Hidden Mountain (#186)

I’ve breezed my way through these digests, and by and large, they’ve blurred as I passed them by. Some of them I have a hazy-but-fond memory of, some I vaguely recall disliking, but most blend into a flavorless paste that disappears into the wrinkles of my brain. Occasionally, I have stumbled across something like The Secret of the Island Treasure (#100), one of the best digests, or The Case of the Psychic’s Vision (#177), which spectacularly misjudges what a Hardy Boys book should be. Nothing comes close to the disasters like the original Disappearing Floor (#19) or Flying Expess (#20) or triumphs like the original House on the Cliff (#2) or Mystery of Cabin Island (#8).

Hidden Mountain is more Psychic’s Vision than Flying Express, but this book is closer to catastrophe than you might think. (Like Psychic's Vision, Hidden Mountain is written by George Edward Stanley, according to the University of Southern Mississippi's libraries' archives.) Hidden Mountain doesn’t have Flying Express’s continuity errors or Disappearing Floor’s ludicrousness; rather, Hidden Mountain has a strange idea of what makes a Hardy Boys story a Hardy Boys story. Had this been an adventure of the Generic Teen Detectives — well, if it had been an adventure of the Generic Teen Detectives, I wouldn’t have been reading it, because “Generic Teen Detectives” is a horrible name for a mystery series. But if it had been part of that series, and I had read it, I wouldn’t have liked it, but I wouldn’t have found it so awful either.

To start off with, Hidden Mountain posits a group of teens who don’t feel like the Hardys and their friends. Neither Frank nor Joe is in a “serious relationship” (1), and they date Callie and Iola only “from time to time” (1). The Mortons live in an older part of Bayport, which I suppose is the new status quo, but it still feels weird — and honestly, I feel the Mortons should live in a newer development, as refugees from rural poverty. At the Mortons’ home, Chet complains about all the food his mother has made, saying, “‘Good grief, Mom!’ Chet cried. ‘You’re not feeding an army!’” (7). It’s a bit like Cookie Monster labeling cookies a “sometimes food” — perhaps for the best, but weird and wrong at the same time.

Plus, Chet owns a shortwave radio.

The shortwave radio used to be a vital part of the Hardys’ crimefighting arsenal, but with the advent of cell phones, the shortwave radio lost its importance; the radio (called a “ham radio,” which is more or less the same) was last mentioned in The Blackwing Puzzle (#82), as far as I can tell. Here, though, the narration reframes radio’s role in the Hardys’ lives: Joe “and Frank had solved a couple of mysteries that involved shortwave, but it was almost always the bad guys who used them” (10). Boo! If Stanley had reframed shortwave as a Hardy thing — Fenton or Gertrude with an old set in the attic, or a childhood hobby Frank and Joe set aside but Chet seems have mastered — I would have been supported or even lauded the decision. But no, shortwave radio is no longer cool enough for Frank and Joe to have ever used.

Anyway, Chet gets a message over the shortwave from Darren Wilkerson, a former classmate who left Bayport suddenly with his family. Darren is in trouble in Hudson’s Hope, British Columbia, Canada, and he needs Chet to get a message to Frank and Joe — but the transmission is cut off before Darren can get off more than a request for help. If I had more confidence that this Dixon and his editor knew the series’s history, I would suggest this book was homaging to The Short-Wave Mystery (#24), a book which involved shortwave radio and a trip to Canada. (And during which Frank killed a lynx with a radio antenna, while Chet took up taxidermy. These were two completely unrelated events.)

After Fenton pretends to exercise parental oversight over the boys, he gives in, arranging for backup in Hudson’s Hope and buying Frank and Joe hiking / mountaineering equipment. Once the boys’ “school vacation” (13) begins* two days after the shortwave call, they are off to Canada, flying from LaGuardia to Edmonton to Dawson Creek, B.C. — a real city of 11,000, not the place named after a James van der Beek character. At this point, the book becomes filled with weird details that go nowhere.

Gertrude laments over a friend in Wisconsin whose house has burned down, and the house was uninsured because her husband might have Alzheimer’s. Neither Wisconsin nor Alzheimer’s (or any other form of dementia) come up again; for that matter, neither does Gertrude. Chet can’t come with Frank and Joe because Mrs. Morton has decided to redecorate the house in “New Mexico style” (19), so she’s going to New Mexico and needs Chet to schlep paintings around. Chet frequently has lame excuses to avoid adventures, but this is a strange yet strangely detailed excuse. At LaGuardia, Frank and Joe inexplicably meet their old babysitter, Annie Wilson, who is working for the airline, and she fawns over them; on the plane to Edmonton, two flight attendants (Bonnie and June, rather than Benny and Joon) give the boys an extra meal each and stop barely short of flirting. This sounds like an airplane fantasy, although that may be because I don’t believe an airplane would serve an in-flight meal, let alone a steak dinner with anyone getting an extra portion, after 2001.

(Flying through Edmonton reminds me of The Viking Symbol Mystery, #42, a clunker that deserves more vitriol directed at it for having the boys casually rack up 5,000 miles of travel in Canada in less than two weeks, flying from Calgary to Saskatoon to Edmonton to Fort Smith, over and over again. At least in that story, Fenton was supervising them from the same province.)

In Dawson Creek — again, a real place — Fenton’s “good friend” (13), Rupert Kitimat, meets the boys when they get off the plane. Rupert is supposed to be a private detective, but the book frequently refers to him as “Detective Kitimat.” That title is almost never used for private detectives; “Detective,” as a courtesy title, is reserved for police detectives. Plus, there’s the question of who’s paying for Rupert’s time? If it’s Fenton, he’s running up a hell of a bill; if Rupert is donating his time, then Fenton must be one hell of a friend.

