. In fact, the book is overwhelmingly physical, removing intellectual traces — other than the narrator’s occasional impressive vocabulary word, such as “sardonically” (59) and “decrepitation” (105). The trash talk between the Hardys and their rivals is embarrassing. For instance, Jay Stone call the Hardys, Daphne, and Chet “the Boy Scout Brothers and their twin sidekicks” (7), which is more descriptive than damning. Bo Reid tells Joe, “I got a message for your brother and Morton. … The word is … pain! Too bad it’s your turn to play delivery boy.” Joe responds, “I think I’ll mark this one ‘Return to sender’” (42). This is too wordy and too weak for even a young reader to care about. The little time it would have taken to improve this banter might have improved this book by an order of magnitude, managing to put a little more juice into rivalries with interchangeable / forgettable villains.

More noticeably, though, Frank and Joe show little interest in unraveling the mystery around them, even when the mystery seems likely to crush them under and metal bricks or electrocute them or give them a megadose of sedatives or unleash an army of rats upon them. Huh, Frank and Joe say, maybe filming in a warehouse abandoned for twenty years isn’t a good idea, and TV / high school rivalries sure can get dangerous! They are right, but their lack of curiosity is disturbing.

The book concentrates on the physicalities. Their athletic challenges on the show get a great deal of attention, as you would expect. Chet brags he’s “strong like bull, swift like eagle” (47), like a latter-day Uncle Tonoose. The Hardys and Chet get into fights on set as well; Frank uses his “martial arts training” to land a “karate chop” (34) and a spin kick, and Joe uses a full nelson to subdue a villain. Even the first clue is uncovered by Chet smacking his head into a brick chimney during a fight with Bo Reid.

That clue is a skeleton, later revealed to be Joss Orlando, a Bayport man who went out for groceries fifteen years before but never came home. The man might as well have been named “Harry Tanwick,” given how little Frank and Joe care about learning more about him. They show only a scintilla of curiosity about a gold ring with emeralds that Daphne finds in the warehouse basement, even though it’s obviously valuable. I suppose I get it: When you’re competing on a game show on which you nearly die and no one seems to care, you must concentrate on staying alive rather than protecting the property rights of the bourgeoisie. Besides, as Frank says, “Danger is bread and butter to some people” (33), which doesn’t qualify as a bon mot, but works well enough to explain Frank and Joe — even if Frank was talking about someone else when he says that.

We don’t get to see who wins Warehouse Rumble. We do know it won’t be Frank and Joe; they are eliminated in the semifinals by Bo Reid and Lily Sabatine. Daphne and Chet do make it to the finals, where they will face Reid and a new partner, as Lily is arrested after her victory but before the finals. As a consolation prize, Frank and Joe do receive coupons to local businesses, like the Town Spa (a restaurant) and a $1,000-dollar “scholarship bond” (134), which as far as I can tell isn’t a real thing. Still, it’s nice to see Frank and Joe getting rewarded for what they’ve done, even if they aren’t getting rewarded for solving a mystery. (Fenton says they will get a reward for recovering the stolen goods, which will go straight into their college funds, but we don’t see anyone with money forking over the cash or even making that promise.)

Circling around this disaster of a mystery is a pair of outsiders. Clark Hessmann is a local preservationist who wants to prevent the building Warehouse Rumble is filming in from being demolished after filming is over; the building’s owner, Herman Jackson, has a restraining order against him. More annoying is TV reporter Stacia Allen of WSDS, who is always barging into the Warehouse Rumble set and (even though it doesn’t apply) bleating about freedom of press, allowing her to publicize many of the set disasters. (In actuality, WSDS is a Spanish-language AM radio station in Michigan.) If the show’s producer had invested in better security, closed the set, and demanded at least minimal support from a network publicist, the book’s most annoying character and a quarter of the book’s plot points would have been wiped out. (As in The Test Case [#171], Warehouse Rumble takes a dim view of the press.)

Also: Warehouse Rumble should have done a better job taking care of the contestants. The show acquires an on-set paramedic only only after a few serious accidents: a collapsed light tower that has sparking electric wires over water, a collapsed catwalk, a collapsed floor, rat attacks, water that changes color from blue to green to yellow-green for no reason. (I don’t know what the latter portends, but it can’t be good.) These are people in an athletic competition inside a dilapidated structure! You need medical staff on set regardless of whether someone is trying to kill contestants.

