Trouble Times Two (#167)

First proposition: The title of Trouble Times Two makes no sense. While the book does contain trouble, I can find no multiplier of said trouble.

Second proposition: Trouble makes more prescient statements than usual, commenting on the decline of unions and newspapers in 2002, years before their collapse had become national panics, and delivers a pointed statement on the lack of protections for whistleblowers.

Third proposition: The main chum (non-girlfriend division) in Trouble is the brainy Phil Cohen, and his opinions are given more respect than usual: When he convinces the others to watch a foreign film rather than an shoot-‘em-up or romantic film, the entire of gang of teens have a great time. Frank decides he should support Phil’s suggestions more often, since this “rare victory” (50) turned out well.

Conclusion: This means something.

I don’t know what, though. Whether this is an attempt to inculcate liberal values on the Millennial Generation, or whether this is an attempt to reflect the values of the book’s target audience, or whether I’m just a couple of steps from claiming the world is run by lizard people, I don’t know, but again: This means something.

The book starts with Frank drowsing in social studies class and being kept awake only by Callie flicking paperwads at him, which gives credence to the target audience argument. But later in the first chapter, “big, beefy” (8) Biff Hooper gets punched by troublemaker Tom Gilliam, and Biff is too surprised to fight back; that Biff, a character named after his fondness for punching, doesn’t fight back against an unprovoked attack in his only appearance in the book suggests a desire for pacifistic Millennials.

And then again, Tom gets the nickname “Trouble Boy” (3) and is later promoted to “Captain Trouble Boy” (61). Neither is a nickname real teenagers would tag a miscreant with; if an adult used it, it wouldn’t stick. Maybe this non-normal behavior is a hint about the Lizard People … Later, Joe says “the organization” built by Ho Chi Minh gave the United states a “big headache” (11). Of course the Lizard People would minimize the damage done to their world order — unless Ho was a Lizard Person himself? How deep does this lizard hole go?

(The author later writes a car “backs up” “in reverse” [17], which is either a Lizard Person writing or bad editing. I’ve given you the evidence. Only you can choose to see the truth.)

Anyway, Trouble Boy gets stuck in a study group with Frank, Callie, Phil Cohen, aspiring newsie Liz Webling, and Kevin Wylie, whose father is Tom’s father’s boss. For the social science fair — which I’m pretty sure isn’t a thing, or at least shouldn’t be a thing — they decide to report on the effects of / on whistleblowers. Frank defuses Tom’s natural surliness and anger by appointing him the leader of the team’s anti-whistleblower group. However, the team is hobbled by Tom’s five-day suspension for punching Biff, and when the other group members show up at the Gilliam apartment, Tom’s father becomes peeved at his son’s anti-whistleblower stance.

Liz is a character who has slipped beneath my radar, a side effect of my skipping around the canon. Liz first appeared in the early Casefiles as Callie’s friend, but Trouble appears to be her first appearance in the Digests. Liz is also in Kickoff to Danger (#170) and The Test Case (#171), filling the young snoop role one would expect of the daughter of someone in the newspaper game. (Here, she and her father work at the Bayport Gazette; in Kickoff and Test Case, her father is an editor at the Bayport Times, and she works for the school paper, the Beacon. She also reports for the Bayport Cable News in Test Case.) In Test Case, her reporting alienates the Hardys, and — as far as I can tell — she made no more appearances in the series.

That’s the boring school stuff. The mystery begins when Joe runs supplies to Fenton, who has staked out Stinky Peterson’s apartment building, posing as a homeless man. Stinky’s a thief — he’s a pro, according to Fenton, despite being nicknamed “Stinky” — but Joe and Fenton can’t stop him from handing off stolen pearls to a fence. The fence tries to kill Fenton as he drives away, which accords with the Bayport police’s reports of a more violent fence, one who is also more efficacious and has a longer reach. This fence is also suspected of murder, a rarity in a Hardy Boys book.

Con says the fence is from a national syndicate, not a “homegrown organized crime type” (29), which is sad; as every Millennial knows, the best criminal organizations are artisanal, bespoke groups that are committed to consuming the profits of their local region. It’s more responsible, you know? And you get a more personal feel when you’re stabbed or mugged.

The next day, Laura is giving everyone — Fenton, the boys, and the readers — the silent treatment and refusing to make breakfast. This is Laura’s only appearance in the story, and her only purpose is to not say anything. She and Gertrude are mentioned a couple of other times, but they are only mentioned to highlight their absence from the home. (Well, Gertrude also gets to pass a phone to Fenton.) The Hardy ladies could be less present in this story, but in books in which the women aren’t mentioned, their absence occasionally is felt as a presence. Here, they do not even register their lack of presence.

When the teenagers witness Tom’s dad, Russell Gilliam sneaking into Tri-State Express, the shipping company he is an accountant for, late on a Saturday night, the Hardys get suspicious. Frank looks up Russell’s employment history (somehow) and sees he’s had a series of short-term jobs. While Joe thinks he might be “like that famous impersonator guy” (52) — I’m guessing he’s referring to the 1996-2000 TV show, The Pretender, in which a genius imposter on the run takes a new type of job every episode — Frank thinks he’s the advance man for the national crime syndicate.

Fenton’s background check reveals something different; Russell Gilliam received a golden parachute, which Fenton calls a “golden handshake” (63), from each of his employers. His peripatetic job history began at Dynodyne — a name that also suggests Lizard Author / bad editor, especially when they could have used Yoyodyne — when his house burned down, he lost his job, and his wife divorced him and took the kid.

Tom and Kevin posture when Tom’s suspension is over, and while Kevin makes abstract threats with a knife, Tom puts a stink bomb in Kevin’s locker that ignites magnesium Kevin kept in it. Joe, who shadowed Tom, gets the fire under control but refuses to rat out Tom, even when the assistant principal threatens his permanent record. Now trusting Joe, Tom comes clean: His dad is a professional whistleblower, getting payouts and NDAs from his crooked employers. After Tom’s mom died, Tom has lived with his father, wandering around the country; Tom worries his father has lost sight of “the line between being an idealist and being an extortionist” (90).

Things go wrong when Tom decides to solicit advice from Fenton. Fenton isn’t at the Hardy home, but the social-science fair group is, so Tom unburdens himself to them instead. Kevin tells his father, who is using his shipping company to fence goods for a silent partner; Mr. Wylie isn’t good at hiding his tracks, as Kevin’s grandfather tried to hire Fenton to investigate his son-in-law months before. Kevin’s father fires Russell, and Frank and Joe are worried Mr. Gilliam will declare “war”: “I guess trouble is Mr. Gilliam’s business,” Frank says (103), echoing the title of a Raymond Chandler short-story collection.

Despite this link to tough-guy stories, when Russell is lured into a trap and assaulted by Stinky Peterson, Frank and Joe save him and lament that unlicensed investigators like Russell can’t handle the “rough and tumble” (112) of the PI business. I’m pretty sure an accountant would make a great private investigator, and avoiding assault isn’t part of PI certification; in any event, Russell shrugs it off as a warning. Frank and Joe agree, and if there’s anything they know, it’s violent warnings.

(Or maybe they don’t. The Hardys have never been able to tell the difference between warnings and attempted murder.)

The Hardys can’t prevent Tom from being kidnapped the next day; Joe won’t even stick up for Tom from Kevin’s insults. (I’ve said Joe was a bad friend before; this is just more evidence. It’s always easier to punch down, isn’t it, Joe?) The Bayport police won’t look for Tom for 72 hours, even though he’s a minor and doesn’t have a history of being a runaway, because they’re not very good at their jobs, so the Hardys step up. When the Hardy brothers confront the Wylies at their McMansion, the elder Wylie’s silent backer, Nicolai, barges in with goons and takes everyone to the Tri-State offices, where the Gilliams are already being held.

The prisoners are bound, and Tri-State is set ablaze. (Nicolai really does not care about the fire looking like an accident. He has a very low opinion of American pig-dog police.) With the help of a box cutter Tom palmed, they manage to cut their bonds, break down a barred window, and escape with the help of firefighters. Mr. Wylie turns state’s evidence, Mr. Gilliam decides to give up his silent whistleblowing, and everything turns out OK.

Except as far as we can tell, Nicolai is still free, and his organization will probably threaten the Wylies’ lives. And we’re never told what grade the group received on the project that started this fiasco; Tom refuses to argue against whistleblowing, so Frank says “Phil and the other kids” (149) will work something out. “Other kids”? Are you going to give them Werther’s Originals if they do good work?

Or maybe he means, “Phil and the other non-Lizard People.” If so, I was right: this means something.

Crime in the Cards (#165)

Crime in the Cards has everything I like about a Hardy Boys story: a new hobby for Chet, a Bayport setting, hints of actual intimacy between the Hardys and their girlfriends, the introduction of a new character who makes more appearances, and a mystery with a blindingly obvious solution. Cards isn’t a perfect book, and it won’t appeal to everyone as strongly as it does to me, but I would put Cards among the best of the digests.

The setup for Cards is that Magic the Gathering is sweeping Bayport High, and Chet is one of the best players. Magic the Gathering is a fantasy-themed collectible card game; that means players buy packs of random cards of various rarities, and by that rarity, the cards may achieve value beyond their utility in the game. Of course, this Dixon isn’t allowed to use the name “Magic the Gathering”; instead, the knockoff product is called “Creature Commander,” which is a good enough name. This Dixon shows enough familiarity with the game to make the allusion clear and show he or she has either played Magic or done enough research to make it seem like he or she has.

As any adult might expect, playing Creature Commander doesn’t make Chet cool. Callie and Iola are baffled by the game, and even though Frank says, “The game’s fairly simple” (2), neither he nor Joe has any inclination to play. Joe says, “It’s not my kind of game, but …” and then shrugs. Why should they risk their aura of cool on one of Chet’s hobbies? (Although Chet snipes that they have no qualms about claiming to know all about Creature Commander to impress the girls.) More to the point, ex-BHS football player Sam Kestenberg bullies Chet and his competitors while also getting Joe’s goat.

