When I decided to revisit The Hardy Boys Mystery Stories as a middle-aged reader, I admit I was partially driven by nostalgic sentiments. Perhaps like many others, I was also drawn to the mystique of the Hardy Boys. The definition of mystique as "a framework of doctrines, ideas, [and] beliefs constructed around a person or object, endowing the person or object with enhanced value or profound meaning" is entirely apropos for the Hardy Boys Mysteries; a lofty reverence envelops them to this day, partly evidenced by the fact that the books are readily available for purchase via christianbook.com. My aim in undertaking the daunting task of re-reading all fifty-eight volumes of the revised canon, about ten thousand total pages, was simply to make as objective an examination as possible. It wasn't long, however, before I began to seriously question the validity of their supporting frameworks, and I soon realized the "enhanced value" so commonly associated with the Hardy Boys is not exactly comprised of sturdy beams but of rather shaky, easily-toppled matchsticks. In fact, the general perception that the stories are sterling repositories of meritorious "family" values is based far more on mystification than on the actual content of the books themselves. Even though these fifty-eight mysteries do indeed disclose a detailed, layered chronicle of nationalistic American attitudes, beliefs, and biases as well as a heartily sustained mythos of unimpeachable wholesomeness, the series suffers from a variety of maladies, and numerous socially questionable, morally objectionable undercurrents repeatedly bubble up to the surface.
The fact is, The Hardy Boys Mystery Stories don't hold up under intense scrutiny. To be fair, perhaps they were never meant to. After all, the books' back-cover billing emphatically states: "Anyone from 10 to 14 who likes lively adventure stories, packed with mystery and action, will want to read every one of the Hardy Boys stories."; in recent editions, the range was even widened to 8-14. That they were not geared towards adults is clear enough, and they certainly live up to their own hype in the sense that they are indeed lively and action-packed. Hearing that they are still highly popular with junior readers should come as no great surprise and may even evoke memories of when we were younger, more innocent, and perhaps more naive. As a juvenile reader, I was in that class, but to a discerning adult, the stories' inherent flaws and weaknesses are glaringly evident.
Let's begin with the Hardy's hometown, the wonderland of Bayport, USA. Any initiate venturing into the Hardy Boys Mysteries will be struck immediately by an array of fantastic elements, chief among them being that Bayport and its inhabitants have been fossilized in White suburban America circa 1955, in a land of hot rods and jalopies, ten-cent hamburgers and five-cent cups of coffee, with haberdasheries, diners and milk bars, privately-owned hardware stores, costume stores, and novelty shops; it's a fairyland where doctors make house calls at all hours and stay-at-home moms, attired in house dresses, never express any desire to work, relying solely on male breadwinners instead, and teenagers (and adults) never grow any older. Frank, Joe, and their friends perpetually remain seventeen and eighteen, and through an endless succession of school vacations never advance a day nearer to graduation. Indeed, Bayport is a neo-Neverland, with very few mentions of the past before the previous mystery in Chapters 1 or 2, or of the future beyond the next case named in Chapter 20. Only in The Tower Treasure does either Frank or Joe reference plans for after high school. Joe tells Frank that the $1,000 reward offered by Hurd Applegate would be "a good sum to add to our college fund," but this plan is later abandoned; when they receive it, the boys speak of building a crime lab in their barn instead.
Despite these fantasy aspects, the stories are generally successful in creating a convincing social and topographical milieu for Frank and Joe to operate in, somewhat comparable to the world of Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry or Batman's Gotham. If readers can accept Harry Potter's magical incantations and transformations or a crusader fighting crime in a black cape and cowl, they should be able to tolerate the fundamental unrealities of the Hardy Boys Mysteries. When the Hardys and their friends are circulating within this familiar environment, the books carry an impressive verisimilitude. Almost all of the first twenty-seven stories take place in and around Bayport; not all are stellar, but The Tower Treasure, The House on the Cliff, The Secret of the Old Mill, The Missing Chums, While the Clock Ticked, A Figure in Hiding, and The Disappearing Floor are among the best mainly because they are securely grounded within Bayport and its immediate environs. The clunkers are usually the ones that deviate from this construct, with The Mark on the Door, The Hidden Harbor Mystery, The Twisted Claw, and The Clue of The Broken Blade being among the most prominent offenders of the early editions.
Paradoxically, although the generation and maintenance of this fictional world can be viewed as one of the series' major assets, it can also be considered one of its primary drawbacks. True, there is surface stability in the Hardy's family, community, and the world at large, but underneath there is a vastly outdated and oversimplified socio-cultural perspective. There is no complexity, no cloudiness, no grey area here, especially when it comes to demarcating the upright, law-abiding citizens from the low-life criminal elements. Good guys are good and bad guys are bad. As one child so eloquently puts it in The Mystery of the Spiral Bridge, "He's a bum! . . . I can tell, 'cause he doesn't shave." It's really as simple as that: society's undesirables and lawbreakers are instantly identifiable by their manners or their appearance. In A Figure in Hiding, Aunt Gertrude states unequivocally, "Features do reveal character." right after making the following incredible comment: "The man was clearly a criminal type-I could tell that by the shape of his ears!" Such ludicrous remarks, spoken with conviction as if they were widely accepted maxims, must either be accepted or dismissed outright otherwise the reader can hardly proceed further, for this overtly simplistic outlook is endemic to the entire series.