Everyone should also take a dim view of the police, as Con Riley and Officer Sullivan seem more interested in avoiding work than solving a crime. The pair find enforcing restraining orders, court writs, and trespassing laws a headache and wish the people involved would just shut up. They are slack on investigating the stolen ring and notifying Joss Orlando’s next of kin. Only when Ms. Forbeck shows up and claims the ring do the police act, and then they overreact, hauling Daphne down to the police station for a robbery that occurred when she was in diapers. Then the narration says the police “decided to let” Daphne’s mother sit in on Daphne’s interrogation (122). They have to! You can’t interview a minor without an adult present! Worse, Mrs. Soesbee wouldn’t even know her daughter was in custody if Frank and Joe hadn’t snuck away to call her.

The rest of Ms. Forbeck’s stolen property is still on set — farther down the chimney Orlando was found in, in fact — but the police can’t find it because it wasn’t in the exact same place Daphne discovered the ring. The people behind the catastrophes on set are siblings Lily and Todd Sabatine, Orlando’s children. (Lily and Todd’s brilliance is described as their ability to give alibis for each other, which shouldn’t have helped; of course they’d lie for each other! The only way this works is if no one cares enough to investigate.) If the police had tracked them down to notify them of their father’s passing or searched the warehouse more assiduously, the case would have been solved and all sorts of menace prevented. Instead — once again — the Bayport PD let a bunch of teenagers do their jobs for them, which in this case involved only showing up to the scene of the crime (the warehouse) at night and beating up a girl and her brother.

Which Frank and Joe eventually did. I mean, everyone had to wait until the Hardys found the time. No need to hurry, after all.

Danger on the Air (#95)

Plot: After an on-air interview at WBPT is interrupted by an explosion, Frank and Joe stick around to find who is terrorizing the station.

“Borrowing” from the past: Frank and Joe head for Mr. Pizza and the mall after Joe saves a man from death; the mall and an unnamed pizza shop show up in The Blackwing Puzzle (#82). Mr. Pizza, which is managed by chum Tony Prito, shows up frequently in the Casefiles — the Hardy Boys Wiki lists three of the books it appears in — and I’m betting it shows up in other, later digests. All I can find in my notes is an appearance in The Prime-Time Crime (#109), another TV-related mystery. (Checking again, the wiki mentions Spark of Suspicion, #98.)

In Danger on the Air, Frank and Joe spend a lot of time at WBPT — serving the Bayport area since 1953 — but it never appeared in the Stratemeyer books (#1-83). However, WBPT is an important part of Prime-Time Crime and is mentioned in Beyond the Law (Casefiles #55).

Frank and Joe (and Chet) are referred to as football players; I went over Joe’s football experience in Daredevils (#159). Joe also plays college football as a field goal kicker in Foul Play (Undercover Brothers, #19).

Frank jumped on the football train later than Joe and Chet. Joe first played in The Sinister Sign Post (#15), with Chet serving as an eligible receiver, but the text specifically says Frank wasn’t a member of the team. By 1953’s The Crisscross Shadow, Frank’s a three-way player who is the punter, quarterback, and captain; Chet was a two-way player, lining up as a center on offense and wearing #34. The Yellow Feather Mystery (#33) mentions Frank has been on the team for three years, meaning he either joined as a sophomore or skipped a year somewhere along the line. He’s a star in The Mystery of the Whale Tattoo (#47), a member of the offensive backfield in The Shattered Helmet (#52), and a participant in The Clue in the Embers (#34), The Mysterious Caravan (#54), The Vanishing Thieves (#66), and The Blackwing Puzzle (#82). Chet also was listed as a center in The Wailing Siren Mystery (#30) and The Mystery of the Aztec Warrior (#43), a lineman in The Arctic Patrol Mystery (#48), and as a player in The Secret Agent on Flight 101 (#46), Danger on Vampire Trail (#50), The Mysterious Caravan, and The Blackwing Puzzle.

The Hardys almost get thrown off Barmet Cliffs, near the Westview Apartments; Barmet Cliffs are said to be honeycombed with caves and full of abandoned mine shafts in What Happened at Midnight (#10). Bayport’s Grommet Park is mentioned as part of a blown ransom handoff; a few of Bayport’s parks have been mentioned in the canon, such as Seaview Park, which was also part of a ransom payoff in Mystery of the Samurai Sword (#60), and Bayport Memorial Park and its “Alfresco Disco” in The Apeman’s Secret (#62). Although it’s not a park, Shorewood Nature Center, a nature preserve, appears in A Will to Survive (#156).