Anyway, the boys and Rupert take a pontoon plane to Williston Lake, a short-but-rugged hike from Hudson’s Hope. This flight disturbs the boys even though they were certified to fly seaplanes in Viking Symbol. Honestly, it’s like this book doesn’t care about the 75+ years of stupid continuity! Frank, Joe, and Detective Kitimat hike into town over rugged hills, encountering a bear, despite perfectly good roads linking Williston Lake and the town. Anyway, when they get to Hudson’s Hope — surprisingly, it too is real, although it has only about a thousand people — Darren and his family are gone, and a couple of men break into their cabin, shooting at Frank and Joe as the boys flee.

When the men catch up with Frank and Joe, we learn the meat of this stupid, stupid plot:

1) The Wilkersons are part of the Witness Protection Program,
2) But their cover was blown in Bayport — the fourth time this has happened — so the family is hiking across the wilderness to the ultra-secret Witness Protection fortress, Hidden Mountain;
3) Hidden Mountain is in Canada, despite being a haven for people in the US Witness Protection Program, which I admit is probably an effective place to hide them — I certainly didn’t expect the US to keep vulnerable, valuable witnesses in a foreign country, because it’s a stupid thing to do;
4) The two men who shot at Frank and Joe claim to be FBI agents, sent to help the Wilkersons to Hidden Mountain, even though
5) They are so obviously not FBI agents, and the Witness Protection Program is run by the U.S. Marshals Service, which is an entirely different agency that predates the FBI by almost a century and a half;
6) Frank and Joe (especially the former) are able to track the Wilkersons through skills gained through a lifetime of summer wilderness programs, including a summer spent in Oklahoma with another of Fenton’s “good friends” (92), a Kiowa lawyer named George Long Bow;
7) When the Hardys finally shed the two fakes, they run into real FBI agents — again, WITSEC is run by the Marshals Service — and Kitimat, but the fake agents blunder into the Wilkersons;
8) Before the Hardys and the FBI agents can put a plan together, one of the FBI agents is “badly mauled” (101) by a bear and the other injured, evidently suffering a head injury so bad he’s amazed by a travois;
9) But don’t worry about the bear — the FBI agents are allowed to run around a foreign country unsupervised, but they aren’t allowed to kill wildlife, so one of the agents shoots the bear with a “special tranquilizer” (101) that puts the bear into “a twenty-four hour hibernation” (101);
10) So while the FBI agent is pulling his mauled partner toward safety, Frank and Joe insinuate themselves back into the Wilkersons’ / fake agents’ group, even though
11) They have no plan about how they’re going to take care of the fake agents, so the boys are inert as they get closer to Hidden Mountain, not attempting to overpower the fake agents or escape them, although I suppose
12) Escaping would be useless, since the villains have the map to the ultra-secret location that was given to the Wilkersons by some moron, and the villains want to kill all witnesses, so
13) Frank and Joe open a sealed envelope the non-mauled agent gave them, which gives them orders that are kept from the readers;
14) But I suppose the subtlety is best kept from the readers, as the directions are “rocks fall, kill everyone,” which is relevant because
15) To get into Hidden Mountain, everyone must climb the mountain, which means, SCREW YOU, DISABLED OR INFIRM WITNESSES;
16) After getting themselves and the Wilkersons to an overhang while rocks do kill the fake agents and gaining entrance to Hidden Mountain, the Hardys need special permission from Hidden Mountain’s “Supreme Council” to be allowed to leave (138), but
17) They gain that permission to leave because even thousands of miles away from Bayport, in the lost wilderness of Canada, Fenton Hardy’s name opens doors, which is good
18) Because I have no idea how the Canadian or US government resupplies a hidden facility, hundreds of miles from a city of any real size, that has a fifty-mile no fly-zone around it (forgot to mention that) and can be accessed only via mountain climbing, but
19) The story isn’t over, because once back in Bayport, the Hardys are followed by organized-crime figures, and once the FBI arrests those, they announce Frank and Joe will be under FBI “around-the-clock surveillance” (153) for the foreseeable future. Hope Iola and Callie find government surveillance a turn-on, or dates with the girls will go from occasional to nonexistent!

Hidden Mountain is intensely stupid, but its worst failing is that it can’t commit — like these Hardys, who aren’t in a serious relationship. Detective Kitimat follows the Hardys through the Canadian wilderness, but he does nothing to help them or the Wilkersons. The FBI agents show up, ostensibly to help (or take control — this is their moronic operation, after all), but they ignominiously are forced from the book by a bear attack, having done jack squat. They shoot the bear, but they can’t hurt nature’s killing machine; the agents must use stupid, science fictional tranquilizers that will put bears into hibernation for 24 hours, regardless of the size of the bear. The Hardys aren’t willing to hurt the fake FBI agents as they approach Hidden Mountain, even though they know the plan at Hidden Mountain is to kill them; they could have saved the men’s lives by trying something, but they’re willing to let them die rather than, you know, try.

I’m sure I’m leaving out a dozen moronic details — in Hudson’s Hope, for instance, the Wilkersons were warned they’d have to leave by a traveling salesman, which would be the opposite of an inconspicuous way to communicate anything in 2004 in a town of about 1,000 people — but I trust you get the idea: Hidden Mountain is a product of a line and era that often feels like watered-down Hardys, but this book’s stupidity is full strength.

* Which school vacation? The boys are out of school for only about a week, which suggests Spring Break or Easter Break or some sort of fall teacher’s conference, but in Canada, daylight continues until 11 p.m. That must be some time near summer — June, at least — but what occasion results in a week’s vacation from school in June? Even those poor unfortunates who go to school year-round get longer between the end of one term and the beginning of the next, surely.

