The Search for the Snow Leopard (#139)

You might think The Search for the Snow Leopard is a mystery that involves travel to a faraway, exotic clime where the endangered species still exists or is used in symbology in some way. You would be wrong.

Snow Leopard is set in Bayport, and it’s a story about Frank and Joe being awful friends to Chet. As with all great works of literature, Snow Leopard starts with a fat joke. Chet has taken an internship at the zoo, and Frank and Joe compare Chet’s appetite to an elephant’s. Of course they do. They then “roared with laughter” (1) over a joke that is just lame as my summary made it sound. Later, when they need to talk to Chet again, Frank makes it clear he was only half listening to Chet when he said what he was going to do next. (Later, they reveal they didn’t even listen when Chet told them the name of the elephant they compared him to.)

They find Chet talking with Salamaji, the princess of the small nation of Fakenameistan — sorry, Rashipah. When Chet tries to impress her by mentioning that Frank and Joe are detectives, Joe grumbles about Chet revealing their true identities. Since when has Frank and Joe’s detective abilities been a secret? And hey, Joe, Chet’s trying to impress an attractive princess from a far-off land — be cool for once in your life. Chet’s never hampered your game when you put the moves on girls when Iola isn’t around, and Iola’s his sister. Frank’s amazed that Chet seems to be attracted to the princess, although I have no idea why an unattached guy liking a rich, exotic beauty who doesn’t treat him like a freak would be remarkable. Maybe Frank thinks Chet should stick with fatties? Later, Joe mocks Chet and Salamaji’s growing closeness while talking to his brother. I think he’s just jealous, though.

Anyway, Frank and Joe keep running around Bayport and the zoo because the zoo director wants them to investigate various animal escapes. After the first three escapes, the animal was captured and returned to its cage before anything bad happened, but then Emi the snow leopard is taken. Not long afterwards, Salamaji is kidnapped. Chet breaks the news to Frank and Joe this way: “‘The princess!’ he cried. ‘She’s been kidnapped!’”

Frank’s reaction: “‘What?’ Frank demanded. ‘Wait. Calm down.’”

I like that Frank can make “What?” a demand, but the rest of his speech seems out of line. Chet seems relatively calm, given the circumstances.

Perhaps Bayporters don’t know how to be friends; one of Salamaji’s friends, who has a key to her dorm room, lets three strange boys (Frank, Joe, and Chet) after when Salamaji goes missing, which seems like a poor choice. Frank and Joe certainly aren’t done being bad friends; when Salamaji’s ex-boyfriend thinks it’s strange that she prefers Chet to him, Frank has trouble concealing his agreement with the ex.

So Frank and Joe are clearly not being good friends with Chet, even though he called them “his best buds.” But Frank and Joe’s jerkhood is not the only thing Snow Leopard focuses on; it’s also concerned with animals. What does this book teach us about the animal kingdom?

• Zoos are very eager to watch snow leopard sex. As soon as Salamaji donates Emi, her female snow leopard, to the Bayport Zoo, the director phones up someone who has a male snow leopard to secure a “nice husband” (8) for Emi. Euphemisms ahoy!
  
• Sometimes it takes a beast to show how much you’ve lost your edge. In the original Disappearing Floor, Frank and Joe take out an escaped tiger by bouncing rocks off its skull until it dies. In Snow Leopard, Frank stands still, staring at an escaped tiger and talking to it, until someone else shoots it with tranquilizer darts. How the mighty have fallen!
  
• Tigers are pirates at heart. When the tiger is hit by the darts, its response is, “Arrrrrr!” (14). That’s supposed to be a growl, but I can’t take that idea seriously.
  
• Animal lovers really like the acronym “ARF.” Animal rights activists in Snow Leopard use ARF for their organization: Animal Rights Force. However, in the real world, ARF is also the Animal Rescue Foundation, a group that saves pets that have run out time at shelters; ARF was founded by Hall of Fame baseball manager Tony LaRussa and his wife in 1991, five years before Snow Leopard was published. There’s also the Animal Rescue Fund, a name under which several separate animal rescue charities operate across America.
  