The mystery begins in earnest when Daphne Soesbee’s Creature Commander deck is stolen from her locker. This is Daphne’s first appearance, and she makes two more appearances before the end of the digest series, in Trick or Trouble (#175) and Warehouse Rumble (#183); in those books she fills a role similar to the one she occupies here: a female acquaintance / friend for Chet. Not a girlfriend, but someone who shares Chet’s enthusiasms. I wish she had appeared more often in the books; the Hardys need more people who are in their orbit but not in their core group of chums, like Jamal Hawkins, and the gender balance of the cast could use some adjustment.

Anyway, Bayport High School responds to the theft and the popularity of Creature Commander in the manner of self-important bureaucracies everywhere: with ham-handed stupidity. (Given how poorly the school handles a cheating scandal in The Test Case [#171], that's unsurprising.) The cards are banned from school grounds, because what BHS wants more than anything is for the problem to go away with as little effort on the part of faculty and staff as possible. But Chet pulls an awesome new rare card, the Coyote, from a pack he bought, and he can’t resist showing it off in front of his Creature Commander playing friends at school. With the Coyote and Bargeist, another powerful rare, Chet believes he has a chance to win next week’s big Creature Commander tournament. (The Bargeist, if you care, is probably a reference to the barghest, which is either a monstrous black dog or ghost or elf in northern English folklore or a daemon that can look like a goblin or wolf in Dungeons & Dragons.)

Chet is caught with the cards in English class. He is supposed to be caring about Moby Dick, a 19th-century decorative doorstop masquerading as something relevant to 21st-century teenagers. When Chet returns at the end of the day to reclaim his cards, he finds they’ve been stolen from the teacher’s desk. Rather than putting his faith in the police, whom Chet doesn’t believe will take the case seriously, Chet turns to the Hardys. Honestly, it’s hard to blame Chet on this one: I can’t believe a Bayport PD officer would consider little pieces of cardboard could be worth hundreds of dollars. I almost imagine Con Riley blinking and asking Chet how much he could get for the ace of diamonds in his desk.

To solve the case, Frank and Joe navigate the world of Bayport collectible hobbies, from a mostly reputable hobby shop (the Dungeon Guild) to a slightly dodgy individual dealer (Gerry) to the extremely sketchy Black Knight, who uses the Internet not to sell cards directly but to meet with potential buyers in out-of-the-way places. Gerry also runs a cloak-and-dagger Creature Commander tournament where everyone wears a mask and winners take possession of one of the cards from the loser’s deck. (This used to be a real Magic the Gathering format, although the card the winner acquires a random card from the loser’s deck, and set aside before the game, rather than a card of the winner’s choice.) The Hardys (and Dixon) wander through the geeky subculture and keep from talking down about the game and its players. Heck, even Callie and Iola pick up the game by the end!

The girls learn the game even though Frank and Joe have considerable physical contact with them than usual. Their relationships start off on rocky ground; when Frank says he and Joe “have something more worthwhile” than vast amounts of money, Iola “hopefully” asks if it’s her and Callie (3). C’mon, Iola; have more pride than that. Fortunately, their relationships improve: In addition to two hugs and three hand squeezes, there are a total of three — three! — kisses. That might be a record for a Hardy Boys book! Usually, I would delve into the implications of all this intimacy, but this time I was struck by the veneer of normal heterosexual teenage behavior given to these acts. The squeezing is of hands; the kisses are on cheeks. This is, by any real measure, a pair of tepid relationships. So why stop somewhere between no touching and normalcy? Did the author feel pressure to include such performative signifiers for some reason? Or was Simon and Schuster convinced its target audience would react badly to mouth-on-mouth kisses, and this Dixon was able to push the envelope only so far?

If I were in charge of the Hardys, I wouldn’t be satisfied with this sort of restraint. I understand not even hinting at sexuality, sure, but a taste of honey is worse than none at all. And I don’t think snogging hurt Harry Potter at all, even among those in the Hardys’ target age range (8 to 12, according to the back cover).

However, if Frank and Joe are unable to meet Callie and Iola’s physical teenage needs, the brothers do treat them like trusted peers in the investigation — not equals, exactly, because the Hardys have considerably more experience at being detectives, and even Chet has helped them more. But Iola and Callie get to participate; sometimes they have to stand up for themselves to get that right, but Frank and Joe acknowledge they have something to contribute rather than insisting on increasing the mystery’s level of difficulty by refusing help. I mean, being the wheelwoman and cutting off avenues of escape with a vehicle aren’t the most exciting ways to help, but they are valuable; they can be crucial. This is a vast improvement; Iola also mentions having to hide in the trunk previously — she refuses to do so again — but the context is left unsaid. Was it for a mystery, or was it to sneak into a drive-in? Maybe to keep Aunt Gertrude from knowing the boys’ had invited strange women into the car?)

Unfortunately, even with the help, the Hardys fail, or at least they fail to meet their deadline, the Creature Commander tournament. Chet shells out a lot of cash — where does he get it all? We never see him work — to buy the cards to compete in the tournament, even though they aren’t as good as the ones he’s lost. Unfortunately, he’s disqualified in the tournament’s second round for accusing another player of using one of Chet’s stolen cards, then punching him. Yes, at the end of the book, Chet gets a special reward from the game’s creator for helping to expose the counterfeiting — wait, is counterfeiting as a crime restricted to currency? Anyway, for helping to preserve player confidence in Creature Commander cards, gets an even cooler card, so as always, being Frank and Joe’s friend is stressful but lucrative for Chet.

The Hardys and their friends also tour Bayport while solving the mystery, which I always enjoy. Sometimes I wonder if anyone at S&S ever thought to compile a bible or at least a map for Bayport, and then I realize how silly the idea is. In the Hardy Boys stories, continuity is a bug, not a feature; anything that might confuse the audience, might make readers think they are missing something, is to be avoided. So we won’t be see Old Bluff Road again; that’s no real loss, as the road’s only real purpose is to be a deserted backroad near cliffs, which is the role the Shore Road used to fill. Bayport’s northwest side, where industrial parks have replaced the scrub thickets Frank and Joe knew as children, will be rewritten into something else. The Kiff and Kendall restaurant chain will disappear into the ether, as will the abandoned Benson Mini-Mall be mentioned in further books — and, unfortunately, the new, nearby development of Magus Hills will also cease to exist after Cards.

This is a shame because Magus Hills makes Bayport about 241 percent cooler. I don’t care whether Magus Hills was named by a fantasy nut, or maybe a fanatical devotee of John Fowles; whether the development has streets named after Gandalf and Raistlin or Nicholas Urfe and Phraxos — or hey, it could be named after either Marvel Comics character with that name. I’d even settle for the Zoroastrian sense of the word.

(One place name that continues to be used is Jewel Ridge, Conn. The city is mentioned as the home of the one of the competitors in the Bayport Creature Commander tournament; the state isn’t mentioned, but Jewel Ridge’s location has been established in other books.)

The solution is blindingly obvious. Although Gerry, a high-school Creature Commander card dealer who doesn’t play the game, is an obvious suspect, the key clue is the presence of Mr. McCool, a belligerent part-time teacher who teaches kids how to use a print shop. Of course Mr. McCool is connected to the thefts, which he uses to acquire cards to copy in his printing plant. (Kestenberg the bully is pulling the actual thefts, funneling the cards to McCool, and then selling the fakes and real cards as the Black Knight, which was a bit harder to predict.) I find it hard to believe McCool could duplicate the cardstock and finish of the cards, but what trips him up is that he duplicates the ketchup stain Chet soiled his Coyote and White Knight cards with. Seeing the stain on a Coyote card caused Chet to start a fight at the big tournament, but only when the police revealed the stain was printed onto the card does the penny drop for Frank — only 100 pages after it did for me, but hey, we can’t all be geniuses.

(If you think it’s petty and foolish to claim genius status at being an adult smart enough to solve a mystery in a book aimed at pre-teens, well, I don’t care, Judgy McJudgerson.)

The London Deception (#158)

You know, it’s really great the Hardy Boys, those plucky underdogs, get to travel to Europe —

Oh, that’s right. They just went to Italy in the previous book, The Lure of the Italian Treasure. Unlike last time, The London Deception describes why they’ve been allowed to head abroad without supervision: They’re visiting Londoner Chris Paul, who stayed with the Hardys while he was an exchange student at Bayport High School the previous year. Why haven’t we seen or heard about Chris before? Because Chris came to Bayport last year, and no Hardy Boys books are set last year. Duh!

Also, Chris is boring. His only personality trait is ribbing the Hardys about American inferiority, and we all know he’s trying to mask his inferiority complex.

Anyway, while on their two-week trip to Jolly Old, Frank and Joe get roped into helping Chris’s father prepare for the premiere of his play, Innocent Victim. Dennis Paul is directing the play, and he’s cast Chris in the title role. Despite being open about how much the Paul family is involved in the play, he’s trying to hide that Innocent Victim is a vanity production, which the theater world looks down upon, by inventing a producer no one sees. The only glimpse we get of the production is a courtroom scene, putting me in mind of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, but that is probably because of my limited knowledge of the theater.

Joe can’t imagine being a performer. “If I was on that stage in front of all those people, my stomach would be doing back flips,” Joe says. “I’d be sweating bullets!” (4). In Danger on the Air (#95), Joe is overwhelmed by the attention he receives after saving a man’s life on TV, so this sort of reaction has been mentioned before. That being said, Joe’s been on stage before, in a minor role as a Baker Street Irregular in the eponymous play in The Giant Rat of Sumatra (#143). (The other actors say he’s not very good.) Frank and Joe had small roles as policemen in Homecoming Nightmare, put on by the Bayport Players’ in Cast of Criminals (#97). Joe was part of a “burlesque orchestra,” led by Chet, at their high-school graduation in The Great Airport Mystery (#9); the graduations were ignored, so we should perhaps ignore Joe’s performance. More seriously, he played guitar in a gig at the Hessian Hotel in Track of the Zombie (#71), and the same book mentions he “often” plays guitar in student concerts at BHS. In the revised Flickering Torch Mystery (#22), he’s part of a combo called “South Forty” with his brother and friends; he plays guitar at a folk / country rock gig in that book.