Wreck and Roll (#185)

Wreck and Roll (#185) is a standard Hardy Boys book. The plot involves Phil Cohen dating a singer in a rock-and-roll band, and — of course — that band is the victim of sabotage, harassment, and light attempted murder. (No one has, as far as I know, ever been charged of attempted murder in one of the digests.) Everything goes about how you’d expect, and although I admit the culprit is better concealed than normally, that’s because the Hardys do little investigating in Wreck and Roll. They react to crises when they’re around the band, but they’re too busy not caring when they’re not around the band.

If you’ve read a half dozen of these books, you can probably guess the specific nature of the disasters: electrical malfunctions, theater mishaps, vehicular attacks. I’ll admit the sabotage of the band’s bungee jump and poisoning of a pre-show buffet was a bit unexpected, but we can’t be expected to think of every way to try to kill a rock band (but fail). Instead, I’m going to use Internet history as an inspiration and create a FAQ, even though we all know there are no questions about this book, let alone questions that are frequently asked:

1. Who is Franklin W. Dixon for this mystery?

Stephen D. Sullivan again.

1.1. How can you tell?

Sullivan doubles down on his namesakes in this book: BPD Officer Gus Sullivan returns for this book, and Sullivan’s son, known only as “Sullivan,” works as the band’s bouncer. Stephen Sullivan also brings back the Browning Theater from Trick-or-Trouble (#175).

1.2. Is that a conclusive identification?

I also read it on the Internet.

2. Who is the returning cast for this book?

Phil, who is described as “tall and thin” (78), is the Hardys’ entre into the action. Callie and Iola accompany Frank and Joe to a couple of concerts, although eventually they lose interest. Fenton and Laura show up, lawyer in tow, to pick up Frank and Joe after they are taken into custody for the crime of being attacked. The Cohens appear at the same time. (In the original canon, Mrs. Cohen was in The Bombay Boomerang, #49, but Mr. Cohen never appeared in the canon.)

2.1. Where’s Chet?

He’s helping at the family farm, which is run by Chet and Iola’s grandparents, for a week. For some reason, Chet’s getting school credit for his labor. Iola doesn’t explain how that works; I can’t imagine Chet taking ag classes, but who knows? Maybe he’s getting biology credit, or maybe it’s part of SkillsUSA, which I knew as VICA as a high schooler.

I think this is mentioned to move the Mortons’ farming heritage a generation back — Iola and Chet probably have never lived on a farm any more — and to foreshadow Sullivan’s next Hardy Boys book, Farming Fear (#188).

2.2. Where do Callie and Iola scarper off to?

They decide spending a weekend at a farm with Chet would be more interesting than hanging around an up-and-coming rock band or watching their boyfriends avert crises.

2.3. Is Phil cool enough to be dating a frontwoman for a rock band?

Of course not. Julie Steele, who performs as “Chrome Jewel,” is a several orders of magnitude cooler than Phil, although Sullivan soft-pedals Phil’s nerd credentials. He’s great with electronics and wiring, but he’s also the guy who drives an aged Toyota plastered with bumper stickers featuring his girlfriend’s band. Julie shows none of the rock passion one might expect, and the band’s lead guitarist actually says “rocked to meet you” (19), but still … by being the bassist and lead singer of a rock band, she’s much cooler than Phil.

Phil’s also the only significant other who comes backstage with the band, and he always brings along the Hardys. He’s trying too hard, and he’s dragging his own tagalongs backstage as well. Uncool, Phil.

2.4. Does Iola have reason to worry about Joe’s affections?

Not really. The band’s drummer, Jackie Rude, tells Callie and Iola to hold on to their “smart and handsome” boyfriends, or she “might steal one” (20), but she makes no moves on the brothers. Frank was never going to do anything, but Joe also makes no move. I suppose all those hugs Iola gives Joe are enough to keep him from straying … for now.

3. Is a middle-aged man writing about the music the youths love embarrassing or acceptable?

Mostly acceptable.

Let’s start with the band’s name, which I’ve withheld until now. Vette Smash is an acceptable band name, although the name conjures up the image of a person who would put a brick on the accelerator of a sports car and watch it slam into a brick wall in a beautiful fireball. (But not an expensive European sports car, like a Lamborghini or a Porsche; a Corvette, which suggests a more blue-collar sort of destruction.) I’d expect Vette Smash to be a punk band or a hair band, and while Vette Smash definitely isn’t the former, I can’t rule out the band being the latter. I mean, hair bands had been uncool for more than a decade when Wreck and Roll came out, but Vette Smash is only locally cool. We all know Bayport is stuck in a time warp, so when American audiences were rockin’ to Green Day, Nickleback, Maroon 5, and Evanescence in 2004, who knows what’s popular in Bayport at that time?

The members of Vette Smash are Jackie Rude, Ken Fender, Ray Chong, and Julie Steele, who — as mentioned — performs under the name Chrome Jewel. Other than the uninspiring “Ray Chong,” these are solid names, and we can excuse Ray because “Ray Chong” is probably his name.

Vette Smash plays “radical covers of older tunes, power ballads, and original compositions” (17). From what I gather, this is normal for newer acts, and as they grow in popularity, they shift more to their own music. (This may not true; I am not now, nor have I ever been, “hip.”) I’m not sure whether a band in 2004 would play “Riders on the Storm” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” classic rock songs from the ‘60s, over more contemporary ‘90s songs. Grunge may be cover-resistant, for all I know, but it’s hard to believe a band looking for a national contract in 2004 would have the courage to play “Deadman’s Curve,” a 1964 song by surf-rock notables Jan and Dean, even if the cover was “hyped up” (17).

On the unlikely side, the band hangs out at a bar that serves health drinks / food and no alcohol. The bar’s former existence as a gym and clever name (Vince’s Powerbar) almost makes up for that — almost, but not quite.