The stories' reputation for upholding core values is perhaps well-earned if we consider that the Hardys and their friends are striving so hard to protect and preserve (to borrow a phrase) "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" against all manner of subversive intrigues and disruptions from unsavory outsiders-a worthy endeavor, but one that places them in constant deadly peril. The boys and their chums are continuously besieged and impossibly, instantly rebound from narrow squeaks with all dangers imaginable: from alligators, bulls, bears, buffalo, piranha, scorpions, snakes, sharks, wild dogs, wildcats, and wolves to raging rivers, flash floods, dust devils, blizzards, hurricanes, volcanoes, cave-ins, and rockslides, not to mention bulldozers, cranes, cars, tractors, trains, airplanes, and ships of all types, and an infinite procession of cliffhangers and close shaves with explosives, hand grenades, handguns, blowguns, spear guns, rifles, time bombs, arrows, cannonballs, knives, machetes, poisoned needles, rocks, boulders, boxes, barrels, cargo booms, crates, and heavy machinery, virtually all the latter resulting from the murderous impulses of what has to rank as the single most unbelievably bungling, inept, and dunderheaded rogue's gallery of homicidal maniacs ever assembled in a corpus of literature.
Frank, Joe, their pals, and Mr. Hardy suffer countless knockouts and engage in innumerable fracases in which their hapless foes are continually "kayoed." Although their enemies employ almost every tactic within the sphere of human invention to try to eliminate them, the Hardys and their friends miraculously do not rely on anything more than their wits and their fists (or the boys' expertise in Judo, Jujitsu, Karate, and football) to escape the clutches of and defeat the perpetrators of every insidious plot. Violence is ever-present, but it's mostly sanitized, cartoon violence. The bad guys repeatedly shoot at Mr. Hardy, Frank, Joe, and their chums with every conceivable weapon, for instance, but only on two occasions do they hit their targets: Frank is struck by a poisoned dart in The Melted Coins, and Fenton Hardy by a poisoned arrow in The Sign of the Crooked Arrow . Amazingly, Mr. Hardy or the boys never return fire; in fact, despite one thug's claim in The House on the Cliff that the senior Hardy "never misses his mark!," Mr. Hardy shoots a gun with deadly force only once, killing a savage wolf in self-defense in The Wailing Siren Mystery .
Frank and Joe carry firearms very infrequently, for protection against wild animals, but only in The Secret of Wildcat Swamp does either boy discharge them: Joe shoots a charging wildcat to save Frank and later takes a "potshot" at a fox for no reason. In the pursuit of crooks, all shooting is done by the police, Coast Guard, or other law enforcement agents, but implausibly, no bad guy is ever hit. In fact, it is a rarity for any person to take a bullet. In Hunting for Hidden Gold, Mike Onslow is struck In the leg by careless hunters, and Bob Dodge reports that two armored car guards were shot in a robbery. Lenny Stryker is hit in the leg by a semi-conscious security guard in The Secret Panel, and in The Clue of the Broken Blade, a mobster, Ziggy Felton, sustains a gunshot wound to the chest. Although critically injured, he tells his tale, and when he's carted off by ambulance, we simply conclude he survives. There is just one murder to be found, in The Witchmaster's Key, but it's not by gunfire; the victim is poisoned. The most sinister physical threats to the good guys are the numerous kidnappings, commonly involving druggings, but (with the exception of The Missing Chums ) whoever is taken and/or drugged is soon rescued, returned, or manages to escape by himself.
Indeed, the Hardy Boys and their friends lead charmed lives; they hardly ever suffer anything more serious than cuts, bumps, bruises, or scratches that never put them out of action for long. Chet does break his arm in The Clue of the Hissing Serpent ; Joe wrenches his ankle in The Secret of Pirate's Hill ; Tony succumbs to a similar injury in The Missing Chums, but all these are accidental; only Biff's severely sprained ankle in The Mystery of the Spiral Bridge is the direct result of a criminal pitfall.
What lies behind all the violence is the clear-cut distinction thus emphasized between the good guys and bad guys. Underworld criminals stop at nothing in their attempts to get rid of the Hardys or their friends, but Fenton Hardy, Frank and Joe, and their pals are presented as remarkably scrupulous, incorruptible, almost inhuman (if the term can be applied to fictional characters), models of moral, emotional, and ethical restraint. According to one critic, they are "part of the 'cultural production of self-control and mastery as the revered ideal for the American man'" (Riska). Although they sometimes express heated desires for revenge, they never seek out personal vengeance; their justice is societal. Once, when Joe states that he wants to get his hands on a certain goon and Frank asks what he would do to him, Joe, after a moment's thought, replies, "Get him behind bars." (While the Clock Ticked ). They only fight to protect themselves or their pals from imminent bodily harm or to rid the community of its evil forces. In their society's eyes, the Hardys and company are viewed as blameless champions of law and order, justifiably lauded and rewarded for their efforts.
Frank and Joe in particular are set up as golden exemplars of honesty, bravery, determination, integrity, intelligence, and courtesy, their unwavering demonstration of which ascends to the heights of mythologizing and superheroism; they are top students in Bayport High, top track, baseball, and football stars; they attend church, even on the road (the word "God" never appears in any of the books, however, but the phrase "Ye gods!" inexplicably comes out of Frank's mouth once), utilize such innocuous catch phrases as "Good night!," "Sufferin' snakes!," "Jumpin' catfish!," "Leaping lizards!," or "Great horned toads!," never voice a harsher epithet than "idiot" to express their anger (and never to an individual directly), make a point to inform their mother or aunt when they'll be late for a meal, and always eat their apple pie and drink their milk.
Additionally, the boys are expert short-wave radio operators and repairmen; they are also alternately master mechanics, outdoorsmen, hikers, horseback riders, rock-climbers, trackers, martial artists, marksmen, musicians, fencers, falconers, pilots, photographers, sailors, swimmers, scuba divers, skaters, skiers, survivalists, and life-savers. And, almost needless to add, they are nearly infallible criminologists, codebreakers, and investigators. Given their extraordinary prowess with practically every talent under the Sun, what gang or criminal mastermind could ultimately prevail against them? They doggedly follow all the essential clues and unearth all the crucial pieces of evidence needed to foil every one of their adversaries. They are always the main instruments for restoring communal security in the end, occasionally with the eleventh-hour aide of the Bayport police force, which, strangely enough, often seems as ineffectual, clumsy, and dim-witted as the criminals themselves.