After saving a man’s life on local TV, Joe is besieged by autograph seekers at the mall. He is overwhelmed by the attention, but I’m not sure why. Frank and Joe have received a great deal of publicity over the years, and they are even referred to as “local celebrities” by a TV producer early in Danger. In The Sting of the Scorpion (#58), we learn Frank and Joe have fans, and the brothers give an interview to a reporter from the New York Daily Star. Their travel plans are on TV in The Arctic Patrol Mystery, and they’ve been told their exploits have been read about by people in upstate New York (The Night of the Werewolf, #59) and California (The Four-Headed Dragon, #69). Joe made the front page of the Bailey Herald for saving his father’s papers from a fire in The Secret Warning (#17). Their picture has been in the paper “quite often,” according to The Crimson Flame (#77), and they’ve been interviewed for TV “half a dozen times” (The Blackwing Puzzle).

In Danger Frank and Joe mention a few previous crimes they’ve solved, although I don’t think they are referring to any published adventures. Frank mentions a bank robbery in which blurry videotape of the robber was their only evidence for a while. The Hardy boys fought bank robbers in the The Missing Chums (#4) and The Secret Panel (#25), but both mysteries are so old videotape could probably have been used for identifying or deterring robbers. The High Rise Bandit robbed apartments in the Westview Apartments “a few months ago,” but neither Frank nor Joe mention capturing him or her. When an interviewer asks the boys what was their “most exciting” mystery was, Frank responded, “I guess it was that time we discovered this ring of smugglers —” That could refer to a previous book, although there’s nothing to narrow it down; for that matter, “ring of smugglers” could refer to almost any previous book.

Where Is Bayport?: It takes two hours for the boys to get from Bayport to Manhattan by train. On Amtrak’s Northeast Regional schedule, two hours from New York to the east is somewhere around or east of New Haven, Conn. (Despite New Haven’s declining population, it is and always has been too large to be Bayport.) It takes about two hours to get to Philadelphia, so if Bayport is in New Jersey, it would be the near southern end, although no Amtrak routes seem to run directly from southern New Jersey to NYC. On the North Jersey Coast Line run by New Jersey Transit, two hours from New York gets the rider to about Asbury Park, N.J., although at certain times, trains can reach the line’s southern terminus, Bay Head, in a little more than two hours.

At one point, the time of sunset is mentioned: 8:40 p.m. (actually, 15 minutes before 8:55 p.m., but I did the math). You might think that could narrow the possibilities, but unfortunately it doesn’t add up; even on the longest day of the year, none of the candidate cities has a sunset that late. You have to move to the north or west to get a sunset after about 8:30, and unfortunately, that isn’t conducive to selecting cities along the Atlantic seaboard, where all the cities are either south or east of New York (latest sunset: 8:31 p.m., EDT — remember to add an hour for daylight saving time in the chart).

Priorities, man: After meeting movie star Wayne Clintock, Frank and Joe can’t wait to relay their brush with fame to the people they know. Frank thinks of Callie, his girlfriend, first; Joe counters with Chet, their best friend. In Joe’s position, I probably would have thought of my girlfriend next, if for no other reason than through the power of suggestion, but Chet has been referred to as the brothers’ best friend, so I guess I understand. But the next person Frank thinks of is Aunt Gertrude.

Gertrude. Why …? But … The purpose of telling people about celebrities you’ve met is to impress them or to share something with them because you’re so close. I’m not sure how Gertrude rises to the top of either list for Frank, but it happened.

I’d buy a ticket to that: Because Clintock is a movie star, Frank and Joe bleat about the films he has starred in. Drop Zone: Danger sounds like a rejected Hardy Boys title, while Hogan’s Law, War in the Streets, and The Last Blast are unremarkable titles. (There’s something of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 feel about all of them.) Clintock’s most recent film, Badge of Honor, shares a name with the fictional TV series in the movie L.A. Confidential, although Danger came out before the movie or the book it was based on.

Beat the Hangman, however, is a movie I’m intrigued by, and one I’d actually stop to watch a few minutes of if I came across it on cable. Clintock plays a “mysterious gunman” in the movie, which, along with the name, suggests it’s a Western. The name echoes the title of the 1953 film Beat the Devil, although that John Huston / Humphrey Bogart film was a parody of film noir, so there’s probably not a connection.