3.1. But this is definitely a middle-aged guy writing this, right?

Oh, yeah.

3.2. Can you give me examples?

Sure! He starts the story with Phil telling other teens, “Grab your dancing shoes and prepare to party!” (1). Frank tells Callie and Iola they look “super” (2). Joe calls Phil “the Philmeister” (3), years after Rob Schneider left Saturday Night Live. For some reason, he thinks Joe, a noted lunkhead, would know the word “obsequious” and be able to correctly use the word in conversation (61). He calls the band’s version of “Riders on the Storm” a “blazing cover” (63). He picked “Deadman’s Curve” as a song for the and called it an “old classic” (17). This is a man whose knowledge of youth is a little out of date, is what I’m saying.

He also has Frank and Joe conduct a normal conversation while driving motorcycles. This is preposterous, but to be fair, this is a long-standing Hardy Boys tradition, going all the way back to The Tower Treasure.

4. What about the agents who want to sign Vette Smash to a national contract?

The two agents are Walker Crown, a sexist Texan, and the all-business Kelly Miyazaki.

4.1. Sexist?

Crown always calls Miyazaki by her first name, while she calls him Mr. Crown; more importantly, he uses terms like “little filly” (27) and “little kitten” (36) to address her. I mean, he’s trying to demean her in front of potential clients, but he’s doing that with the kind of language that diminishes women.

4.1.1. So they definitely sign with Miyazaki?

No, they don’t.

4.1.2. They signed with Crown?

They did not.

4.2. Then which agent do they sign with?

Neither! Their manager dithers, and the band stalls, so Vette Smash doesn’t make a choice. And why should they? Nothing can go wrong for Vette Smash! There’s no reason to hurry — none at all!

5. Do Frank and Joe get to use sick martial arts?

Boy, do they! At the beginning, Frank is undone in fights by his reluctance to crack heads, giving Joe the opportunity to use hammerlocks and other boring moves to teach the unruly a lesson. But the Hardys and Vette Smash are set upon by mobs twice, giving Frank and Joe a chance to use their awesome moves to hold off the unwashed hordes until the police can be arsed to do something.

Frank uses a judo flip and “a quick chop” (118) in one rumble and “sweeping martial arts kicks” (87) in the other. Most likely Joe would have gotten a few good shots of his own — he has to settle for a slamming his fist into a guy’s gut — but he and Frank were busy protecting Phil and Vette Smash. Like when you’re running an escort mission in a video game, the brothers were prevented from doing cool stuff by the need to keep the feebs they were protecting from dying.

6. On a scale from disinterested to incompetent, how would you rate the Bayport Police Department?

Grossly incompetent. They don’t arrest any people who assault Vette Smash; even without Vette Smash pressing charges, the mob caused damage to property, and the police don’t seem to care. I mean, a mob pulled a man from his car and tried to beat him up! If one of those people had been African-American — as far as I know, Bayport doesn’t have Black people — in 2015, the National Guard would have been called out to keep the peace! And when Vette Smash is attacked again, this time by a rival gang, everyone gets arrested, and then … everyone gets released? The police take everyone’s fingerprints, and then nothing happens.

Nothing happens after Ken is almost killed by a sabotaged bungee cord. Nothing happens when an electrical fault sets the Browning Theater on fire; nothing happens when an electrical fault zaps Julie and her metal costume. Nothing happens when someone steals Ken’s convertible, stuffs Ken in the trunk, and tries to run over Julie with the car. Nothing happens when a rival band’s guitarist gets shocked by a guitar Ken was meant to play. It’s not just — just — that no culprit is captured or identified; I know justice can take time. But it feels like the police don’t ask the important questions: Does the band want protection? Who is out to get the band? Should we send an undercover or uniformed cop to be on top of things if another attempt is made? It’s hard to understate how much the police seem to be ignoring the nearly unignorable.

Perhaps Frank and Joe are to blame for this. They’re supposed to have “police contacts” (76); maybe those contacts were waiting on the go-ahead from Frank and Joe before doing anything. But the lack of work by the police and the lack of investigation by Frank and Joe does make Bayport seem like a lawless, early ‘90s urban hellhole (absent the hard-core drugs) that had been on the wane for a few years by this point but was still entrenched in the public mind.

The Dangerous Transmission (#184)

The Dangerous Transmission has precisely two things going for it: 1) a surprisingly metal cover illustration, with a raven, the scavenger of battlefields, holding an electric tooth in its beak, and 2) a title that could have easily fit in among the early Hardy Boys canon. (It’s a better title than The Secret Warning and more era-appropriate.)

That’s it, really. And it’s just those two specific elements — the cover itself isn’t great, and the title has flaws. Despite the picture that serves as the not-at-all fictional thrashcore band Electric Raventooth’s logo, the cover itself is dull, giving nearly as much room to the stultifying notebook-and-file-folder trade dress while minimizing the psycho corvid. The cover tag line, “Somebody’s got a sweet tooth for crime!,” is nonsensical, given that no sweets are mentioned in the book; that line has me primed for a criminal who has trained crows to steal either candy or cavity-filled teeth — both, maybe. The trade dress gives much too much room to that phrase for me to ignore it. Similarly, the book has no transmissions, either by radio or as part of an automobile, so it’s impossible to say the transmission is dangerous or perilous or even benign. The transmission doesn’t exist.

There’s a story that in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Superman editor Mort Weisinger thought readership would turn over every few years, so he’d recycle popular stories. I have no idea whether The London Deception (#158) was popular — I kinda doubt it, but I don’t have access to Simon & Schuster’s numbers — but the two books’ setups are identical. Frank and Joe are in London for a vacation, forcing an English exchange student who had stayed with the Hardys to pay back the hospitality. Rather than being drawn into the world of the London stage by high-school student Chris Paul, as they were in London Deception, this time they’re staying with London orthodontist Jax Brighton, who had stayed with the Hardys for a semester “a few years earlier” (2) while studying at Bayport College.