Critics have described Fenton Hardy, Frank, and Joe as "ideal[s] of masculinity," which is debatable, as well as "well-scrubbed Boy Scout types" (Wood; Kirkpatrick); on the surface, collectively, they and their male cohorts comprise a virile boy's club, a veritable Boy Scout troop on steroids. One prominent way this "Boy Scout" mentality is displayed is through Frank and Joe's polite, formal modesty around women, but on this point, the series reveals its age in more ways than one. There is absolutely no attempt to conceal the notion that females are the weaker sex, in constant need of protection and support, best left at home, for when they step outside their prescribed roles, they are likely going to need rescuing. Only Aunt Gertrude is boisterous enough to defend herself and her nephews against home invaders and other miscreants, so feminists may take some comfort in that, but this may also partly explain why she's a spinster, as men of her day would no doubt feel threatened by her.
Callie Shaw and Iola Morton, the only significant female teenagers in the series, enjoy almost sanctified status as Frank and Joe's "special friends," "favorite dates," or "girl friends" (two words), but only in The Tower Treasure when Frank and Callie deliver some home-baked goods to the impoverished Robinson family do they ever approach the stature of a bona fide couple. Throughout, Frank and Joe maintain such a stringent physical and emotional distance from the girls that the word "relationship" becomes totally unsupportable. For the most part, Callie and Iola are merely window-dressing, existing only to be paired with Frank and Joe at dances, parties, picnics, or beach barbeques, where they always supply the food for their robust, "manly" young men.
Even though in The Hooded Hawk Mystery, Iola is described as "a capable sleuthing assistant," and Callie as "frequently very helpful in the boys' sleuthing," these are gross overstatements; even in this story they are almost invisible. Frank and Joe do not, as a rule, actively involve Iola as an "assistant," nor could hers or Callie's help be accurately deemed frequent (if their skittish, bone-headed attempt to procure undercover waitressing jobs in The Secret of the Caves is any indication of their capability, it's no wonder). The girls do uncover cogent clues on occasion (Footprints Under the Window, The Crisscross Shadow, The Disappearing Floor ) and receive highly condescending praise as when Frank tells Callie, "You were a doll." when she fulfills her task in The Secret of Skull Mountain . More often than not, out in the field, the girls are merely left behind only to run into trouble. In The Missing Chums, Iola and Callie go to Hermit Island with the boys to help search for Chet and Biff, but they are soon outdistanced, and their screams upon seeing the "hermit" bring the boys rushing back to their defense; when another visit is proposed, Tony Prito states adamantly, "no girls this time . . . That phony hermit carries a shotgun, and if the robbers are there, the danger is double," to which Frank simply replies, "Right," thus giving credence to the idea that the girls must be shielded from all potential hazards. Of course, the Hardys and their friends express no qualms about facing the same "double danger" they seek to screen the girls from and venturing unarmed into the hideout of an unknown number of foes; such outward fear of indeterminate peril would be utterly contrary to their boys' club code of manly courage and fortitude.
Frank and Joe mostly succeed in protecting their "special friends," but sometimes the girls are put in harm's way. Iola is bound and gagged by burglars in The Ghost at Skeleton Rock, and her hair catches fire when a bomb explodes in a barbeque pit in The Clue in the Embers (fortunately, Frank snuffs it out immediately), but only in The Shore Road Mystery is either of them in any real deadly danger: Callie, trapped in the "Spiderman's" net underwater, nearly drowns. Luckily, Frank is right there to rescue the damsel in distress, and it is interesting to note that while after such close calls Frank and Joe often apply artificial respiration to each other and their male friends, in this case, Callie is "choking," but "gestured that she was all right," thus nullifying any need for Frank to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, for the authors constantly adhere to an unnaturally rigid hands-off policy as it relates to Frank and Callie, Joe and Iola. There is no hand-holding, hugging, or other physical displays of affection except for Iola infrequently looping her arm through Joe's, and, in one very remarkable instance, Iola giving Joe a quick peck on the cheek after he and Frank rescue the girls in The Mystery of the Chinese Junk . (Callie, however, does not offer Frank the same reward; she merely flashes "a grateful smile" at him.) True, Iola's kiss evidences more gratitude than romance; nevertheless, it is the only occasion in the entire revised canon where any kiss is recorded between the boys and their "girl friends."
There may be several reasons for the conspicuous absence of what might seem innocent physical exchanges among them; one of the most cogent is the point expressed in Leslie A. Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel, summarized in Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia, that "America's classic novels are written primarily for males and that fully-developed female characters are virtually non-existent . . . As a result . . . American literature has tended to depict a kind of prepubescent male camaraderie instead of mature heterosexual relationships."
It is not my intention to assert that the Hardy Boys Mysteries are "classic" novels, but they do occupy a rightful station in the history of American literature, albeit juvenile literature, and one would be hard-pressed to come up with a description that fits Frank and Joe's relations with Callie and Iola, each other, and their male friends more to a T than this one.