Joe’s scared of something else as well, although it’s hard to tell if it’s Iola or the play’s technical director, Jennifer Mulhall, or women entirely. Jennifer, who is described as “young” but someone who “radiated confidence and commanded respect” (4), singles Joe out for special attention. She also gives Joe a *wiiiiiiink* as she tells him good night at one point. Joe seems to like Jennifer, as Frank says, “I kind of figured you liked being around her” (95), which causes Joe to blush, but that’s as far as his responses go; he does nothing else, not even thinking of Iola, around Jennifer — not even when she saves him from falling off a building. (Admittedly, he does give her a hug when he rescues her, tied up in a closet, but that’s a little creepy; she doesn’t have much say in the matter.)

Anyway, the production of Innocent Victim has had a run of unfortunate “accidents,” just like you’d expect for a location / business that is used as a locale in the first few chapters of a Hardy Boys book. Jennifer’s assistant, Neville Shah, broke his wrist before the book begins, and he eventually quits. So does the stage manager. In the first chapter, three spotlights blow while Jennifer is leaning off a catwalk adjusting other lights, and she goes over the edge, with only Joe’s strong arm and quick reflexes saving her. Upon investigating, Frank thinks the spotlights’ malfunction “might have been sabotage” (19), which should go unsaid — it’s an insult to the readers’ intelligence to suggest otherwise. Later, a fire (and the excellent sprinkler system that douses it) damage the production’s costumes, and the theater’s sound board is stolen.

The theater’s resident ghost is spotted in the control booth when both the spots overheat, and the theater people immediately bring up the supernatural. (Even Frank has trouble maintaining his skepticism — “Even I’m beginning to think this ghost is for real,” he says [39] — but that’s less a product of the plot and more a result of slipshod writing.) I wanted London Deception to be a full Scooby-Doo: a real-estate scam pulled off by using a supernatural natural legend and a person in a costume. The villainy is centered around a real-estate scam at a theater with a ghost legend; the owner of the theater needs Innocent Victim out so he can sell the theater to a soccer player who wants to open the second location of his restaurant in the remodeled theater in time for the World Cup. But even though the villains have a former circus acrobat amongst their number, they don’t commit to the ghost bit, and that’s disappointing. Perhaps it’s because the ghost, the wife of a former owner of the theater who committed suicide, is just a ghostly presence rather than a true g-g-g-ghost! I understand even villains have to work with what they’re given, but Mr. Jeffries, the owner, needed to start playing up the ghost’s malevolence as soon as he hatched his stupid, stupid plan.

Frank and Joe investigate — of course — and according to a private investigator hired by Jeffries, Frank and Joe “have some fame as amateur sleuths” (43), which is good to know; in the last ten or so books, that’s varied. (The idea their career would be secret never made any sense to me.) Frank sounds like he’s learned some investigative tricks in London Deception; when he questions a member of the cast, he manages to frame his questions to her in a way that doesn’t sound accusatory. Shockingly, that’s a big step forward. Also a step forward, at least technologically: To investigate the theater’s history, Joe “surfs the internet” (38) and searches for the Quill Garden Theater. Joe gets sixteen results, which is both ridiculous and possible for 1999. Using Google today, I found 844,000 results on that phrase (although only three when using quotes around the term), and the theater doesn’t even exist in my world.

Since Frank and Joe are in a foreign country, they get to sightsee — well, they traipse through London landmarks while investigating, which is almost like sightseeing. They go on a Haunted London tour, and they follow suspects to Madame Tussaud’s, the Tower of London, Victoria Park, and the Boleyn Ground (unnamed in the story), the home of the West Ham United soccer team. That’s the way I like to see new people and places: while completely distracted!

I apologize for this digression, but I did research, and by Dixon, I’m going to use it: Footballer John Moeller wants to open his restaurant’s second location in preparation for the next World Cup, which Moeller intimates will be in England, but that doesn’t make any sense. Deception was published in 1999; the year before, the World Cup was in France, while the next scheduled one, in 2002, was scheduled to be held in Japan and South Korea. England hasn’t hosted the World Cup since 1966, and it isn’t among the scheduled future hosts. I think the author was hoping American kids wouldn’t know or care about the World Cup schedule, but that’s playing with fire — given youth soccer participation rates, American kids were probably much more likely to know about the World Cup than American adults.

However, the author was much more knowledgeable about the Premier League, the top league of English (and occasionally Welsh) soccer. The fictional Moeller plays for West Ham United (“the Hammers”), a London-based team that has generally been mediocre or worse since London Deception was written. (West Ham, as Dean Thomas’s favorite team, is the only soccer team mentioned in the Harry Potter series.) Every year in the Premier League, the three worst teams are sent down to the second-best league (now called The Championship), and three Championship teams are elevated to the Premier League. West Ham was relegated from the Premier League after the 2001-02 season, spending three seasons in the second tier, and then again after the 2010-11. West Ham spent only one year in the less-prestigious Championship that time before returning to the Premier League.

Frank and Joe discover that soccer hooliganism is a real thing. The boys almost get trampled during a scuffle, and they get thrown into the stadium’s detention area, which is filled with hooligans, for trying to approach Moeller after the match. West Ham has links to hard-core soccer hooliganism going back to the ‘60s. Surprisingly, according to Wikipedia, West Ham hooliganism isn’t restricted to fights with opposing fans: They also fight one another, which is only unusual to an American in that these hooligans organize themselves into factions to do their in-fighting.

In Deception, West Ham is defeated by Chelsea, another London-based team. Chelsea has been one of the best clubs in English soccer, a charter member of the “Top Four” group (now the “Big Six”) that has dominated the sport this century. Chelsea has won five league championships in the 21st century, finishing outside of the top four (in a 20-team league) only five times. No wonder West Ham loses!

Back to the story … Despite a lack of brain power — when Jennifer goes missing, Frank and Joe ignore a consistent tapping sound in the theater, and they let Jeffries get the last word in a detective / villain exchange near the end — they catch Jeffries, Shah (aka Anacro, the Human Spider), and the play’s former stage manager with the help of Moeller and the London police. The Hardys don’t even have to resort to karate to catch these effete London theater villains; Frank uses a mannequin’s arm to smack the stage manager, and Joe uses “powerful punches” (145) to knock out Shah.

Of course, Innocent Victim turns out to be a hit, and the most chill powerful West End producer, Mr. Schulander, shows up to dangle funding in front of Dennis Paul. A happy ending!

The Lure of the Italian Treasure (#157)

I hope some enterprising writer or editor commissioned / wrote The Lure of the Italian Treasure as a way of writing off a trip to Italy on their income taxes. I doubt that’s true, although I think someone in the creative process for this book has actually gone to Italy. The details feel right.

This is the first time Frank and Joe have left North America / the Caribbean in the digest series. They traveled to Canada in Cross-Country Crime (#134), and then they went to the Caribbean twice — The Secret of Skeleton Reef (#144) and The Caribbean Cruise Caper (#154) — but the last book that sent them overseas was Revenge of the Desert Phantom (#84), in which they stopped a civil war in Africa after diverting through Paris. Desert Phantom is so unlike the rest of the series it barely counts, though. If you want a “normal” Hardy Boys book, their last trip out of North America was in The Crimson Flame (#77) — Thailand — and their last trip to Europe was to Germany in The Submarine Caper (#68, also known as The Deadly Chase).

But Frank and Joe don’t make a big deal about their trip to Italy, and even a kerfuffle with customs inspectors in Milan over Joe’s bugging equipment is downplayed as barely worth mentioning (except as foreshadowing). So why are Frank and Joe, average American teens, in Italy, and why should we care, if they’re so blasé? Well, they’re working on an archaeological dig outside Florence. Before you can jump to the obvious conclusion that this is related to Frank’s interests or that Fenton as placed them at the dig to uncover antiquities theft or fraud or some damn thing, we learn that working on an Etruscan archaeological site has been Joe’s dream “for more than a year” (2). Yes, lunkheaded Joe is the one who wants to see Etruscan ruins, and he’s interested enough to not only work as an unpaid student (for credit, maybe, but where?) but to also rope in his brother.

How did they become a part of this program? Who knows! It’s never explained. If you’re in charge and the Hardys show up, you thank your lucky stars, integrate them into the program as well as possible, and wait for the crime and astounding luck to wash over you. And let me tell you: Hardy-caliber luck really cleans out your pores. (Crime, not so much.) It’s not like you usually pay them — The Hunt for the Four Brothers (#155) notwithstanding — for their normal labor or their mystery solving.

And the Hardys certainly bring the cheap labor and unbelievable luck in this one. Joe uncovers an Etruscan potsherd, which allows the Dixon to go over archaeological procedure and introduce our supporting cast: Cosimo Gianotti, a fellow student whose “English was almost flawless, though he spoke with an accent” (5); Julia Russell, an Englishwoman getting her doctorate at the University of Florence; and Professor Mosca, who is nominally in charge of the dig but rarely makes an appearance. Count Vincenzo Ruffino, whose estate the dig is on, and his daughter, Francesca, also pop up about this time. Francesca flirts a bit with Frank, which perhaps inspires Frank, who one-ups his brother by unearthing a box full of jewelry. Frank gets a quick congratulatory kiss from Francesca as a reward.

Now, a note about the jewelry: Among the pieces are “fibulae” and “agrafes” (16). The former term is the plural of “fibula,” which is a brooch or clasp; the latter also describes clasps, usually on armor or costumes. Also, one might guess that jewelry would make the boys think of their mother, aunt, or girlfriends, but elder female Hardys go almost unmentioned, and the only time Iola’s name comes up is to remark that she gave Joe a handkerchief so he would “think of her when he made an important discovery” (2). Predictably, he never gives her a second thought; at least Frank thinks Callie would appreciate one of Florence’s lovely views.

The box is left in situ so that the find can be photographed in context, but after Joe has a misleading nightmare to inject a bit of excitement into the story, the Hardys awake to find the jewelry is missing, and the man the count placed on guard — Bruno, a former convict, now employed as a gardener by the count — has been chloroformed. The Hardys get off on the wrong foot with the police when an officer sees Frank too close to the crime scene; Frank tells Cosimo to explain to the officer how great Frank and Joe are, but Cosimo declines, saying, “I think we’d better just be quiet. I know the type.”