• Joe would like to experience primate behavior. While watching apes groom one another, Joe asks Frank why he didn’t clean him like that when they were younger. Frank says he wouldn’t do it now, either. Frank’s right to say that, Joe. Your joke was weird.
  
• Chimps like soap operas. They watch Days of Destiny every weekday. Perhaps the best part of the book is that Days of Destiny actually sounds like a soap opera name.
  
• Vampire bats cause amnesia. Frank thinks he’s never seen vampire bats, even though vampire bats were a major plot point in Danger on Vampire Trail.
  
• Animal rights activists aren’t concerned about the law of man. Frank and Joe have a discussion with the Kellermans, the founders and only members of ARF, about the “laws of nature” and “laws of man.” Jeff Kellerman says he doesn’t want to break the laws of man because he isn’t useful to the animal-rights movement in jail. He later breaks the law several times, so he isn’t really worried about prison. But perhaps if the Sayer of the Law told him “he who breaks the law shall be punished back to the House of Pain,” he might change his mind.
  
• Snakes are boneless. Or at least they are according to the narrator of Snow Leopard. Perhaps the particular snake being described was bred in an unsuccessful attempt to find an alternative source of the meat for chicken McNuggets.
  
• Man really is the most dangerous game. And not just because Frank and Joe deem it acceptable to wear cutoffs as part of their “official summer vacation uniforms” (2). No, it’s because humans can use blow guns. Frank, Joe, and Chet try to rescue Salamaji from a big-game hunter but get caught themselves; the hunter and his two assistants decide to be sporting and give them a chance to survive, “Most Dangerous Game”-style. The trio finds Salamaji while fleeing the hunters; they also find blow guns that allow them to take out two of their pursuers and one of the great cats that Frank released to confuse the situation.
  
• Dead animals talk to Joe. While the kids are being chased by the hunters, Joe thinks he can hear the head of a bison telling him, “Don’t let these hunters get you too, kid” (142).

***

Anyway, it all turns out all right. Chet gets a date with the rescued Salamaji at the end of the book, the villains are all thrown in jail, and both snow leopards get to live at the Bayport Zoo. But that ending makes it clear the book has been focusing on the wrong protagonist the entire time … Chet rescues the girl he’s interested in from kidnappers and manages to overcome both her ex-boyfriend and his two awful friends to get a date with her. All hail the mighty Chet!

The Serpent's Tooth Mystery (#93)

Plot: Phil Cohen gets canned from his job at the zoo, then he gets framed for releasing and stealing the zoo’s snakes.

“Borrowing” from the past: Phil Cohen is the least-used chum — well, least used if you don’t count Jerry Gilroy, who hasn’t been seen since the ‘60s, or Perry Robinson, who I believe was killed and eaten in a hobo jungle during the Depression. He’s described as a “high-tech” genius, master of electronics and computers. That’s pretty much the angle he’s given after the Stratemeyer Syndicate sold the series; before, he was just a general book nerd. He draws and paints (Mystery of the Spiral Bridge, #45) and composes for and plays piano (The Clue of the Hissing Serpent, #53). He plans for college and a medical degree (The Mysterious Caravan, #54). Most damningly, he enjoyed reading as much as he did sports (The Pentagon Spy, #61). Nerd! On the other hand, Chief Collig describes him as athletic in Serpent’s Tooth; his quickness and agility is noted in The Pentagon Spy, he plays first base for Bayport High in The Mummy Case (#63), and he’s the county tennis champ in The Mysterious Caravan.

Phil gets phired in Serpent’s Tooth; he was hired to build electronically controlled display cases for snakes, but then he accidentally sets off an alarm while the head herpetologist was milking a snake for its venom. Oops. In the past, Phil has been employed as a timekeeper for Prito Construction (The Mystery of the Spiral Bridge), as an artifact restorer in a museum (The Mysterious Caravan), as a ticket taker at the Big Top Circus (Track of the Zombie, #71), and in some capacity at the Wild World animal park (The Sting of the Scorpion, #58).

Phil’s parents are mentioned in this book to be on their second honeymoon. The Cohens never appeared in the first 85 books of the series.