Furthermore, one could point to some infrequent but slightly fishy depictions that raise legitimate doubt about Frank and Joe's machismo (check out Joe's fuzzy slippers in the illustration from Chapter 1 of The Flickering Torch Mystery ). Certain passages, charged with latent homoerotic overtones, give deeper meaning to the phrase "male camaraderie" and may shed further light on why the boys much prefer their pals' company to that of their "favorite dates." In Mystery at Devil's Paw, for example, after a night canoeing up a river in Alaska, Frank, Joe, and their companions take a dawn swim, with Frank and Joe frollicking in the icy water and their Native American guide Fleetfoot "plunging and darting like an otter . . . Shortly, all of the boys were glad to hurry to dry land, where they toweled themselves to a brisk glow." Since they're out in the wilds of Alaska, one could assume they didn't pack their swimsuits and therefore must have been dipping in their birthday suits, although they did at least have the foresight to bring towels to dry off with. WIth this little morning escapade behind them, the enlivened, rosy-cheeked lads are ready to get back on the trail of a ruthless gang of international spies.
More of this suspicious action and language surfaces In The Mysterious Caravan, first while the boys are time-sharing a beachfront hut in Jamaica with Frank's mysteriously missing underwear, and then in an emotional parting scene between Joe and William Ellis, whom they met on the beach. After the Jamaican hands Joe his necklace as a goodbye gift, "Their eyes met for a few silent seconds, then Joe smiled." Here it appears the two are seriously infatuated with each other; they seem on the verge of a farewell kiss. Later, upon hearing that his "bromantic" interest is coming to Bayport, Joe cannot restrain his enthusiasm and immediately comments to Iola: "You'll like him. He's tops." Even in the same story, when Frank begins to develop what could be a meaningful relationship with their exotic guide, Christine Cellier, nothing ever comes of it, and he and the others part company with her with handshakes and the same formal, distant language reserved for all females. Indeed, the only real intimacies they share throughout the whole series are with themselves and their male friends; additionally, one cannot help but wonder if the authors of the revised canon were genuinely, honestly unaware of the dirtier meanings of words like "dick" (cop), "boner" (a mistake), "queer" (odd), and "faggots" (bundles of sticks) when they decided to utilize them, or whether there really is a sly, surreptitious intention to subvert the Hardy Boys' impossibly idealized, "well-scrubbed" Boy Scout veneer.
The unswerving ties of friendship and loyalty shared by the boys and their pals are only rivaled by the Hardy's familial bonds. It is repeatedly stated that Frank and Joe inherited their sleuthing abilities from their father, but it appears they also inherited his male chauvinism, for he displays an exemplary sexist model in his relationship, or lack thereof, with Laura Hardy. Mrs. Hardy greatly typifies the ideal housewife of her day, meaning she is essentially persona non grata, there only to do her husband's bidding and see to the family chores. It is something of a breakthrough when, in The Tower Treasure, we learn she actually has her own car. Moreover, despite the assertion that "their mother's word was law" (The Crisscross Shadow), she rarely says anything significant. Most of her dialogue with Frank and Joe involves their describing recently survived incidents and accidents (but they continually omit the more violent aspects or couch the truth to prevent her from worrying too much) and her advising them to exercise caution. If any issue regarding their cases arises, she defers to her husband, who, in turn, never withholds his approval.
In several ways, the boys' relations with Fenton Hardy can be viewed as unusual, and in other ways, unsettling. The fervent admiration Frank and Joe display when speaking of him borders on idolization, while the unbridled excitement and exuberance they exhibit in his actual presence borders on arousal, but Mr. Hardy's attitude towards them is often curt, distant, even ambivalent. He offers them standard compliments such as "Great work!" when they track down clues or crooks but doles out more genuine praise to Frank and Joe's staunch friends. Joe often puts his arm around Mr. Hardy's shoulders, but the boys rarely receive anything warmer than handshakes. One of Fenton Hardy's most revealing statements, however, comes at the end of The Secret of the Lost Tunnel. General Smith proclaims he is "the luckiest man in the world to have such sons!," and Mr. Hardy replies, smiling, "You won't find me contradicting you!" One could argue this would have been more heart-warming if Mr. Hardy had made the initial remark and General Smith the reply; nonetheless, it constitutes quite an outpouring for the usually reserved master sleuth.
Critic Tim Morris noted that "while Fenton Hardy is portrayed as a great detective, his sons are usually the ones that solve the cases, making [him] a paradoxical figure" (Morris). It's true that on occasion, Mr. Hardy does seem remarkably inastute, but I wouldn't say he's incompetent. Although he sometimes lands in scrapes he cannot extricate himself from and must rely on Frank and Joe's aid, he probably rescues them just as much, if not more, than they rescue him. Sometimes, however, he is either incapacitated (Hunting for Hidden Gold, The Sign of the Crooked Arrow, The Mystery of the Spiral Bridge) or else on vacation (While the Clock Ticked, The Hidden Harbor Mystery), so the boys "pinch hit" for him. Most other times, he's out of town on a case, leaving Frank and Joe to shoulder the workload and bear the main brunt of the danger. One troubling thing that does crop up is the way he deserts his sons, causing them unnecessary suffering at the hands of their captors. In The Missing Chums, instead of closing in on the kidnappers directly, Mr. Hardy leaves Frank and Joe tied up in a shack for so long that they give up all hope of rescue and fight their way free (fighting a fire in the process as the shack is set ablaze); in The Wailing Siren Mystery, he accompanies the boys to North Woods to track down the gang, yet exits mysteriously and returns only in time to save Frank and Joe from being devoured by ravenous wolves after the boys had been ensnared and lashed to trees with stout wire for hours.