And the boys get to know the type as well: Inspector Amelia Barducci suspects the boys of involvement in the theft. (Amanda Knox and author Douglas Preston would both learn about this type in Florence.) The bugging device that customs officials found raises her suspicions, and she also finds the timing — the theft occurred two days after the Hardys arrived — suggestive. The inspector also thinks Frank finding and sniffing the chloroformed rag shows he was checking to see if the cloth still smelled of the chemical, and using his knowledge of the moon’s phases to reason when it would be dark also indicates his possible guilt.

Despite the polizia’s suspicions, the brothers are allowed to continue working at the dig; the next day they find a skeleton and a bronze dagger — outstanding finds! Honestly, Mosca’s benign indifference might have uncovered the greatest innovation in archaeology: Hiring detectives. After all, it’s their job to discover what has been hidden. (Detectives who are students are preferred; you can pay them little or nothing at all! Exploitation of young workers for “experience” and “college credit” is standard practice in academia and industry, after all.)

Bruno shows them a secret passage, which they conclude the thief used to get away. The police, who find them there, reach the same conclusion; the inspector says the government has ordered her to tolerate the Hardys, but the next time she finds them meddling, she will arrest them.

Frank and Joe can’t let things go, of course, so they take time off their unpaid jobs and dive into the Reprobate Roll Call! (Also, I am not recapping the boring investigation part of the book. Literally, the most memorable part was that Francesca has a horse: Her name was Lola; she was a show horse.)

• Francesca Ruffino. Francesca likes to flirt with Frank, even in front of her boyfriend. When she takes the Hardys riding, their horses are spooked by a gunshot and collide. (Both boys are thrown, but Francesca saves the unconscious Frank.) Joe calls her a “mixed-up chick” (72) because she baits her boyfriend by batting her eyes at Frank.
  
  
• Count Vincenzo Ruffino. The count is having trouble finding the money to keep up his old castle, and selling the jewelry would raise considerable cash. His father was a Fascist under Mussolini, and the count keeps his father’s military gear — including a rifle the same caliber as the one that spooks Frank and Joe’s horses — in a secret room. On the other hand, he’s a non-entity, and I don’t care about him.
  
  
• Vito, Francesca’s boyfriend. He’s obviously jealous of Frank, and he might not like Americans, but that has nothing to do with stealing antiquities. He was in the area when Frank and Joe’s horses were spooked. He also insults Frank’s face — to his face — with Frank being too gutless to respond with a toothless insult.
  
  
• Antonio Cafaggio, the count’s friend. Cafaggio runs a shop in Florence, and Francesca is sure he’s taking advantage of her father, who sold Cafaggio a family heirloom too cheaply for Francesca’s liking. But they find nothing incriminating in Cafaggio’s castle warehouse, and Cafaggio does nothing nefarious when he catches the Hardys, Cosimo, and Francesca trespassing in the warehouse, turning them over to the count instead.
  
  
• Bruno. He keeps finding secret passages around the count’s estate, he served time in jail (for embezzlement), and he makes a joke about killing the Hardys to keep them quiet. (Frank and Joe claim to understand that it’s a joke, but they note the “humor has an edge” [74].) Bruno also leads the boys to the count’s father’s rifle, which Bruno may have used and / or planted.
  
  
• Phillip Speck, a fence. According to Bruno, he buys stolen antiquities. When Frank and Joe go undercover as buyers, Cafaggio’s assistant, Pino, enters the store and reveals their identities. Speck tries to lead them at gunpoint to Pino’s van, but the Hardys make a break for it and elude both, shaking Pino during a foot chase through Florentine tourist sites. (Both Speck and Pino know where the Hardys sleep, so I’m not sure what good escaping momentarily does.) Pino is captured by police for trespassing, and Speck claims he wasn’t involved with the jewels — but Speck says the count is deep in hock with a loan shark, so maybe the Hardys should look at him?

After Frank and Joe elude Pina, a car tries to run the Hardys’ Vespas off a cliff. A little later, someone tosses a smoke bomb into their sleeping quarters to scare them off, which makes no sense — if guns and an attempt at vehicular homicide isn’t scary enough, then a smoke bomb would be pretty weak tea. The sprinklers do ruin the boys’ clothes, though, so that’s a victory for the criminals, one as important as any the criminals usually get.

Inspector Barducci is unimpressed by this sequence of events, explaining it all away. But she does extend her warning, giving the boys one more chance. If that’s the way you discipline criminals, inspector, no wonder Italy has a reputation for lax law enforcement. Later, when Frank and Joe try to tell her Vito’s car looks like the one that ran them off the road, Barducci tells them to buzz off, then arrests Bruno.

That night, the dig is robbed again. The Hardys and Cosimo catch Francesca wandering around; they force her to admit Speck and Vito are the masterminds behind the thefts. They also make her wear Joe’s bugging device, which is classic crime drama stuff. There’s a lot of scrambling, Frank says “there’s no time” to call the police (130), and the Hardys rush off, putting a young woman’s life at risk for their pride, I think, more than to find stolen antiquities.

The stakes increase when Speck and his men stuff Francesca and Vito in the trunk of their limo and drive off. When Frank and Joe run to get the cops — the same cops Cosimo stayed behind to call — they are caught by Speck’s men. It was a trap, you see. Francesca ratted them out with a note slipped to the villains, and Speck and Vito — actually a con man named Claudio — played it perfectly. Stupid Hardys! That’s what you get for not actually planning!

However, Speck and Claudio make the classic blunder: Getting involved in a land war in Asia. No, wait, that’s not it. They taunt Francesca, demeaning her intelligence, telling her she’ll never be able to go home again, and laughing at her falling for Claudio so easily, more easily than they had hoped: “You plant seeds, and some turn into beautiful flowers. I never thought this one would be so easy to pick,” Speck says (136).

Speck, Claudio, and their thugs take Frank, Joe, and Francesca into the woods to kill them, but Speck abandons his co-conspirators with the goods. Claudio turns on the thugs, leaving them as well as the Hardys tied up in the wilderness. But Claudio inexplicably spares their lives. Another classic blunder! Remember the classic hiking maxim: Take no chances; leave no witnesses. Or something like that.

Frank and Joe round up the thugs, and despite their near escape, the Hardys are not too harried to lecture a somewhat contrite Francesca. The police quickly sort out who’s who and who deserves prison; Speck is quickly arrested off-page by the police, and the artifacts are recovered, delivered to the Hardys by an officer who thinks the jewelry is too ugly to steal. (Claudio gets away. A loose end!) Bruno is presumably released, although maybe not — maybe he’s the Monster of Florence. And no one pays Frank and Joe anything!

The Hunt for the Four Brothers (#155)

Three (mostly) made-up dialogues about The Hunt for the Four Brothers:

The pitch meeting:

So what great idea do you have for me for Hardy Boys #155?

I want to send Frank and Joe to a summer resort —

We just did that four books ago — The Rocky Road to Revenge.

Oh … OK. Wait — they’ll be working at a summer resort in the mountains.

The resort was in the mountains in Rocky Road —

Which state?
Colorado.

Aha! This time they’ll be in North Carolina.

Mountains in North Carolina are better than a small town in Oklahoma, I suppose, or a train station in Indianapolis. So what’s the mystery?

It starts out with someone stealing soap from the resort bathrooms, and the victims see a wolf-like animal nearby at the time. This leads to whispers of a werewolf —

Ah, that’s better! You had me worried about this soap stealing. We’ve done the werewolf thing in Night of the Werewolf, but that was almost a hundred books and twenty years ago. How are you going to resolve the werewolf legend?

Oh, I’m going to drop it immediately. This is the Hardy Boys, not Scooby-Doo.

Then why bring it up — you know what? Let’s let that go. What are Frank and Joe going to be doing while a not-werewolf is stealing soap?

Lots of things! Lawn mowing! Picking up — and burning — trash! Dishwashing! Carrying luggage!

Those are things they do for their jobs, right? Not part of the investigation?

Well, their jobs become cover for their investigation, like always. The actual investigation will include more exciting things like airport codes and parking fines and stolen soap and a civil war.

A civil war could be interesting. Haven't done one of those in a while. Where?

Kormia.

OK. I’ll ask again, where?

Kormia!

*sigh* Where is Kormia? Is it in Africa? Eastern Europe? Asia?

Almost certainly!

Well, as long as that’s the only major non-American place mentioned in the book, that should be OK.

*silence*

Let’s move on. What are the villains trying to get away with? Maybe with a high-stakes crime, we can still polish this coprolite.

Gem theft, looting a country’s cultural heritage, and smuggling.

Now you’re talking!

But the Hardys won’t know the gems exist until about pg. 110 out of 151, and the other crimes are incidental to the main gem theft.

*deep sigh* So what about their chums? Will anyone from Bayport be working at this resort with them?

Oh, sure — Chet.

Why Chet? Not that I’m complaining — Chet’s always a great addition to the story — but why him instead of, say, Biff?

The Hardys will need someone to do investigative work for them when their elsewhere. They’ll need someone to cover their shifts when they’re investigating and someone to pressure into following them into danger so we can see how courageous the Hardys are. And in this case, they’ll need someone to steal soap for them.

So basically you’re saying the Hardys need someone to push around, and no one else would take their crap?

Exactly! I mean, at one point, the Hardys essentially work Chet so hard he gets only two hours sleep in 48 hours!

So Chet will be there. What about their girlfriends?

No. Why would they want to spend the summer with Frank and Joe? Besides, it would cramp Joe’s style. There’s a girl, Katie Haskell, at the resort who has a major crush on Joe.

That has potential. What happens between them?

Absolutely nothing! Joe mostly ignores her, but she’s there to loan him her car when he needs it to run errands and save his life when he’s stung 65 times by white-faced hornets.

Sixty-five times? That sounds like it would require a long hospital stay. Is that part of the climax?

No, they can take care of 65 hornet stings on an outpatient basis. I don’t think you have to stay overnight until, like, 90 or 105 hornet stings.

Huh. Isn’t modern technology wonderful?

Yes! And they use cutting edge stuff in this book — like the Internet and fax machines!

Fax machines?

Yes! You can send a whole page to a single person over phone lines! Grainy, black-and-white pages on horrible paper! It’s wonderful!

I know what a fax machine is. I was questioning whether … you know what, let’s skip that. What are you thinking about calling this soap-stealing extravaganza?

The Hunt for the Four Brothers!

The four brothers? What are the four brothers?

The gems!