Frank mentions some “run-ins” with snakes. That's an understatement; the Hardys have seen more snakes than Marlon Perkins. Other than dogs, no other animal tries to kill the Hardys as much as snakes do. They encountered rattlers in The Mark on the Door (#13), Mystery of the Desert Giant (#40), The Clue of the Screeching Owl (#41), Mystery of Smugglers Cove (#64), and Track of the Zombie; a boa constrictor in Track of the Zombie; two different species of rattlesnakes, an Eastern diamondback and a pygmy rattler, in The Voodoo Plot (#72); a viper in The Clue of the Broken Blade (#21); a krait in The Hooded Hawk Mystery (#34); a cobra and a python in The Crimson Flame (#77); a coral snake and a cottonmouth in The Swamp Monster (#83); and just a plain-old snake in The Secret of Wildcat Swamp (#31). But the deadliest snake in this one, the Australian tiger snake, is a new one for the books. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), they don’t kill any snakes in this book.

Where is Bayport?: It’s two hours from Jersey City on a normal day. Jersey City, for those of you who can’t mentally untangle the sprawl that is the New York City metropolitan area, is just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, between Hoboken and Bayonne. According to Mapquest, it takes an hour and a half to get between Jersey City and the real Bayport, N.Y. (on Lon Gisland). Two hours would take you farther out on Long Island, to Riverhead — about the point where the island starts to thin itself into two narrow spits of land. That seems an unlikely place for Bayport, as that's a geographical point of interest that would have been mentioned in the books.

If you like the idea of Bayport being in New Jersey, two hours from Jersey City takes you pretty far down the shore — about to Mystic Island, which is almost to Atlantic City. That far south, and Bayporters would likely consider Philadelphia “their” city rather than New York, which is something that has never been shown in other books. Also, Frank, Joe, and Phil mark reaching the New Jersey Turnpike as a major milestone on their way to Jersey City, which just doesn’t work if they start in Jersey.

In The Serpent's Tooth Mystery, the best answer to the question of Bayport's location is probably New Haven, Conn., and its vicinity. It’s about two hours from Jersey City, and unlike destinations on Long Island, the Hardys could travel on the Turnpike near the end of their trip. Since this route also allows them to avoid the worst of New York traffic — not mentioned in the book — New Haven is a winner … this time. This conclusion is an outlier for most books; in The Castle Conundrum (#168), Frank admits Bayport is in New York.

Fenton’s advice: Write it down, all you aspiring detectives out there: The first thing Fenton taught his sons was, “Ask questions. Then, if all else fails, ask more questions.”

Your edumacation for the day: The title probably refers to King Lear, in which Lear castigates his truthful daughter, Cordelia, by saying in Act I, Scene IV: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!” Admittedly, this quote has no relevance to the story at all, but neither does the phrase “serpent’s tooth” — there’s nothing special about the teeth of the snakes in the book, and in any case, the serpents are usually called “snakes” and the teeth are generally called “fangs.”

As Phil notes, “hamadryad” is another name for the king cobra. It’s also a type of nymph from Greek mythology — a dryad, one of the nymphs that are closely tied to trees. The Greek mythology angle has nothing to do with the story, but that’s hardly important; if the Hardys can spew random facts, so can I.

Also, Joe learns the correct term for the antidote to a snake’s venom is antivenin, not antivenom. He’s corrected by a zoo physician who has the tone of someone who corrects someone on that every day.

Off brand: A recurring vehicle in the story is a flashy sports car called the Pillari 400 — evidently the hideous generic offspring of a Porsche and Ferrari. I imagine it having odd shaped wheels or a day-glo plastic interior. The Hardys also find a ticket for a professional football game between the Mustangs and the Titans, a game played in the Meadowlands. The USFL had collapsed in 1986, a few years before the book was published, but the author probably had something similar in mind. The Titans were the home team, playing at Titans Stadium; this is may be a reference to the New York Jets, who were originally named Titans, although the Jets are an NFL team rather than USFL. The Mustangs could refer to any number of horse-themed NFL and USFL teams, including the Baltimore / Indianapolis Colts, Denver Broncos, and Birmingham Stallions.