This, of course, is really what the "paradox" of Fenton Hardy and the entire series revolves around. Mr. Jefferson puts it succinctly in The Mystery of Cabin Island: "I'm surprised your parents permit you to pursue criminals, however much you appear to-er-thrive on danger." No responsible parent would willingly allow his teenage sons to become embroiled in one danger-laden case after another or permit them to risk their lives, one near-fatal mishap after another, to chase after vicious crooks. Yet Mr. Hardy does. Like Laura Hardy, he continuously warns Frank and Joe to always be on their guard, but this advice usually occurs about a page and a half before they are almost blown up, shot, or killed in a myriad of other ways. One would think a single near-death experience would be more than enough for any parent to endure. But Fenton and Laura Hardy are not real parents; they are fictional characters, bound in their fictional world. If they were to forbid Frank and Joe's sleuthing, there would be no more cases. The same goes for all the close calls. If just one were a real call, then the series is kaput. In a way, every one of these stories is anticlimactic; we know the boys will never be seriously injured. We know they will escape no matter how psychotic or merciless the criminal. A prime example: in The Mystery of the Chinese Junk, the bad guys knock out Frank, Joe, and Chet in a cave in which there is a slime-covered pool. Instead of disposing of them immediately after trussing them up, the goons allow at least two hours to pass so the boys can fully revive, proceed to confess everything, and finally inform the still bound boys they will throw them in the pool to drown. By the time they get through all that rigamarole, Biff and Tony arrive to thwart their evil scheme. Foolish, yes, but there's no avoiding it; ironically, despite all their acumen, the boys repeatedly fall into the hands of kingpins and criminal masterminds in Chapters 18 or 19, thus initiating an all-too-familiar cycle of capture, confession, rescue, and resolution by the end of Chapter 20.
Far too often, these stories strain our suspension of disbelief to the breaking point; far too often we must tolerate incredible deus ex machinas and far-fetched improbabilities, many involving Mr. Hardy, who often displays almost supernatural abilities. In The Secret Agent on Flight 101, while a hostage in a hotel room, he scrawls the precise location of an unnamed Caribbean island (degrees, minutes, and seconds of latitude and longitude) his captors will transport him to on a wall for Frank and Joe to discover. Just how he divined this is never explained. Chet once refers to him as a "magician" (The Shore Road Mystery), and he performs feats that are nothing short of miraculous. He saves the boys from a rapidly filling ship's hold from out of nowhere in Footprints Under the Window; he unexpectedly swings down from the roof (like Tarzan) into a warehouse loft where the boys are trapped in The Firebird Rocket; towards the end of Mystery of the Desert Giant, when the boys are holed up in a small cabin, he shows up so perfectly disguised as the missing Willard Grafton (even though he'd never seen him and the man himself was disguised by Frank earlier) that as Chet flees in fright he cries: "Something weird is going on. There are two Mr. Graftons in the cabin!" Something weird, all right.
But the bulk of the obnoxious plot devices revolve around Frank, Joe, their friends, and the criminals themselves and often sink into outright absurdities:
[Frank] bore down on the accelerator until the needle touched the speed limit.
"We're gaining!"Chet yelled.
One of the stories' more laughable aspects comes when Frank or Joe affect tough guy attitudes by conversing in street slang. The language employed by ordinary hoodlums is not absurd in itself, but a lot of their stage names are: Shorty, Lefty, Taffy, O.K. Mudd, Big Al, Hooks Zigurski, Baby Face, Junior, Whip Lasher, Kitten Cole, Big Malarky, and Choy Bok (a clear ethnic mockery: flip it around and you've got a Chinese vegetable) to name a few, but rather it's the ridiculous manner in which the Hardys mimic it. Two overly-theatrical exchanges stick out like sore thumbs. The first appears in What Happened at Midnight when Frank goes to the police station to fish for information from a recently captured hood:
"Hi Shorty! I'm sorry the dicks got yuh. But yuh didn't tell 'em nuttin', did yuh?"
"Naw."
[.] "Name's Youngster. I got a bonus on the last haul. Just joined up with Marr-when smacko!-I run into the toughest set up [. . ] Did the dicks take the Hardys' package from yuh?"
"Yeah. Before I could open it."
"How'd yuh like me to lift it? I could do it easy," Frank boasted.
"From the dicks?" Shorty asked, astonished.
"Naw. The Hardys. The chief'll give it back to 'em."
The conversation continues until Frank learns where the ringleader is and then "swaggers" out of the police station. Evidently, the intention here is to illustrate that cons like Shorty are also short on brains; since they're not highly educated, they don't speak in standard American English but make use of clipped, nonwords, and lingo such as "dicks." Of course Frank, a squeaky-clean, top-of-his-class high school student, would never use such corrupted language in his daily life, but "Youngster" is more than fit for the task and employs it so effortlessly (along with a hoodlum disguise, if you can get past the Laurence Olivier Hamlet wig he's sporting in the illustration) that Shorty coughs up the one key piece of information that cracks the case wide open.
A second, sillier example comes from The Mystery of the Spiral Bridge. Frank and Joe, undercover on a road-construction crew, find themselves in a lion's den of ex-convicts, but when they eavesdrop on one of the gang's confabs, they're stymied, for "[t]he language of the card players was interspersed with many slang words which the boys had never heard before. It certainly was not the jargon of their Bayport High School crowd!" Indeed. Luckily, they have their notebooks handy, jot down the unfamiliar expressions, and get them translated by Sam Radley. Overnight, they become such adepts that Frank has the nerve to address one of the ex-cons with this gem:
"You think I'm a bindlestaff, eh, Yancy? I figured you to be a finger . . . I'm a torch man, but a tin star caught me on a cheeser. Ain't that the way? Copped a heel but fell flat."
Good night! Fortunately, the humble reader is supplied with a glossary so as not to be at a total loss, but Yancy, a hardened criminal, needs no such help; what's more, this jabberwocky is so impressive that it wins Yancy's confidence on the spot, but at least he has the wherewithal to tell Frank to pump the brakes on the jailhouse slang, not because Frank overdid it just a little bit, but because his big boss doesn't like them using it. Thus we are mercifully spared any more grossly exaggerated outbursts for the rest of the book.