You mean the ones Frank and Joe don’t know exist until almost ¾ of the way through the book?

Of course!

Are you sure you don’t want to go with something like The Great Mountain Gem Caper or The Mystery of Mountain Resort or even The Soap Smugglers?

Nope!

You know what? Fine. I’m going to start my whisky break now.

*****

Continuing a discussion on investigation management:

“What in the world is going on down there?” Fenton asked. …
“Everything’s under control now, Dad,” Joe assured him. “I survived the hornets, and they got the shrapnel out of Frank’s leg.”
Fenton paused. “You call that being ‘under control’?” (p. 109)

“Yes, Dad. This time we had actual medical professionals treat our relatively minor wounds. In the past, I’ve been knocked out more times than I can count (literally — I think those concussions have done something to my brain), been kidnapped, electrocuted, tied up, gassed, almost drowned, attacked by more vicious predators than I could shake a stick at, starved, shaken sticks at vicious predators, been shot at, was shot with a freeze ray and frozen for 36 hours, wandered into the middle of violent revolutions, been hunted as the most dangerous game, struck by lightning, buried alive, and poisoned, all while wandering around with no supervision and only the occasional medical attention. Later I plan to careen down a mountainside and fight a giant Russian in river rapids. But yeah, I think we have matters under control for the moment.”

“You have a point, son. Carry on, then — just let me know if I need to plan a funeral.”

*****

How a discussion on geography should have ended:

“I have a hunch about was in those pet carriers you saw … Siberian huskies, and I mean Siberian.”
“What?” Joe asked.
Frank held up a printout he had pulled off the Internet. “The airport code IEV is for Kiev … in Russia!” (p. 70)

“But Frank, Kiev is nowhere near Siberia — not really.”

“What?”

“It’s hundreds of miles from Kiev to the Ural Mountains, which are the western border of Siberia. It would be like saying Omaha or St. Louis is in the Rocky Mountains.”

“But —”

“Eurasia is a large landmass, Frank. You’re the smart one. You should know this.”

“But it’s — I mean, it’s the Russian connection. I know Russia is a big country, but I just got confused.”

“Well, you say that, but that’s working under the assumption that Kiev is in Russia. I know for almost the first half of your life Kiev was part of the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union doesn’t exist any more. Kiev is the capital and largest city of Ukraine, which is an entirely different country.”

“Not part of Russia?”

“No. Ukraine borders Russia, and it used to be part of the USSR, but it’s been independent for almost a decade now.”

“Gee, thanks, Joe! If you hadn’t corrected me, I would have spent the rest of the adventure saying Kiev was in Russia, making the Russian who’s lurking around the obvious suspect. That would have been humiliating!”

“Yes, and just think if the adults around us didn’t correct us — think of how embarrassed they would be!” *wiiiiiiink*

Eye on Crime (#153)

I picked up Eye on Crime while killing time in a northern Virginia mall — Crystal City? — half a year after the book came out (December 1998). It was the first of the post-Syndicate digests that I had read, and I wasn’t that impressed by any aspect of the book. Still, I remembered the general plot: A TV variety-show host, alternately described as “fast becoming one of the hottest” things on TV by the narrator (1) and “two-bit” (110) by the Hardys, hypnotizes teenagers into enacting various action scenarios, which are then edited into security footage to implicate the teens for jewel robberies. It’s ridiculous; that’s the reason I remembered it.

Rereading Eye, though, after covering my gaps in the original canon and reading dozens of digests and other Hardy series, I am fascinated by the dynamics between the Hardys and their girlfriends. The first fifteen pages or so are portraits of teen relationships that are somewhere between normal and careening toward disaster. (Although from what I remember, “careening toward disaster” is pretty normal for teenage dating relationships too.) Frank and Joe have taken Callie and Iola to a taping of the Monty Mania TV show, which is hosted by the aforementioned hypnotist. The boys start by ignoring their girlfriends to read the newspaper (Bayport Times, this time). Frank apologizes, blaming the front-page news, but Iola (of course) asks, “And this excuses your poor behavior now?” (2).

And rather than taking this as a hint to socialize, like a normal teen — hell, a normal person — Frank and Joe immediately go back to the newspaper. I thought Iola had Joe under some sort of control, but obviously not.

Later, when Iola and Callie complain about how Frank and Joe’s mystery solving cuts into their relationship time, Joe decides to play relationship chicken: “Are you getting jealous? … Do you miss us that much?” (4). Iola snickers at the idea, but the boys are convinced it’s true, even after both girls decline Frank’s offer to include them in crimesolving. The discussion (from Frank and Joe’s POV) / argument (from the girls’) ends as “Callie and Iola sneered at the brothers, putting on their grimmest we-don’t-find-you-funny looks” (5).

During the show, Callie and Iola volunteer to be hypnotized, even though they’ve been told audience members who appear on the show will have to stay after the show, and the foursome have agreed to meet Chet and Tony at the Pizza Palace. Frank’s solution? He and Joe will abandon the girls, letting Callie and Iola catch up with the rest of them at the Pizza Palace.

Frank … Frank, Frank, Frank. You’re supposed to be the smart one. Your girlfriend has just complained about not seeing enough of you, about your being emotionally and physically distant. The correct answer is you call the Pizza Palace on a payphone or your cell phone to let Chet and Tony know you will be late, then WAIT FOR YOUR GIRLFRIENDS.

Then Frank pulls another weird move, as if he’s already trying to shift the blame for the failure of the relationship: When the host of Monty Mania asks Frank and Joe if he can “steal” their girlfriends, Frank says, “Seems to be the theme of the day” (9). This is the first time anything like this has come up! And anyway, other than kidnapping, you can’t really steal a romantic partner. Women and girls have agency, Frank.

Then Frank and Joe participate in Iola’s and Callie’s hypnotic humiliation, with Joe saying the girls should be made to impersonate their favorite animals. Later, while still under hypnotic control, Callie and Iola admit they are envious of Frank and Joe’s crimesolving activities and wish they could be more like the brothers. That’s kinda creepy — or it would be if the text (and most of the other books) indicated this were true, but nothing in the rest of Eye on Crime indicates they want to be like Frank and Joe.

Joe wants to use this admission against Callie and Iola — “rub it in a little” (13) — but Frank tells him not to. Joe: relationships are frequently a power struggle. You can’t use your ammunition willy-nilly. You have to save it up — and given Iola’s strong will, you’ll need all the help you can get.

Or maybe discretion is better: When Iola comes home late and Joe hopes “everything is OK,” she says, “I’m fine” (26). The next day, when Frank and Joe express concern, Iola asks, “What could possibly be wrong?,” and Callie says, “Nothing is wrong” (28). If you have to ask, you’re already doomed, Frank and Joe.

(Speaking of creepy, while on the subject of relationships: Chet and Iola’s father “looked like an older version of his son,” while their mother is “a dead ringer for her daughter” [23]. Did the Mortons procreate asexually, like through mitosis or by budding?)

And that’s about the only glance we get at the Hardys’ romantic relationships. We learn Callie and Iola are friendly but not close friends (a characterization that clashes with previous books), and Callie and Iola are more emotionally demonstrative (embraces) than usual after the boys come to their investigative rescue. But that’s not enough to satisfy the reader’s appetite after the glimpse we get — not that I buy all that we are told, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

*****

The rest of the story isn’t much. Footage of the hypnotized Iola and Callie is spliced into security footage of a robbed jewelry story, just as it was for a pair of baseball players at rival Shoreham High, who are also accused of being jewel thieves. Frank and Joe are slow to catch on, but while sticking their beaks into crime scenes and other people’s private property, the Hardys realize TV host Monty Andrews and his hypnotism is a key element to the crimes, as is the robbery victims’ reliance on Eye Spy Security. After Frank and Joe saves Andrews from a pair of goons, Andrews tells them he’s a patsy. He owes a lot of money at high interest to Ronald Johnson, the owner of Eye Spy and a loan shark, and Andrews’s hypnosis scenarios, focusing on teen audience members, were dictated by Johnson.

The Hardys’ solution? Allow themselves to be hypnotized, and then … profit? Iola and Callie are supposed to keep an eye on Frank and Joe and give them an alibi (probably?), but hypnotized Joe disables the girls’ car, and the Hardys disappear for the night. (They don’t have Chet and Tony, who wait at the Hardy home, or Fenton do anything.) Frank and Joe are arrested for robbing a furrier, with evidence planted in their van, but after smirking at the cops, making bail, and snooping at Eye Spy, they figure out the next target and watch Andrews’s goons rip off another jewelry store. The Hardys and their friends follow the goons back to their hideout, and even though Chet and Tony are captured because they don’t follow Frank and Joe’s orders, Frank and Joe get the goons to confess the entire scheme, and the teens capture the goons. Iola even whacks one of them over the head with a lamp.

Even though no direct evidence links Johnson to the crimes, the teens are all in the clear. Frank and Joe are back at school the next day, ready to play Shoreham. Before the game, Shoreham’s exonerated players offer Frank and Joe an autographed baseball and bat. It’s a bit of shade thrown at the boys in addition to a thank you: The items are autographed by the defending state champions from Shoreham High School.

*****

Although I commend the Dixon for his / her relationship work despite Simon & Schuster’s romantic strictures, she / he shows some inexperience with the series and how high school works:

• In Eye on Crime, Tony is a waiter at the Pizza Palace, rather than a manager at Mr. Pizza; interestingly, Pizza Palace was mentioned in the revised Mystery of the Flying Express (#20), but many digests have used Mr. Pizza as a setting: Danger on the Air (#95), Spark of Suspicion (#98), Terminal Shock (#102), The Prime-Time Crime (#109), Rock ‘n’ Roll Renegades (#116), The Mark of the Blue Tattoo (#146), Trick-or-Trouble (#175), and probably others. Mr. Pizza is also mentioned in Dungeon of Doom (#99) and The Case of the Cosmic Kidnapping (#120), The Crisscross Crime (#150), and Kickoff to Danger (#170). Mr. Pizza has been in too many books to ignore, is what I guess I’m saying.
  
  
• Monty Mania is filmed at WBAY, which was a rock-format radio station the only time it was previously mentioned (Program for Destruction, #87). WBPT is Bayport’s main TV station, featured in Danger on the Air, Spark of Suspicion, The Prime-Time Crime (#109), and Beyond the Law (Casefiles #55).
  