Jax isn’t just an orthodontist; he’s also a taxidermist, a pursuit he picked up because of his father, a professional taxidermist. This isn’t the first time taxidermy has appeared in the Hardy Boys: Taxidermy popped up as Chet’s hobby in the original Short-Wave Mystery (#24). In fact, it’s Chet’s second hobby ever, after old coins and the digging for them in The Melted Coins (#23). Setting the course for later stories, Chet makes his usual hemi-glutteal mess of his taxidermy efforts, creating a “lopsided” and “bulgy” (213) deer and then getting two pre-teen boys to finish the job. It would have been nice if the boys had mentioned this: “Boy, our friend Chet sucked at this!” they might have said. “But you’re actually good!”

Also something Frank or Joe could have mentioned: This is the second time they’ve come to the UK and immediately run into someone whose livelihood is teeth. In The Witchmaster’s Key (#55), Joe starts the book by getting a wisdom tooth pulled by Vincent Burelli, who is a) named after the book’s author, Vincent Buranelli, 2) is the book’s villain, and iii) is also known as “He-Goat.” I think any book would be improved by adding a guy named “He-Goat.”

Jax is making false teeth for an exhibit on the medieval period at the Tower of London, which means the Hardys get to tour the grounds with Jax and his friend, Nick Rooney, when there are no tourists around. It also means that when the exhibit catches fire and arson is suspected, Jax is politely but firmly questioned. Well, the police question him until Frank and Joe, who keep lurking around as Jax is questioned, drop Fenton’s name, and then that plot thread is snipped neatly off after Fenton vouches for Jax’s character.

But taxidermy and orthodontics aren’t all Jax has to offer the world. No, he’s invented the Molar Mike, which is a receiver / transmitter embedded in a false tooth and not — not, let me emphasize — a male stripper who wows the ladies with his gleaming teeth. Although Jax believes the Molar Mike is his ticket to riches, it’s actually the beginning of his troubles: a break-in that ends with an assault on Frank, a lawsuit from his downstairs neighbor over the Molar Mike’s creation, another break-in that sends Jax to the hospital, the Molar Mike’s theft and ransom for 100,000 Euros. (Euros — or “Euro dollars,” as they’re referred to on pg. 79, are the only currency mentioned; maybe this Dixon or his editor thought the UK had switched to Euros from pounds, because there’s no reason for Frank to pay for his “lemon drink” with Euros. In fact, there’s no reason for Frank to have Euros at all, unless he was going to the Continent later in the trip.)

The suspect pool is limited. There’s a soccer coach from Toronto, who is pushy and aggressive but is so obviously a red herring I’m not going to look up his name. There’s also “AA42,” a former Soviet secret agent Frank spots following them in London; the Hardys learn her code name because Fenton tracked her down a few years before, and they have access to his casefiles. She’s eliminated from suspicion because Fenton tells the boys she’s a double agent now, helping … I don’t know, somebody — “basically on our side,” according to Fenton (125). (I doubt she’s an asset to either side; in her home territory, she’s easily spotted and identified by two American schoolboys.) I’m not sure how Fenton knows so much about her or why she’s in her files; maybe he’s still working with SKOOL against UGLI, as he was in The Secret Agent on Flight 101 (#46).

Still, a goon is hanging around her, and the thug pulls Frank’s arm hard enough to strain his rotator cuff. This man is never mentioned again as a threat or suspect again. Despite his pain, Frank doesn’t seek medical attention for his injury immediately, setting a bad example for all the boys reading Dangerous Transmission. Instead, he treats his injury with a “tube of medicine” (70), presumably Icy-Hot or Ben-Gay or some other similar brand. He eventually does go to the hospital, but when Joe gets kicked in the ribs and knocked onto the Underground tracks, he too uses the tube of medicine to seek relief. I would say the boys are being too masculine for their own good, but the head injuries might be taking their toll, causing them cognitive difficulties; when Jax is knocked unconscious while retrieving a stuffed raven, falling with the raven on his chest, Frank “smacked the stuffed raven away” (71) like he was afraid the raven would attack him or Jax. Maybe he’d seen the electric tooth on the cover and was afraid it was the raven that was electric.

Oh! When Joe is kicked onto the tracks, the attacker loses his custom-made athletic shoe. This is a clue that goes exactly nowhere.

That’s because this Dixon has failed to set up that the actual criminal, Jax’s friend Nick, has prescription shoes. I mean, there’s enough in the book for the readers to realize Nick probably isn’t on the up-and-up — he’s the only other person who could have set the fire in the Tower of London, he’s worked all over the world and has “contacts everywhere” (108), and he knows enough karate to take care of the Hardys — but nothing about his shoes. Anyway, Nick is caught ridiculously easily at the ransom drop, so we don’t need to talk about him or Dangerous Transmission again.

Although I will mention plug London tourism. As Dangerous Transmission mentions, you can make brass rubbings in the crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields; it’s a classy souvenir, and I have a rubbing hanging in my hall. The Tower of London is also a neat place to see if you’re in London, even if you do have to visit while other tourists are there. I also recommend Sir John Soane’s Museum, which Frank and Joe don’t visit but should have; that place is chockablock with all the things a 19th century collector would have found interesting, including a mummy. I don’t know what to make of the Black Belt, a fictional karate restaurant Frank and Joe visit. At least I hope it’s fictional; I’m not quite prepared for a restaurant that hosts karate exhibitions and has such an on-the-nose name to emerge from a Hardy Boys book into real life.

Warehouse Rumble (#183)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Case of the Psychic's Vision (#177)

The Case of the Psychic’s Vision is a weird one, and that’s not meant as a compliment.