There are numerous instances of broad comedy throughout, such as when a safecracker humiliates Aunt Gertrude by actually penning the following on a scrap of paper and pinning it to her shirt after tying her up: "Take my advice and keep this blabbermouth gagged all the time!" Most of the humor in the early stories, however, revolves around the clownish, obtuse, "would-be detective" Oscar Smuff, a source of great merriment for Frank, Joe, and their chums. Smuff then disappears altogether, only to reappear later as a beat cop. In the meantime, Chet takes over as chief buffoon. His sundry amusing exploits, with the "Bigloo Igloos" in While the Clock Ticked, his rocket-propelled bicycle in The Sinister Signpost, his abortive magic tricks in The Secret Agent on Flight 101, his improvised set as a last-minute replacement for Boko in Mystery of the Whale Tattoo and others help ease the pressure of the non-stop action, but, on a more serious note, he is made the butt of countless jests because of his weight (and his appetite) by his friends. In fact, the boys' off the cuff ribbing comprises a large portion of their supposedly friendly banter with him. This also extends, in one highly crass and insensitive case, to Chet's hefty love interest, Thelma, in The Shattered Helmet as Frank and Joe mercilessly tease him with such flippant remarks as Thelma joining the Bayport HIgh football team or lifting Chet off the ground with one hand. In light of our heightened sensitivity and zero-tolerance policies today, especially in our schools, concerning bullying and harassment, however, this unrelenting ridicule would no doubt be considered totally unacceptable. One could argue that it's natural for hoods and surly youths like Ronnie Rush in The Haunted Fort to toss around derogatory terms like "fatso," or try to rationalize away the boys' verbal barrage as "good-natured kidding," but these excuses don't hold water in the wake of news stories detailing vindictive cyber-bullying, harassment-related school shootings, and even teen bullying-induced suicides.
The interminable teasing Chet bears is only one of a number of discomforting side aspects of the Hardy Boys Mysteries. Another is the unaccountable transvestite behaviors that pop up: two in Mystery of the Flying Express, and one in The Clue in the Embers, Mystery of the Whale Tattoo, and The Clue of the Hissing Serpent. They are all explained as disguises, as when Chet (who wears one of them) says in Mystery of the Flying Express: "I thought it might be fun to tail the disguise in disguise," which is puzzling because it is completely unnecessary. The man he was tailing (who was himself in drag) had never laid eyes on Chet, so he wouldn't have known him from Adam (or Eve) anyway. Thus we are led to conclude that Chet had "fun" dressing as a woman. This is surely bizarre behavior for Bayport High's beefiest lineman, and even stranger that he donned his mother's dress and sister's wig (which begs the question why Iola had a wig in the first place). The saboteur would naturally use a disguise, but why dress as a woman? We could safely assume that he simply enjoys it also, for he had already donned feminine attire to call in a threatening message to Frank and Joe. The other instances are equally as baffling, for there is no logical reason for them and they are rendered even more pointless as the masquerades are are quickly discovered. At least in The Clue in the Embers, the bad guy has a legitimate motive: he's been fingered and has to flee the country, but again, why try to do so dressed as a woman? Unsurprisingly, his guise doesn't make the grade: Frank, Joe, and Chet immediately identify him on the flight out (coincidentally being on the same plane to the same destination as he tries to make good his escape). Oddly, the boys do nothing about it, and the (wo)man manages to slip away after landing only to resurface at the end as a man and is then captured, whereupon Chet taunts him because his hairy arms were a dead giveaway on the plane.
An additional troublesome issue is the portrayal of minorities. Writing of the revised stories, Tim Morris described Bayport as "ethnically cleansed." This is a little overstated, but there is no arguing that it is vastly dominated by whites. In The Hooded Hawk Mystery, a delegate of the Indian government states that he knows of only a half-dozen Indians in all of Bayport, a city of some fifty thousand residents. It is also clear that the good citizens are unaccustomed to dealing with people of color. Here is a grocer's recollection of a foreigner in The Mystery of Cabin Island: "He was a scary sort-dressed up like Halloween. He had somethin' wrapped around his head. I got rid of that spooky fellow soon's I could." Mr. Grice is an old-timer who likely had never met an Arab before, but there is obvious xenophobia in the words "scary" and "spooky" as well as clear ignorance in equating the man's wearing a white robe to being "dressed up like Halloween." When Frank, Joe, Chet, and Biff encounter the same man on the island, they simply refer to him as "the ghost," thoughtlessly reinforcing Grice's cultural misapprehension and anxiety. In Footprints Under the Window, after describing a suspect as having a "dark complexion," Joe immediately remarks that "He may be foreign-born." When Frank learns that Krassner in The Clue of the Hissing Serpent is one-fourth Chinese, he comments, "So that's what gives him that odd look." These remarks clearly exemplify a mind-set that anyone not 100% Caucasian must necessarily be "foreign," "odd," or even "scary." This is not language suggestive of unity; it is the language of inherent separateness and difference.