About time someone brought it up: At one point in Serpent’s Tooth, the Hardys find a stolen snake and return it. Of course, they trespass to do it. Officer Con Riley explains that the Hardys have found some clues, but the person responsible for the property on which they have trespassed isn’t having any of it: “I don’t care what they found! I pay taxes — taxes that fund your paycheck. I expect the police to solve crimes, not a couple of kids!”

Honestly, that cannot be said often enough.

Technology!: Ah, the late ‘80s, when technology was going to do everything for us. In this case, computers are used to provide security for the herpetology labs; visitors without an electronic badge set off alarms. This is an important plot point, as the Hardys realize the snake theft has to be an inside job since alarms weren’t set off. Unfortunately, that should have made the solution too easy. I worked with a similar system in 1990, and even then, not only did the system register authorized / nonauthorized people, but it also noted who those authorized people were. It should have made finding the culprit as easy as a quick check of the computer files.

Phil is also framed by a large electronic deposit into his account — an early example of computer banking. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t say what that entails: an ATM deposit? An electronic transfer? Magic electrons forming an ASCII-art check? Electronic transfer seems most likely, but if that were so, the police should have been able to figure out where the money came from, opening all sorts of new aspects to the case.

Everything’s up to date in Bayport: They’ve got the Bayport Zoological Gardens, after all — none of this lowbrow “Bayport Zoo” stuff. (Like it was in The Hooded Hawk Mystery, #34, or The Voodoo Plot, #72.) On the other hand, in a very ‘80s throwaway plot, Bayporters have to deal with toxic waste dumping in Barmet Bay.

Bayport also has a University Medical Center, leaving the question of what university? The only college to be associated before Serpent’s Tooth is Bayshore College (Mystery of the Samurai Sword, #60).

Previous hospitals in Bayport have included Bayport General Hospital (A Figure in Hiding, #16; The Secret Panel, #25; The Sign of the Crooked Arrow, #28; Tic-Tac-Terror, #74), City Hospital (The Melted Coins, #23), and Bayport Hospital (The Crisscross Shadow, #32; The Mystery at Devil's Paw, #38; The Viking Symbol Mystery, #42; The Mystery of the Aztec Warrior, #43;The Billion Dollar Ransom, #73). Additionally, there’s an “excellent” hospital at the Bayport Naval Base (The Billion Dollar Ransom).

Stretching the bounds of probability: While driving in New Jersey, the Hardys’ van is bumped by a semi into a lane that’s about to end, then bumped again and put into “a wild skid” on a wet roadway. Yet when the truck passes by them after the second bump, Joe is able to calmly read the label on the side of the semi as if nothing is going on. But is that any worse than Fenton Hardy “cr[ying] muffled words of encouragement through the gag over his mouth”?

Probably not. But it’s a close race, and they’re both pretty stupid. Also stupid is ventilation shafts big enough for Frank, Joe, and Iola to crawl through, but that’s a typical movie cliché.

Where “thank you” is a double entendre: When Joe is about to be sliced into pieces by a fan in that absurdly large ventilation shaft, Iola gets help, and Frank is able to rescue his brother in time. Frank says, “Iola told us you were in trouble. I think you owe her.” Joe responds, “Well, that’s one thank-you I won’t mind delivering.”

Opinions: The mystery for Serpent’s Tooth is decidedly average, although using snakes instead of strangely reluctant killers does get around the general plot question of Why don’t the villains just kill them? In any event, the investigation does have a plot twist or two, the false accusation of Phil does move the plot along, and despite the general dumb moves by Frank and Joe and general inaccuracies, the mystery itself is fine.

But beyond the actual mystery, the book occasionally shines. There are moments of self-awareness, as in the above complaint that the police should be finding clues, not a couple of kids. More importantly, the supporting cast beyond Phil feel more alive than anything else in the book — more alive, really than most of the series characters after Leslie McFarlane left the series. Iola and Chet actually talk to each other like siblings do, trading gibes. Chet is good natured and occasionally funny. Chet and the girls actually act like they are teenagers who care about Phil, willing to take stupid chances for the guy. Iola and Joe actually act like they like each other rather than being two humans who have been paired off for mysterious purposes. The book shines when the chums are on the page, and they’re shuffled off much too quickly.

Grade: B+. Chet, Callie, and Iola’s short appearance is enough to raise it above the standard digest.