Those were the days: A cameraman mentions WBPT was originally supposed to be the flagship station of a fourth television network: the McParton Network, named after its founder. In the discussion, the boys and cameraman mention ABC, CBS, and NBC, but evidently this Dixon or the publisher had no confidence in Fox, which became the fourth network when it began primetime broadcasts in 1987. When Danger on the Air came out in 1989, Fox had network programming for two hours on both Saturday and Sunday nights. In fall 1989, it expanded into Mondays, and it had expanded into all nights by 1993.

Although skepticism that a fourth network could be sustained was abundant when Fox started, other networks outside the big three of ABC, CBS, and NBC existed in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Paramount, for instance, launched in 1948 but went off the air in 1956. The DuMont Television Network was the most successful, running from 1946-55, debuting two years before ABC’s and CBS’s television offerings. DuMont was done in by a variety of factors: getting the short end of AT&T’s limited broadcast technology, lack of a radio network to solidify finances and recruit talent, competition from its corporate partner, Paramount, and ABC, NBC, and CBS monopolizing the three VHF stations in most markets, forcing DuMont to expand into UHF channels, which many TVs of the era could not receive. Like McParton’s fictional network, most the video of DuMont’s shows were destroyed.

Privilege rejected: In New York, Frank tries to get an appointment with the head of Mediatronics, an electronics company. The company’s busy president, however, rejects Frank’s idea of a meeting out of hand — as almost any corporate leader would, no matter what previous books tried to tell us.

Questionable grasp of “hottest”: The villain plans to sell the original recordings of Mrs. Brody’s Boardinghouse, long thought lost, to a television station for a half million dollars. “Some people,” he says, “… believe that the revival of ‘Mrs. Brody’s Boardinghouse’ is going to be the hottest thing on television in years.” I will point out it’s not the villain who thinks this but whomever he’s going to sell the tapes to. However, I highly doubt the 35-year-old reruns of a black-and-white series would be “hot,” even if they hadn't been seen since they originally aired.

The child doesn’t drop far from the family eaves: After catching Frank and Joe eavesdropping, Ettinger, the head of Mediatronics, angrily asks the boys whether their parents taught them any manners. He fails to take into consideration that Fenton, as a private detective, probably taught the boys to eavesdrop.

Enhance!: The Masked Marauder, the criminal who opposes the Hardys in Danger, is caught on video tape. Of course the image is from a distance and blurry; of course a video technician is on hand to gradually improve the image through successive iterations until the suspect is clearly seen. No one yells, “Enhance!” but they might as well have.

Maybe the Hardys should be in charge of the police: When a producer at WBPT goes missing, Frank and Joe try to interest the Bayport Police Department in the case. As the Masked Marauder has already been caught, the police decline to investigate; Con Riley shrugs and says, “We’ll do our best to find her, but … If you guys hear from her again, get in touch with us right away.”

The interesting question here is whether Frank and Joe are justified for taking over crimefighting in Bayport because of police incompetence, or has Frank and Joe’s hypercompetence taught the police to not even try? I lean toward the latter, but that explanation requires a bit too much metaknowledge about the characters.

Opinions: A lot of Danger that is not focused on the mystery is devoted to fame. Should we want it? What are its pitfalls? What are its privileges? Joe is sure he wants to be a movie star, but he freezes up during an interview on live TV, and he’s overwhelmed by a crowd of autograph seekers after people watch him save a man’s life on TV. Joe seems to be fine with the kind of fame that makes him recognizable or gives him access to secrets, but he’s terrified of fame’s other aspects.

Frank and Wayne Clintock deal with other aspects of fame. Frank is unable to secure an interview with Ettinger, despite being a renowned teen sleuth and the son of Fenton Hardy, and he’s actually unrecognizable enough to sneak into the Mediatronics offices. Clintock has to deal with the ignominy of people seeing his awkward teenage years in Mrs. Brody’s Boardinghouse after he’s spent decades building his reputation as a tough action hero; when you’re famous, nothing is forgotten. And because everyone thinks they know him and his motivations, he becomes the prime suspect for the attacks on WBPT. Everything works out in the end, but fame certainly complicates his life.

That being said, the author stops looking at the fame aspect once the investigation kicks into gear, with no one really noticing or contacting Joe a day after his on-air lifesaving; it would have been interesting seeing how friends and family dealt with Joe’s fame other than Chet kidding him about it. This aspect of the story gives way to a better-than-average mystery, with someone using technology to cover his tracks, and Frank and Joe learn about the differences between appearance and reality on TV. They won’t remember the difference by the next book, but that’s OK.

Grade: B. Enhance!