According to Meredith Wood, "racist stereotypes are . . . fundamental to the success of the Hardy Boys series." Although referring to the old and new versions of Footprints Under the Window, this statement is not without merit on a larger scale; whether they are "fundamental" to the success of the series is open for debate, but there is no doubt some stories abound in stereotypical depictions of ethnic minorities. Native people, for instance, play significant roles in several and are generally handled tactfully; their most consistently fair and dignified representation comes in The Melted Coins, but in others, such as The Clue in the Embers, The Ghost at Skeleton Rock, and Mystery at Devil's Paw, they are portrayed in a less than flattering light. Though Chief Whitestone and his son Ted mostly preserve their tribe's cultural credibility in The Crisscross Shadow, this story also contains the most egregious use of common Native American stereotypes and racially motivated ridicule. We are treated to D-grade Hollywood dime-store Indian speak as when Chet, wearing Indian garb, intones: "This Indian warrior's suit. Chief say you his prisoners.Bring um white girl to Wallapatookunk." And when Callie enters soon after, Joe chimes in in the same degrading vein: ". . . let me present Great Chief Walla-er-anyhow, heap big wheel among Indians!" Later, when Frank, Joe, and Chet approach the Ramapan's tribal land, they are accosted by an imposter who jaws at them: "No be afraid. I your friend . . . I give warning. You boys walk to bad country . . . You listen to warning, pale-face . . . Tribe guard deep secret. No want visitors." At least Frank is clever enough to see through this phony, saying, "No real Indian talks like that these days." An astute observation, but only a few chapters later, a legitimate member of the tribe, Long Heart, does indeed talk exactly like that.
Other critics have noted that of all minority groups represented, Hispanics draw the most sympathetic treatment (cf. Connelly); Frank and Joe even adopt Spanish names, Francisco and Jose Fuerte, for a time in an effort to shake a gang in Mystery of the Desert Giant. None of the Latino characters ever achieve genuine companion status, however, and several are merely stock caricatures, but some paltry attempts are made to introduce minorities who are on equal footing with the Hardys and their friends. Jim Foy plays a large role in The Mystery of the Chinese Junk (but at one point chastises Joe for his insulting parody of overblown Chinese-coolie manners), but then he disappears from the series; a Maria Santos appears as Callie and Iola's friend in The Clue in the Embers, but she has no dialogue and is never seen again; in The Mysterious Caravan, and The Sting of the Scorpion, Blacks close to Frank and Joe's ages are finally visible, but they're not school pals; at least in The Sting of the Scorpion, Leroy Ellis is paired with an African-American "girl friend" (two words again) at a picnic with the Bayport High crowd, and later she actually supplies some useful assistance in their case.
Other than these and Sid Carter, husky attendant to the White master diver, Roland Perry, in The Secret Warning, African-American characters are shamefully absent, only appearing elsewhere in The Hidden Harbor Mystery and The Secret of the Lost Tunnel, both of which are set in the South. This could have given rise to some sound dramatic tension if substantive Black characters were drawn, but they weren't, and anything remotely approaching social realism is entirely eschewed; instead we are presented with loyal, subservient Negroes in the Whites-ruled fabricated fairyland of Tara. Claude, General Smith's "orderly" in The Secret of the Lost Tunnel, is a stark example of the mythic cheery, contented, polite Black and spawns one of the most idiotic, racially insensitive, historically blind statements I've ever come across. As Frank, Joe, and Chet arrive at General Smith's home, "the front door was opened by a middle-aged Negro, beaming broadly. His courteous welcome reminded the boys of the gentle traditions of the Old South." "Gentle traditions"? Such as. slavery? Let's see: here we have a middle-aged Black doorman, a virtual servant to the White General, doing all the cooking, cheerfully guarding hearth and home while Smith and the boys are out rummaging through the ruins of the General's great-grandfather's slave plantation, trying to clear his besmirched family name by locating a cache of gold secreted during the Civil War, a war fought primarily over slavery, and all the White boys can do is hearken back to those rosy, bygone "gentle traditions of the Old South" when they are respectfully greeted by a grinning Negro. It's a wonder that ever made its way into print, but now it appropriately serves as a blatant example of the casual racism that rears its head time and again throughout the series. In the end, Claude does attain an ironic importance, however: when he offers to help decipher a coded message after overhearing a discussion between the General and the boys (never having been admitted into the White men's confidences regarding the treasure clue), he is politely dismissed, but the track he puts the boys on leads directly to the discovery of the long-lost gold.
A third annoyingly persistent aspect of the stories is that they are rife with distracting and irritating inconsistencies. One thing the series could greatly benefit from is a continuity editor with a sharp eye for small details, starting with the Hardy's barn behind their stone house in The Tower Treasure. In subsequent books, their home is redesigned into a wood clapboard structure with a large front porch, and the barn is replaced by a two-story garage. In the first six stories, Frank and Joe cruise around on motorcycles; these are afterwards discarded in favor of a sports coupe and later, a convertible. In almost all stories, Chief Collig's first name is Ezra, but in The Disappearing Floor, he refers to himself as Clint; Callie is described as having blonde hair throughout, but in The Missing Chums, her hair is brown. Biff Hooper owns a Great Dane, Tivoli, in The Secret Warning, but by the time of Danger on Vampire Trail, his mutt has transformed into a bloodhound named Sherlock; Chet's jalopy, Queen, is alternately described as yellow or tomato red, and in What Happened at Midnight, it's green. Some of these minor slip-ups would probably go unnoticed if one read a handful of the books, but if a generous selection is reviewed, they become blatantly obvious, as do more serious and frequent blunders such as wrongly assigned lines of dialogue. Here is a classic instance from The Phantom Freighter: "'This might be the place,' Joe said as they neared it. Then he yelled excitedly, 'Joe! Look! The barn's on fire!'" Either Joe got so flustered by the sight of the burning barn that he addressed himself instead of Frank, or this is an inexcusable oversight given that Joe is clearly indicated as the speaker just ten words previously. In The Melted Coins, another such "boner" surfaces:
"Listen, Chet," said Joe, "the thieves wouldn't be so obvious and leave that card if they were really driving to Montreal."Obviously, the first line of dialogue should have been given to Frank, and the second to Joe, or vice versa; the repetition of the name is the error (the thieves weren't obvious enough to leave the card and drive to Montreal, by the way; they flew there instead and were apprehended by Fenton Hardy the moment they landed). Such mix-ups can easily be chalked up to inattentive editing and sloppy proofing, and the same can be said for some illustrations that bungle scenes. In The Wailing Siren Mystery, we see a drawing of the vicious wolf, Saber, trapped in a stockade, chained to a stake, while Joe shines his flashlight on it. That may sound innocent enough, but only a page prior, we know that Frank is holding the light and that Saber is trapped, but not chained. In The House on the Cliff, Frank and Joe are depicted wearing V-neck sweaters and ties while battling gang members, which is strange because great care was taken to detail how the boys entered the secret hideout after swimming to shore with their T-shirts, pants, and sneakers tied above their heads. So where exactly did they get the dress shirts, sweaters, and ties, then? (Not to mention the undeniable absurdity of their putting on white-collar clothes to hunt for smugglers and their missing father at a cliffside house in the dead of night.) And why exactly is the same illustration used twice in The Mysterious Caravan, once as the frontispiece and again in Chapter 20? Couldn't they have dreamt up anything different? (By the way, it is botched both times as Joe is shown fleeing the landslide with William, though the text has Frank running for his life; however, the unimpressive depiction makes it a little difficult to distinguish between the two.) Mistakes will inevitably creep into anything printed, but when there is an excessive accumulation that not only distracts the reader but also impacts the integrity of the narrative, the publisher's commitment to issuing professional-grade products can reasonably come under fire.