First, it presupposes that psychic powers are real, and not in a nebulous or deniable manner; psychic powers can reveal that which is hidden or forgotten. Real psychics are the rule, although the existence of fraudulent ones is acknowledged. Second, Fenton not only believes in these psychics but thinks they have probative value in investigations, both public and private. (They do not, of course.) Third, the Dixon writing Psychic’s Vision posits that everyone’s latent psychic abilities can be developed.

Wikipedia says Psychic’s Vision was the first of four Hardy Boys digests written by George Edward Stanley, although [CITATION NEEDED]. (The University of Southern Mississippi has Stanley’s papers, and the collection lists manuscripts and accompanying correspondence for Psychic’s Vision, The Mystery of the Black Rhino [#178], and The Secret of the Soldier’s Gold [#182], which would seem to settle the matter for those books; no mention is made of a manuscript of One False Step [#189]. ETA on 8 June 2019: The Southern Mississippi archive page also lists Hidden Mountain, #186, as one of his works.) Stanley wrote dozens of juvenile stories, including five Nancy Drew books, the Third Grade Detectives series, and the Spinetinglers series, the latter under the pseudonym of M.T. Coffin. Weld those last two together, and you can see how Psychic’s Vision might have come together.

In an interview, Stanley mentioned reading Nancy Drew, the Dana Girls, and the Hardy Boys as a child, and that inspired him to be a mystery writer. Stanley was born in 1942, so the Hardy Boys books he read would have been the original texts of the canon. That influence is visible in Psychic’s Vision. Chet is back to being a prankster, like in the early days; the author remembers the Hardys live at the corner of High and Elm (which shouldn’t be hard to remember, but, well …). The Hardy name gets a new pal excused for being late to class and causes a Vermont police officer to tell a bunch of kids everything about an ongoing hostage situation. A plot point in which a wealthy man pressures an employer to fire certain employees or risk financial ruin seems straight out of the first decade of the series. The book references early mysteries as well: “We got this airplane-shaped trophy when we solved a mystery at the airport … and we got this car-shaped trophy when we found out who was stealing all of the cars out on Shore Road” (44-45). These are clear references to The Shore Road Mystery (#6) and The Great Airport Mystery (#9), although they received trophies in neither book. Still, it’s a better way to shoehorn references to old mysteries into the book than most.

The psychic angle is an element that could have existed in the early books; certainly the original Disappearing Floor (#19) has events far less believable than psychic phenomena, but on the other hand, a fake psychic seems to be the kind of nonsense the Hardys would fight against — like they fought against a quack eye doctor in the original A Figure in Hiding (#16). But Colin Randles and his family are all good psychics trying to hide their abilities in Bayport.

Well, except for Colin’s sister, Nellie, who wants to hold a séance to cement her friendship with Iola and Callie. Chet sees this as an opportunity for a prank, and he and the Hardys hide near the Shaws’ gazebo. When Iola suggests they try to contact Roberta Sanders, a former P.E. teacher at BHS who went to South America and “just disappeared” (24), Chet responds. Now, it seems like a former teacher vanishing in South America is right up the Hardys’ alley, something they would have been hired to investigate, but I suppose “South America” is too large an area to search, even for the Hardys.

While Nellie and Colin’s parents break into the Shaws’ back yard to protest their daughter’s stupidity and people taking advantage of it, something grapples with Frank, drawing him into the bushes as it tries to strangle him. He doesn’t see who it is; he blames Colin, but it plainly wasn’t. But the culprit is never revealed. The only possible explanation, based on in-story logic, is that something supernatural tried to kill Frank. The only possible explanation, based on real-world logic, is that an old rival tried to kill Frank and was scared off by the kerfuffle caused by the Randleses.

Despite this otherworldly visitation, the main takeaway is that Chet went too far and the Randleses are good people — such good people, as a matter of fact, that Mr. Shaw wants to hire the unemployed Mr. and Mrs. Randles to run a new hardware store he just picked up. How fortunate! It’s always nice when capitalism works out for the little people. Everything’s going to be fine!

Except it isn’t. After demonstrating his psychic abilities by probably saving Joe and Phil Cohen from a fatal car accident and teaching the Hardys how to develop their own psychic abilities (!), Colin upsets the pretty, popular little world of pretty, popular girl Melanie Johnson by telling her she had been kidnapped as a two-year-old. This is the plot’s inciting event, but it occurs 55 pages into the book. No wonder this book runs 166 pages! (This is probably the longest book since Simon & Schuster took over the series at #86.)

Anyway, you make pretty, popular girls unhappy, and you’ll reap the consequences. In this case, Melanie’s boyfriend (and family chauffeur) pummels Colin in a Bayport back alley, necessitating that the Hardys track down Colin’s dumped body before taking him to Bayport General Hospital, the Hardys’ favorite emergency healthcare provider. (Another reason the book is 166 pages: It takes nine pages to find Colin and take him to the hospital.) The assistant principal yells at Colin with unwarranted venom, saying, “I despise people like you” (60). (Frank shrugs off Mr. Brooks’s abuse, which is horrible.) Melanie’s popular friends shoplift from Mr. Shaw’s hardware store, with the police shrugging when the Randleses report it. Pretty standard stuff, really.

But Melanie is pretty, popular, and rich, and when you make pretty, popular, rich girls unhappy, you also reap the economic consequences: Mr. Johnson threatens to call in Mr. Shaw’s loans unless he cans the Randleses. Mr. Shaw caves. It’s always crushing when capitalism doesn’t work out for the little people, which seems like it happens far more often than capitalism working out, although I suppose there’s a bit of confirmation bias there.