  
• Shoreham started baseball practices a week before Bayport. When schools can start their practices is almost always set by a state athletic committee, and any coach who didn’t start his or her own practices with a few days of that date would be seen as derelict in duty to their students and employers and / or incredibly lazy. The latter seems likely; the day after Bayport’s first baseball practice, Bayport is scheduled to play Shoreham … and then play them again the day after that. High schools don’t normally have games on back-to-back days, especially against the same team, unless they are in a tournament or similar competition.
  
  
• Unlike in The Crisscross Crime, Biff is not the Bayport catcher. As far as the text goes, he isn’t on the team at all, although previously unseen characters Michael Shannon (catcher), Novick (pitcher), and Gitenstein are.
  
  
• Chief Collig is paranoid about teenage gangs infiltrating Bayport, going to extraordinary lengths to curb the Shaws’ and Mortons’ free speech and right to association. (I’m pretty sure the police don’t have the authority to institute a gag order by themselves, but I admit I may be wrong; New York or Bayport may have some gang / organized crime statute on the books to prevent accused criminals from talking to those who might be able to help with their defense.) But if teen gangs are appearing in Bayport, it would not be a new development. The Mark of the Blue Tattoo, which came out the year before Eye on Crime, was entirely about teen gangs in Bayport High School, and although Frank and Joe are seen as a power nexus within the high school cosmology, they were clearly not seen as a gang per se.
  
  
• When Chet tells Joe to let nothing happens to Iola and Callie, Joe says, “Never have” (34-5). Obviously, that’s not true in the Casefiles, in which Iola was killed in the first book; in that light, I’d say Joe’s comment is an ironic statement.

*****

This Dixon also has a proclivity to get too clever with names. BHS’s baseball coach is Coach Tarkanian; Jerry Tarkanian was the basketball coach for UNLV from 1973 to 1992, winning an NCAA national championship in 1990. (He also briefly coached the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs in 1992, then returned to the NCAA with Fresno State from 1995-2002.)

One of the wrongly accused Shoreham players is named Pepper Wingfoot. The surname is really strange; the only place I’ve ever seen it before in the Fantastic Four comics from Marvel, where Wyatt Wingfoot is a friend of the Human Torch and the Fantastic Four. Given that association, I wonder if “Pepper” came from Iron Man’s secretary / on-and-off girlfriend, Pepper Potts. On the other hand, I have no idea where the name of his partner-in-non-crime, Roberto Rojas (Robert Red?), comes from.

This Dixon also named a goon “Spicolli,” which I thought was a tribute to the character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. But that character’s name was spelled with only one L, and given that his partner in goon-itude was “Zybysko,” it’s more likely the names were chosen for wrestlers Larry Zybysko and Louie Spicolli, who feuded in the mid- to late ‘90s WCW.

There is a limit to the Dixon’s cleverness: One of the robbed jewelry stores is “Golden Palace,” which sounds like it should be selling Chinese food instead.

The Rocky Road to Revenge (#151)

My first disappointment with The Rocky Road to Revenge is that it contains no revenge. I admit: The title is a good one, but it doesn’t fit the story. The only attempt “revenge” in the story is a botched extortion scheme that ends up with the blackmailer abducted and nearly murdered.

The second disappointment is that Rocky Road is a clear attempt to cash in on the X-Files craze in the late ‘90s, yet nothing about the title or front cover gives any indication of that. It’s a waste, even if the back cover copy does try to get the UFO angle in the book across … although even the back cover botches the details, as the second paragraph starts, “It begins with a strange green light in the sky.” No, the book clearly says it’s an orange light: “The color reminded Joe of a Halloween pumpkin” (7).

The mystery involves abductions in Colorado, where Frank and Joe are spending part of the summer with a classmate, Terry Taylor, who is working at a resort. (I don’t think many parents who would allow their teenage sons to visit a classmate of the opposite sex more than halfway across the country without adult supervision, but we know Laura and Fenton trust / have abandoned all responsibility for Frank and Joe.) Rocky Road pushes the theory that the victims were taken by aliens, linking the disappearances with the bright orange light seen in the Colorado skies during the first chapter.

Rocky Road hits most of the highlights of UFOs and UFO abduction that any X-Files fan would know: electrical failures, lost time and fuzzy memories of the abduction, abandoned vehicles on deserted roads, bright lights. Frank and Joe debate the alien-abduction theory, with lunkhead Joe pushing the idea, and Frank batting it aside. Disappointingly, the experts they talk to don’t hit some of the points real experts on UFOlogy would; Rocky Road doesn’t mention the “Wow!” signal when discussing evidence of alien life gathered by radio telescopes, no one mentions the words “panspermia” or “Fermi paradox” (although Joe describes both ideas to bolster his claims), and the word “probe” is never once mentioned in relation to alien abductions.

The final disappointment is that Rocky Road plays the alien angle too straight. This is a Hardy Boys book, not a serious novel, and no one should expect a Hardy Boys book to be rooted in strict reality. I wanted a winking acknowledgement that the orange light or the mysterious night hobo who always wore sunglasses had something alien about them; I wanted Alex Trebek as a man in black. Instead, Rocky Road drops both the light and drifter, referencing the light on the final page in the same way the original Disappearing Floor (#19) picked up the mystery of its beginning pages, ending with the boys promising to find Harry Tanwick.

*****

After the orange light in the sky gets the attention of the Hardys, Terry, and everyone else at the Silver Crest resort and the nearby town of Parnassa, Colo., the Silver Crest’s owner, Clay Robinson, disappears, his jeep abandoned on the side of a lonely road. Local UFOlogist (and former SETI scientist) Alistair Sykes takes down eyewitness accounts of the lights, exposits the basics of UFOlogy to the Hardys, and plays up Robinson’s disappearance as a possible alien abduction to the local press (such as it is). Soon after, though, Sykes vanishes as well, and that means it’s time for a Reprobate Roll Call:

1. Myra Hart and Bev Kominski, two former employees of Silver Crest and “drifters” (12). Robinson fired them for stealing from his office, and the two bear a grudge against him (and Terry, who reported seeing them exit Robinson’s office at the time of the theft). After denying the theft through most of the book, Myra and Beverly eventually claim they were only getting compensation for overtime Robinson declined to pay them. They also have no regard for anyone’s personal safety; they puncture a raft so that it will cause problems in the middle of the rapids, and while riding bicycles, they swing wide on a blind curve, causing Frank to either plow into them or drive off the cliff. (He uses his amazing driving ability to put Robinson’s jeep into a controlled sideways skid instead.) Myra also strands Joe and Terry on a ski lift for a while.
   
   
2. Max Jagowitz, general store owner and local crank. Jagowitz is opposed to Robinson’s plan to create a ski resort called the Golden Dream. As a member of the local council, he’s steamed that Robinson managed to get the votes for the approval of the Golden Dream despite his opposition. (He essentially accuses those who voted for Robinson’s development of corruption. Democracy!) Jagowitz lies about his family history, claiming they emigrated to America in 1889 from Yugoslavia, even though Yugoslavia didn’t exist until the Treaty of Versailles, thirty years later, and didn’t exist when the book was written either. He also keeps accusing Joe of stealing a bag of potato chips, although to be fair, Joe should have waited Jagowitz to ring up his purchase rather than just dropping a couple of quarters on the counter.
   
   
3. Clay Robinson. Clay’s a genial fellow, and Stella, his dog, loves him, but he’s ruffled a few feathers getting the Golden Dream project approved. Sykes doesn’t like him either, making cryptic comments about Robinson stealing moonstones. Also, Robinson tells the Hardys, “When Clay Robinson gets it into his head to do something, by golly, he does it. Always remember that, boys. Stick to your guns, no matter what” (6). Frank says it’s good advice, and I know it sounds that way in a “never give up on your dreams” sense, but taken to its extremes, it becomes delusional or psychopathic. Sure, he disappears early in the book, but he could be staging his abduction for nefarious purposes.
   
   
4. Alistair Sykes, a scientist / UFOlogist. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence let him go after their funding was cut — according to him — and now he’s working from his home, with a radio telescope and equipment he paid for himself. He too has an (unspecified) grudge against Robinson, so perhaps he abducted a man he doesn’t like to play up the alien-abduction angle and even used his own abduction to drum up publicity and the funding he needs for his work.
   
   
5. Aliens! No, not really — but what’s up with that weird guy who keeps wandering around at night in sunglasses?

After Robinson disappears, Frank and Joe uncharacteristically agree to call the cops, but Sgt. Bunt and his team inspire no confidence. Terry asks the Hardys to investigate, even though she claims she’s not supposed to know they’re detectives. “Word gets around school,” she says, and the narration claims, “They tried to keep it quiet” (32). This is in contrast to The Ice-Cold Case (#148), just three books before, when even a classmate’s father knows they’re detectives.

(Speaking of uncharacteristic, Frank is the B&E King this book rather than Joe; Frank uses his lockpicks to break into a couple of places, setting off the burglar alarm in one location. Also uncharacteristic: When their raft is sabotaged, Frank gets dumped into the water, which causes Joe to pity him: “It could have happened to anyone” [30], which is the Hardys’ version of “Don’t worry: It happens to all guys.” Perhaps he should pity Frank — he and Joe were outstanding white-water rafters in The Roaring River Mystery (#80], so falling out of a raft is a huge step down for him.)

They visit with Sykes and learn that despite all his fancy equipment and learning, he’s decided that an invented language, known only by him, is the best way to communicate with aliens, and he almost concludes a powerful Mexican radio station playing salsa music is an alien signal. Later, after a possibly alien-caused electrical outage at the Silver Crest, he disappears, with only an open window to suggest where he went.

Not uncharacteristic is Joe’s ability to put himself in danger. Joe and Terry visit Moondance Peak to sightsee and give themselves something to do while Terry exposits to Joe about the area and Robinson. (There’s no romance here, no, no! Joe has no hormones — or at least not the ones that would cause a teenage boy to react when alone with a female classmate in a beautiful setting.) While Joe and Terry are on the way down, Myra, the ski-lift operator, shuts the lift down; Joe tries to climb down a nearby pole but nearly falls to his death instead. The lift starts up again soon after. This almost exactly like what happened in Carnival of Crime (#122), when Joe almost falls to his death getting out of his gondola on a stalled Ferris wheel to help a kid who doesn’t actually need his help.