"The address is probably a phony," Joe put in.
Regrettably, one has to deal with not only these recurring errors, but also the painfully substandard content of some of the books. For the most part, volumes 1-38 retained some of their artistic integrity after the series was overhauled, even though "offensive" material was excised and some plots totally reworked. Books 39-58, though, are a hodgepodge of mediocrity. The Clue of the Screeching Owl does stand out as a fairly tightly-woven, suspenseful, and consistently effective story, although it too falls victim to some overused plot conventions at the end, but it is clear that by books 46 and 47, the series was becoming exhausted, and volumes 48-58 are particularly dreadful, with the possible exceptions of The Masked Monkey, The Clue of the Hissing Serpent, and The Sting of the Scorpion, but even these are serviceable at best and groan under the many flaws that plague the series. The Arctic Patrol Mystery is an insufferable, nonsensical, almost incomprehensible mess, but the golden turkey of all Hardy Boys Mysteries has to be the virtually unreadable The Bombay Boomerang, a thoroughly overblown exercise in stupidity and absurdity. Its over-reliance on every formulaic Hardy Boys convention, each one more fantastic than the last, plus all the quips, jests, and "tongue-in-cheek" humor totally ruin any and all dramatic sensibility until the whole attains the heights (or depths) of ridiculous self-parody and farce. Danger on Vampire Trail (Prince Cuthbert? Are they serious?) and The Witchmaster's Key (Dr. Burelli/ Satan? Please.) tie for a greatly inauspicious second, with The Jungle Pyramid, an absolute sham of a story, running a close third. The series rebounds with The Sting of the Scorpion; unsurprisingly, it was penned by a different ghostwriter than the two responsible for the previous ten installments who between them almost managed to irretrievably sink the ship.
In the final analysis, it is certainly questionable whether the authors of the Hardy Boys Mysteries knowingly, willingly, and deliberately constructed them to harbor socially aberrant behaviors, or disrespectful, mean-spirited, racially-derisive attitudes, or if they are just by-products of their times. Viewed through a modern lens, the issues are undeniably present. The extensive longevity the series enjoys may be one of the great triumphs of youthful innocence and optimism: to see beyond all its defects and limitations, if to acknowledge them at all, to accept every aspect of the Hardy Boys' world at face value and question nothing. The idea that the stories provide simple wish fulfillment (Cross) is all well and good, but if true, I don't think it necessarily involves the certainty of good triumphing over evil (Kismaric & Heiferman), or the insupportable mirage of Frank and Joe's chivalric White knight's armor of impeccable, clean-cut moral righteousness, or even the mental transportation to an idealistic fantasy land, unless one inquires into what that fantasy land rests its foundations on. To a large extent, even now, the Hardy Boys Mysteries transmit a validation and perpetuation of the myth of upper-middle-class White suburban ascendancy in the face of ethnic, racial, international culture clashes and social diversification. In short, the prevailing mystique of the Hardy Boys proves that sometimes the whole can indeed be greater than the sum of its parts; collectively, the stories rise above their individual faults and weaknesses and provide something more essential: comfort and reassurance that a cherished way of life is not falling by the wayside. In The House on the Cliff, when Joe remarks that having a crook like Felix Snattman on the loose doesn't make the community a very healthy place to live in, Fenton Hardy exclaims: "But we're going to make it so!" Such a vehement declaration is almost poignant; realistically, we know that a trio of detectives and a handful of high school students can't successfully safeguard our communities or our national interests, but I'll be damned if Mr. Hardy, his sons, and their friends don't manage to achieve the impossible somehow.
Viewing The Hardy Boys Mystery Stories as an adult is a little like peering at a collection of Egyptian mummies encased in glass at a museum: we approach with a sense of fascination, and maybe even awe; they are antiquated relics of an era long since past, yet they endure. They are swathed in the slightly tarnished, threadbare linens of time, and like the mummies, if one starts picking at those threads, they will disintegrate in one's fingers, exposing to our eager eyes the parched, gnarled, skin-and-bones husk underneath, so faithfully preserved for all eternity.
THE TEN WORST HARDY BOYS MYSTERIES
THE TEN BEST HARDY BOYS MYSTERIES
REFERENCES
See also: [NERObooks homepage] [Gene Weingarten on The Hardy Boys, 1998] [tag:fiction]
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