The Randleses head back to New York, but on the spur of the moment, Frank and Joe offer to let Colin stay at their home. They don’t consult with Fenton or Laura; when Mrs. Randles asks if the elder Hardys will be OK with an unforeseen lodger, neither brother opts to telephone a parent to ask. Sure! say the boys, and sure enough, they’re right.

With Colin back at BHS, things begin happening. Melanie wants to talk to Colin at her house when her parents are out, and shockingly, it’s not a trap. Melanie kinda remembers the abduction and wants Colin’s psychic help. (She also tells the boys her father told her to date the chauffeur, which is creeeeepy.) Before Colin can deliver any definitive info, the Johnsons come home and find the boys; after Mr. Johnson pulls a gun on them, Colin and the Hardys and escape through the back.

To up the creepy ante, Mr. Johnson commits Melanie to a psychiatric hospital. The boys track her down, but before Melanie can tell them anything, Mr. Johnson shows up, tries to strangle Colin, then collapses in tears after nurses separate them. The next day, at his law firm — the exquisitely named Stanley, Stanley, and Stanley — Mr. Johnson comes clean: His ex-con first wife gave birth to Melanie after their divorce, and when she started dating a thug, Mr. Johnson abducted Melanie to protect her from a criminal environment. He and his next wife, the current Mrs. Johnson, decided not to tell Melanie the truth. This should be a major scandal — non-custodial abductions are crimes, after all — but a combination of Mrs. Johnson’s indifference (she never filed a missing-person report for Melanie) and Mr. Johnson’s riches means he’ll probably escape all punishment. And all adverse publicity, as the story doesn’t show up in the Bayport Times.

That puts the book at about 150 pages, but Stanley has more to his story, so on we go. Melanie wants to track down her biological mother, so she asks Colin for help — the psychic, not the private detectives. Colin uses psychometry on Melanie’s toy lamb to learn bio-mom is in Vermont; three days of real detective work tracks Mary Davis Sullivan to West Middlefield, Vt. When Frank, Joe, their girlfriends, Colin, and Melanie arrive in West Middlefield, they learn Mrs. Sullivan is being held hostage by her ex-husband. Rather than let qualified police officers handle the deadly situation, the boys decide to butt in. They circle around the block, approach the house from the rear, and use Joe’s plan to pretend to be dopey teenagers who cut Mrs. Sullivan’s lawn, hoping Sullivan will be confused long enough for them to get the drop on him. It’s an intensely dumb plan, and it should end with several shooting deaths, but the power of the plot compels Sullivan to be dumb long enough for Joe and Colin to throw the contents of Mrs. Sullivan’s refrigerator at the criminal.

Evildoer subdued, they manage to announce to the police what has happened without being shot or arrested or both, and Melanie gets a moment with her biological mother. Just a moment — then the kids take off, leaving Melanie’s lamb with Mrs. Sullivan, and the story ends.

Thank Dixon for that. Psychic’s Vision is overlong and nonsensical (and not in a good way). But it’s done now, and we never see that psychic Larry Stu again. That’s something to be grateful for, at least.

Hide-and-Sneak (#174)

I have mentioned many times that I find the Bayport-based books that make use of the chums and explore the city are the best Hardy Boys books. Hide-and-Sneak, despite the mediocre, first-draft name, is another volume that supports my theory.

The story begins with Chet harassing Tony about the use of his boat. The boat’s name is never mentioned, but long-time readers of the series will remember it’s the Napoli. (I honestly don’t know whether Tony’s boat has ever been mentioned in the Simon & Schuster paperbacks.) Tony is too involved with his job at Mr. Pizza and moonlighting as a security guard at night at his father’s construction site to deal with Chet’s nonsense, though. (It’s been a while since the industrious Tony has worked for Prito Construction.)

Chet wants the boat because it’s a prerequisite for appearing in a student movie, as advertised in the Bayport Alternative. (Bold for an alternative paper to just label itself “alternative,” although I think a corollary of the Rule of Cool — nothing that labels itself “cool” can be cool — applies here.) Since his appearance in the sci-fi TV show Warp Space in Trouble in Warp Space (#172), he’s caught the acting bug — well, not the acting bug, because he has rejected working with local theater groups, like Frank suggested. I can’t blame him much; if working with the Hardys will teach you anything, it’s that you can’t think small; if you think small, you don’t get to go to Australia or Hong Kong or space. Also, the last time he was in a local play, in Cast of Criminals, Callie was almost killed over stolen diamonds. Since being with the Hardys means attempts on your life, again: You can’t think small. It’s the old scene-stealer’s adage: Might as well be murdered for a movie as a play.

Anyway, Frank and Joe have the Sleuth, “an older-model Chris-Craft boat that Frank and Joe had bought with their own earnings ad some help form their dad” (3). The Sleuth hasn’t been mentioned in literally years: It last came up in High-Speed Showdown, which was about six years before Hide-and-Sneak. It may have been even longer since the boys were paid for anything they did; in the original hardcover stories, they were paid all the time, but I’m having trouble remembering any rewards or fees they’ve collected since then. Still pretending their amateur status is intact for competitive purposes, I suppose.

The Hardys exist in a world in which money is ignored, which means class is as well — except as a signifier of a person’s worth. This becomes plain when the Hardys sign on for the student movie; no one asks if there’s any money involved for the actors. But for the actors, wealth is a proxy for class; the middle-class Hardys with their older but reliable motorboat are good, while Willow Sumner, who is using her father’s expensive powerboat, is a snobby bitch, and working-class Andy Slack and his friend, who have borrowed Andy’s father’s fishing trawler, turn to crime and treachery at the first sign of difficulties. (They are also so bad at both crime and treachery they come out of things with no money and are forced to switch sides back to the Hardys’.) The production itself has money woes, and the director is eager to smooch the hinder of the first rich person who will give him the time of day in order to increase the budget from shoestring to cruise-ship hawser.