Because of his belief that the government is concealing proof of aliens, Joe cashes in some of Fenton’s chips with his friend, General Radman. Radman sets up a meeting with General Webster at NORAD, who essentially tells the boys to stop grasping at straws and act like rational adults rather than conspiracy freaks. Joe is more or less satisfied, and we all have to agree as taxpayers that this hour-long conference, soothing the paranoia of a teenage boy, is a great use of a military officer’s time and expertise.

On their way back to Silver Crest, Frank is forced to stop on a lonely road by a bright light. After a “quick jab of pain” (107), Frank loses consciousness; when he awakens, Joe is missing, and he claims something had hit him over the head. (Nothing hit him in the head; he was jabbed with a knockout drug.) Frank and Terry immediately confront Myra and Bev; Frank thinks they are “downright mean and capable of just about anything” (113), and I can’t decide if that’s a damning statement from Frank (he’s seen a lot of crimes) or if Frank’s imagination is so limited he can’t think of anything truly awful. Terry bluffs and gets Myra and Bev to admit they stole a moonstone necklace from Robinson’s safe.

Then Joe shows up on a bicycle after Bev and Myra slip away from the interrogation and, without consulting his brother, puts Bev in a headlock. You know, as one does. It’s not like he has any reason to suspect the ladies. He woke up in a cow pasture with Robinson, then ran into Frank and Terry. He only beat up on a woman because it looked like she and her friend were fleeing, and if that’s not an allegory for modern police practices, I don’t know what is.

Neither Joe nor Robinson remembers anything helpful. Despite the lateness of the hour, Robinson goes to complete the task his kidnapping prevented him from completing days before: talking to his lawyer. That’s a good idea, because Frank — after a visit to Jagowitz — works out that Robinson is behind everything. When Sykes saw Bev wearing a moonstone necklace that had been stolen from his mother decades before, Sykes realized Robinson had been the thief and tried to blackmail him. Robinson decided not to take extortion lying down, staging his own kidnapping before abducting Sykes (and later Joe).

I must admit: I very much admire how Frank figures out the motive, working through an A.B.C. Murders setup. At first, he conjectures Robinson was the true target, and Sykes and Joe were taken to muddy the waters. When Joe and Robinson turn up, he switches gears — Sykes was the real target, and Robinson and Joe were kidnapped to obscure the real motive. Frank shows he’s the intelligent one, for once, rather than Dixon just telling us.

The Hardys track Robinson and his dog, Stella, to a mine — Frank finds the hidden door to the abandoned mine after he “ran his flashlight over the mountain” (134), which … wait, the entire mountain? — and after leaving Stella outside, they find Robinson about to blow up the mine to kill Sykes. Frank tries to convince Robinson he’s not a killer, but Robinson reminds Frank of the advice he gave Frank at the beginning of the book: “I said once you’ve got it into your head to do something, you stick to your guns” (145). Fortunately, Stella wanders into the mine — Joe didn’t actually tie her up or put her in their vehicle or anything — and Robinson can’t bring himself to harm his dog. He’s put in jail for his stupid, stupid crimes.

The Crisscross Crime (#150)

For the hundredth book in the Hardy Boys series, The Secret of the Island Treasure, Simon & Schuster brought back Hurd Applegate, a character from the first Hardy Boys book (The Tower Treasure) and a recurring character in early books. I was hopeful S&S would do something unexpectedly retro with book #150, The Crisscross Crime, but I was disappointed.

The book does have touches that recall earlier mysteries. The title is similar to The Crisscross Shadow’s (#32), although the plots have nothing to do with each other. Bayport’s reservoir is important, like in The Secret of Skull Mountain (#27), but the reservoir in Crisscross Crime appears to be a new reservoir, as it isn’t located at Skull Mountain. (It's probably the same reservoir from Dungeon of Doom [#99].) The biggest rush of nostalgia comes when Fenton’s international crimesolving just happens to interlock with Frank and Joe’s Bayport case (The Mystery of Too Many Damn Times to Count). Still, I wish there had been more explicit references to the Hardy Boys’ past in Crisscross. If, as Wikipedia suggests, Crisscross Crime started out as Hardy Boys Casefiles #130 before that series was cancelled, it’s a miracle the book fits with the Digest / original series as well as it does.

Well, I suppose you can count Joe being a headstrong moron and Frank being a plodding dullard being references to the series past — but I’ll get back to that.

The story begins on the baseball field — that’s something else that hearkens back to the good ol’ days, but Frank and Joe were playing baseball for the Bayport Bombers in Danger on the Diamond (#90) as well, so it’s not unusual. Now, if they’d brought back baseball-loving chum Jerry Gilroy, who hasn’t been seen since 1966, then that would have been awesome. Anyway, Joe’s pitching, Frank’s at shortstop, and Biff takes Chet’s old spot behind the plate. The Bayport Bombers are an out from a win with runners in scoring position; Joe hangs a curve, but a diving catch by Frank seals the Bomber victory.

Rather than head to Mr. Pizza, Frank and Joe need to pick up their mother’s car from the shop. While Frank pays, Joe spots a break-in at a nearby bank. The robbers take off when the alarm sounds, and when Frank drives by in Laura’s car, Joe hops in with their video camera and tells Frank to follow that car!

The chase ends in a junk yard, where the robbers abandon their vehicle. But Frank drives Laura’s car into a car crusher — oops! — and as the car is turned into a cube, the boys narrowly escape with their lives and the video camera. I realize this is probably a traumatic moment for them; it would be for me. But our heroes are Frank and Joe Hardy, who have been in traumatic situations from (literally!) Australia to Zurich and everywhere in between, so why do they do so many stupid things afterwards?

For example:

• Joe’s first act after the car is destroyed is to break into the junkyard’s office and snoop around.
  
• Frank and Joe delay telling Laura that her car is no more, and she learns about it by watching the video Joe shot of it turning it into a large die.
  
• When the boys want to learn what happened at a successful robbery that happened just after the break-in they witnessed, Joe poses as a reporter for the Bayport Globe and grills the bank manager, even though the police have told the bank manager not to blab. Why not ask the usually cooperative police, Joe?
  
• When a suspect doesn’t want to talk to the boys, Joe’s reaction is to immediately hop her large wall to force her to talk to them.
  
• When Frank tells his brother to call the cops if he isn’t back from checking a potential bank robbery in ten seconds, Joe’s reaction is to get a couple of baseball bats, give one to Biff, then try to beat up the robber(s), who have guns.
  
• When Frank and Joe are captured by the villains at the end of the book, and Frank realizes the criminals are more likely to kill the boys the more they learn about what the Hardys know, Joe keeps blabbering, letting the criminals know exactly how much the boys have learned.

On one hand, the Hardys have always put justice above property rights or personal safety. On the other hand, Joe might be a nihilist thug, rushing headlong toward the hospital or the grave. (He might have discovered what all those concussions mean for him later in life and be determined not to suffer through the symptoms of CTE.) I realize the above acts are (somewhat) normal for private eyes in fiction, but Frank and Joe are kids with no reason to not cooperate with the police, given how willingly Con will feed them info.

But Frank and Joe never call the police! I’ve joked about the boys considering themselves a law unto themselves, but it’s hard to remember a case on which they have snubbed the five-oh so blatantly. After Laura’s car gets crunched and the boys break into the junkyard office, Frank and Joe don’t call the cops — even though it takes about three hours between the car’s destruction and the arrival of a concussed Biff to pick up the brothers. (A time warp might explain the abnormally long time it takes for a car chase and poking around a room or two, or the boys might have fallen into an alternate timeline: Joe calls Biff “Hoop,” and Biff’s drives a hatchback instead of his usual jeep.) Frank and Joe are determined to investigate, and it takes Frank’s near arrest — the boys’ van was spotted near the botched bank robbery — to get them to hand over their video of the chase.

But they don’t hand over the tape until after they’ve given it to Phil Cohen, who shouts “Enhance!” at his computers a few times and gets a clear look at the license plates. C’mon, guys! If TV has taught me nothing else — and it’s possible that it hasn’t — it’s that the police have a whole unit dedicated to shouting “Enhance!” at video, even though it’s impossible to improve a video past its original resolution.

I suppose the lack of police involvement cuts both ways. When Joe vaults the fence at a ritzy house on tony High Street — the same street the Hardys live on, although the book doesn’t mention that — and are caught, Frank and Joe don’t feel the need to use the police to justify their presence. Fortunately, the suspect lets them out of the trees in which her Dobermans have chased them and doesn’t call the cops herself.

Collig tries to give the boys their comeuppance, yelling at the Hardys for charging into a bank robbery with baseball bats, but his dressing down is interrupted by a grateful bank manager, who tells Collig the boys saved all that federally insured money and only drew a couple of bullets that hit only one bat. Still, Chief Collig gets his momentary revenge at the denouement: When Frank and Joe reveal the villains’ real, final target, he sneers at them, and his officers laugh. Serves you right, boys.

(This antagonism between Collig and the boys makes more sense if the book was originally a Casefile; Collig’s animus against the boys is much greater in that series.)

I guess I shouldn’t be too harsh on Frank and Joe. After they describe the initial robbery attempt and chase to Fenton, Fenton tells the boys to call Collig “if they find anything concrete” (30). Fenton: They are frelling eyewitnesses to an attempted bank robbery, and they have videotape of the criminals escaping. I’m not sure your sense of responsibility is everything it should be.

The independent streak he inspires in his sons ends up biting him in the ass, though. When Frank and Joe find the counterfeiter Fenton has been hunting is in Bayport, they ask for Fenton’s number; Laura says she has already spoken that day to Fenton, who said he’s returning to Bayport, and boys decide their information can wait. Sure, why not?

And the boys definitely get their cavalier regard for information sharing from their father. When Frank and Joe try to “soothe” Laura and their Aunt Gertrude after they see Laura’s car being crushed, the women tell the boys to call the police (36). The boys refuse. No reason to listen to hysterical women and their completely legitimate concerns about your safety and the modern crimefighting apparatus!