I will give the Dixon full points for making the boys’ chief rivals a trio of girls without a) pairing them off with the boys or b) making one of them the fat one to match Chet / counteract Chet / be a lazy writer. Such arrangements happened occasionally from the ‘60s to the end of the Syndicate books, but they haven’t occurred often in the S&S digests. I mean, Joe takes the opportunity to get to know Willow’s friend Trisha Eads and ask her out — Joe calls her “fiesty” (106), so at least he has a type — but that’s just the way Joe rolls.

The movie, named Hide-and-Sneak, is improvised, lacking a script, to be filmed with digital cameras over three days on Barmet Bay. The actors’ goal is to find and keep the McGuffin, an unwieldy modern art project, while the cameras — one to each boat — capture enough footage to cobble together an interesting 80 minutes. I have my doubts, but that’s what the director and the producer, Joan Athelny, want.

Frank maintains an arch, cool demeanor throughout the planning stages despite his clear interest in drama. He’s unfamiliar with the term “McGuffin,” but he has seen the Shore Point Players’ production of The Miracle Worker, which featured Willow as Helen Keller, and Fenton and Laura had taken Frank to New York to see improv. (He’s also the one who suggested Chet take to the theater.) Frank works out the power struggles between writers, director, and producer as if he has been reading Variety. Frank obviously has some interest in theater or movies; why else would he have seen the Shore Point Players’ do anything? And yet he has no interest in the stage. He stayed out of the cast in Cast of Criminals, The Giant Rat of Sumatra (#143), and The London Deception (#158). He doesn’t use the investigation in Reel Thrills (#127) to force an entrance into the movie world. What is Frank’s endgame?

Whatever it is, Hide-and-Sneak doesn’t do anything to advance it. Each team gets a doggerel poem leading them to the McGuffin. The clues point toward places like Merriam Island and Shipwreck Cove; the latter is new, but the former — and its lighthouse keeper, whom Joe mentions is now buried on the island — appeared in The Secret of Skull Mountain (#27), as Frank and the Sleuth ended up on the island after running out of gas. The boys also mention the Barmet Shoals, which appeared in The Phantom Freighter (#26). This is pretty tight continuity work for a Dixon who thinks the Hardys live on Oak Street (81).

Because Joe’s attempts to lose the girls’ boat gets the Sleuth pulled over by the harbor patrol, Willow and her friends get the MacGuffin first. The boys climb the cliff at Shipwreck Cove, which is the location of the construction site Tony had been guarding — still was guarding, actually, as he jumps the Hardys’ cameraman. From the cliff, they spot the girls in another cove, but they don’t see the McGuffin; Joe correctly surmises the girls are using it as an anchor, and before dawn the next day, he cuts it loose and steals it for his team. The other two teams tear after the Sleuth, which ducks and swerves between small islands, eventually hiding behind a yacht. But the yacht is deserted, like the Mary Celeste (Frank tells the story of the doomed ship as they investigate); when Chet spots the owner swimming nearby, they rescue him, and the story comes to a screeching halt.

Peter Buckmaster — a name truly worthy of the Stratemeyer Syndicate — is the owner of the yacht, a Wall Street bigwig, and the owner of the construction site above Shipwreck Cove. He sweeps up the director and the cast, taking them to his under-construction home, and the director’s obsession with getting more funding for Hide-and-Sneak stalls the production for an entire day — long enough for Joe to ask Trisha out and for Buckmaster’s entire financial empire to crumble. Once the news of his financial misdeeds hits the air, Buckmaster hops on his yacht, which explodes in a fireball before it can get far from the cove.

Suicide? Frank’s not convinced. He thinks a strange woman in disguise has been lurking around the movie, both before and after the explosion, and he’s sure someone’s still skulking around the construction site; he sets a trap, but the intruder escapes in the blinding rain when Chet has to save Joe from tumbling off the cliff. Another trap nets Buckmaster’s ex-wife, who is both the producer and the woman in disguise. She financed the movie to get extensive footage of Barmet Bay, where she suspected her ex-husband was hiding himself (and his money); she suspects Buckmaster faked his death.

While the Hardys, Chet, and Mrs. Buckmaster search for Buckmaster’s hidden money, they are interrupted by Andy and his friend, who decide to steal Willow’s dad’s boat. Frank uses his “martial arts” to deal with Andy and his knife, but Buckmaster returns from his watery grave with a gun. Andy and his friend throw in with Buckmaster, claiming to be capitalists like him; Buckmaster has Andy tie up his friend, Chet, and the Hardys before pistol-whipping him. “Now you know the first two rules of successful capitalism,” he tells Andy’s unconscious body. “Never do anything you can get someone else to do, and never pay for anything unless you have to” (122). Good advice for a villain too!

While Buckmaster takes the powerboat, removes the bilge plug from the trawler, cuts the Sleuth loose, and makes his getaway with his ex as a hostage, Chet gets another hero moment: He crawls over to Andy’s knife and uses it to cut Frank loose. After everyone is free, Andy and his pal go for help while Joe retrieves the Sleuth and hotwires its damaged ignition. They set out after the powerboat, but unable to catch up with it, they attract the harbor patrol by shooting a gas can they have tied behind their boat with a flare gun. I would think the flare would be more than enough to attract police attention, but I am not a boy detective!

The combination of the harbor patrol attracted by the explosion and police alerted by Andy catch Buckmaster. Chet, after his two hero moments, takes the Hardys’ advice to try out for a production of South Pacific. Frank and Joe decline to do any more acting, ending the book by telling Chet, “If you’re going to be a star, it’s better to shine alone” (135). It’s good advice, even if Chet will never achieve anything without the Hardys, but at least that exit line allows the book to wrap up more than 10 pages early, just like End of the Trail (#162).

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!