Because Frank and Joe don’t share info with the police, it’s hard to blame Collig for his reactions. He thinks he’s figured out the pattern in crimes — or more accurately, he figures Frank has figured out the pattern, which he shared with the police in a rare moment of cooperation. Well, the book claims Frank figured it out, but let’s see if you can figure it out yourself. First, as Frank and Joe were getting their mom’s car crushed and the police were responding to the triggered alarm, a bank downtown was robbed. A day or so later, while Joe and Biff foiled the bank robbery with their wooden bats, the police were responding in force to an alarm triggered at a bank on Bayport’s outskirts. Frank’s cognitive breakthrough? He “explained the hunch he and Joe had about all the real targets being downtown and all the false alarms being on the outskirts of town” (108).

That’s not a hunch. That’s recapping what had happened in the book so far

Now, what don’t Frank and Joe share with Collig? In the junkyard office, Frank and Joe find detailed maps of Bayport’s utilities, including the sewer lines and storm drains. Also, Fenton is investigating a counterfeiting case for the government, and the printing plates and ink have already been stolen; one of the suspects tells them the paper U.S. currency is printed on is stored in Bayport. (Seems like Fenton should have been on top of that, really.) The boys — well, Frank, really — put 2 and 2 together, and even though they don’t bother to check whether they should be adding or multiplying, come up with the 4-1-1: The criminals are using the storm drains to move around town, and the last bank robberies will be a double fake. The real target will be the armory where the paper is stored.

While the police are responding to a decoy robbery downtown, the robbers use jackhammers to break into the armory from below, which our crack troops can’t hear. They then escape through the storm drains on jet skis. It’s unusual; I’ll say that, at least. After Frank viciously “clocked” a criminal with a tire iron and steals his jet ski (138), the boys chase the other robbers to the reservoir, survive being tied up to drown in the storm drain (Frank flexes his wrists to escape his wet bonds), and pursue the last of the criminals onto the bay, where they prevent international counterfeiter Herve DuBois from escaping onto his speedboat and the open sea.

At no point do they call the police, but the Coast Guard does show up in time to keep the criminals from drowning.

The book ends with Laura and Fenton showing up at the boys’ next baseball game in her new car; Laura cheerfully tells her sons they will “never” drive it (150). Finally — consequences for Frank and Joe!

The Chase for the Mystery Twister (#149)

The Hardy Boys mysteries are usually set in fictional places — Bayport is fictional, the small towns around Bayport are fictional, and the small towns across the world the Hardys wend their way to are fictional. They do spend time in real places, of course; New York has always been a staple of Hardy Boys crimesolving. But mostly the Hardys are not visible from the world outside your window.

For many years, I rarely thought about this practice, but lately it has been bothering me. Bayport and its fictional environs are fine, I’ve decided: The milieu created for the absurdly powerful crimefighting family could hardly be mixed up with the real world. But when they wander into some fictional town in an identifiable part of the real world, it feels strange. The Hardy Boys books aren’t the most subtle and incisive observers of humanity, and these fictional places give leave to the authors to abandon reality and make somewhere real into something unreal, where stereotypes and bizarre characterizations dominate.

Take, for instance, Lone Wolf, Okla., where most of The Chase for the Mystery Twister takes place. Allegedly, all these things are true about Lone Wolf:

• It is large enough that a television station is located in the town.
  
• The TV station thinks its audience is learned enough but also bored enough to care about atypical tornado debris patterns.
  
• It is small enough that the town’s sheriff also holds a full-time job as a barber.
  
• It is large enough that people remark about how long it takes to get from one side of the town to the other.
  
• It is small enough that there is only one motel in a 25-mile radius of Wolf Gap.
  
• It is the self-declared Tornado Capital of the World, even though it is part of “Twister Alley,” rather than “Tornado Alley.” This title seems to bring no tourism to the town, as evidenced by the one motel.
  
• The air is so clear and the land so flat that vehicles can not only be seen more than a mile away (and their relative size distinguished), they can be seen despite the lessened visibility created by storms and tornados.
  
• Somehow a Hispanic man who introduces himself to newcomers with a hearty “Buenos dias” has been elected sheriff in the largely white community in rural Oklahoma.
  
• The early spring corn in Lone Wolf is tall enough to block Joe’s view of a thresher, despite corn being barely shoe-top level until some time in May in most of the Northern Hemisphere.
  
• Joe is able to practice bilocation, being at a bank and a barnraising at the same time.

The most amazing fact about Lone Wolf, though, is that it’s a real place. Or at least the Lone Wolf in Mystery Twister is based on a real place — the 500 people who lived in the real Lone Wolf in 2000, two years after Mystery Twister was published, wouldn’t have been able to support the two rival insurance agents / scamsters that are at the heart of the book, let alone have a television station or a sheriff.

(I was also shocked to learn that the National Severe Storm Laboratory is a real thing. I mean, National Severe Storms Laboratory just sounds fake. But no, it’s a real part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.)

The real Lone Wolf also presumably doesn’t expose homoerotic urges like this book suggests. When Joe grabs Phil with his “muscular arms,” “Joe knew there was no time to be delicate”; there’s also mention of Phil being “roughly yanked” and of putting body parts in hole (54). The scene is supposed to show Joe rescuing Phil from a fire, but you have to read between the lines. I think Joe is carrying Phil to the fire … in his pants. Later, when an attacker pins Joe against the dirt, words like “wriggled,” “bucked,” “tried every move he knew” and “got a hold of the man’s hair” are used (88). Sure, it’s supposed to be a fight, but it seems ... charged, you know? By the time Phil urges, “Get it up, Joe!” (127), I was blushing at the explicitness.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. Lone Wolf is a place and a state of mind. What is The Chase for the Mystery Twister?

****

It’s a bad book, that’s what it is.

I’m not going to suggest an editor slid a worn-out VHS copy of Twister to this book’s Dixon, said “Go wild,” and then belched instead of giving the author an outline — heavens no. But if you’d like to make a little bet on the matter without letting the authorities know, then you know how to contact me.

During Spring Break, Frank and Joe fly to Lone Wolf — fly commercial, mind you, like peasants — to meet up with Phil Cohen. What’s technophile Phil, who was complaining about going out in the cold in the previous mystery, doing in BFE Oklahoma? Why, he’s working for a team of stormchasers, a pursuit he has never showed any interest in before. Phil has been in Oklahoma for a while, much longer than a mere spring break internship would allow — has he already graduated high school, or are his grades good enough that he doesn’t have to show up for classes?

Phil and the other stormchasers work for Lemar Jansen, who apparently doesn’t have a doctorate in meteorology or anything else (everyone calls him “Mr. Jansen”). His team is opposed by Greg Glover, a former colleague who has his own team. Glover’s team has corporate sponsorship, but Janson’s doesn’t because he “doesn’t want anyone pressuring him or telling him what to do” (109). This raises questions: What kind of businesses sponsor stormchasers? What do they get out of the deal? What do they pressure stormchasers into doing? And why — why sponsor people who drive after tornados?

No — asking “why” never gets anyone anything but a headache. We’ll press on.

(NOTE: I apologize for not knowing the evil rival tornado chasing team comes from the movie Twister, which Mystery Twister is obviously based on. I should have done the research, but I thought Twister was an excuse to watch wind destroy buildings and pick up cattle and didn't bother with a “plot.”)

Jansen and Glover’s teams are fascinated by a house that a tornado has leveled near Lone Wolf; the debris left by the tornado has been strewn in an atypical pattern. Jansen and Glover have seen this anomaly once before, but like the previous time, they find no clues as to what caused the strange pattern — all the local weather radars were jammed, and evidently NOAA has no interest at aiming its weather satellites at a probable tornado event. Poking around the house’s wreckage, Joe finds a piece of the owner’s “Ming vase” (35), but the shard is stamped “Occupied Japan” (40). Bayport’s education system must be lacking severely if Joe thinks a vase labeled “Occupied Japan” could be a genuine Ming.

Anyway, Frank, Joe, and Phil find other clues that the homeowner was defrauding his insurer, which is poised to pay out more than a million dollars, although the homeowner’s insurance agent doesn’t seem too concerned. At the same time, Lone Wolf’s other insurance agent disappears, causing suspicion to fall on the Cherokee grandfather of the absurdly named Snowden Parlette. While investigating the fraud and disappearance, Joe pressures Phil into breaking into every place with a locked door. Frank performs a Buster Keaton impersonation at a barnraising, then Joe has his sexually charged fight before fleeing from a thresher that corners like a rally car. (Joe ends up hiding under a tractor rather than climbing over or through the tractor. What a farm noob!) When the man with the destroyed Ming vase shows up with the sheriff in tow, accusing the brothers of “slander and threatening him in public” (90), Frank and Joe are nice enough to not point out that slander is a civil crime, outside of the purview of a sheriff.

A videotape of the tornado that left the weird debris patterns — dubbed the “mystery twister” by Frank — shows up without provenance or credit; Frank and Phil debunk the video after Frank steals it from Glover. While Frank is realizing the homeowner and his insurance agent are colluding on their scam, Joe gets Phil into trouble by breaking into the villains’ semi; Phil is knocked out, and when yelling for help while the truck is roaring down the highway predictably fails, Joe manages to knock down the rear door with a “huge” tractor (118). (If you think a huge tractor will fit in a semi-trailer, you too are a farm noob, sadly uninformed about tractor sizes.) The tractor is part of the fraudsters’ insti-tornado kit, which they used to knock down the house with the weird debris pattern; I think the amount of damage the kit would have to pull off in a short time is only a little more believable than a supervillain keeping his lair secret when it has been constructed by a crew of hundreds.

Even with the tractor, Joe can’t get the door down until the semi is going over a cliff; Phil and Joe implausibly jump free of the trailer and tread water in the quarry pit until they are rescued hours later. In the last ten pages, the boys are chased by an F5 tornado on the way home, capture the fraudsters, prove the missing insurance agent was in on the scam, exonerate their friend’s grandfather, and recover most of the money stolen by both corrupt insurance agents. Also in the last ten pages: Joe runs at a monster truck that is driving toward him, leaps on its hood, and subdues the truck’s driver, so it’s pretty clear the Dixon just threw up his hands, said “Screw it,” and crammed everything he needed to into the last few pages without regard for pacing or logic.

It's a poor ending, but then again, it’s a poor book.