Hardy Boys = bumbling saps, or, non-mysteries you hate

Cafe Society
1

I just got my uncle’s old collection of Hardy Boys books and read “The House on the Cliff” and “The Hidden Harbor Mystery” and so far it seems to me the greatest mystery is why there aren’t any clues in any of the books.

Maybe it’s because I just finished reading the entirety of The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, but I was waiting for the incisive reasoning, the quick conclusions, the skill, the subtle inferences, and the crisp decision to pursue one lead over another.

But no, the Hardy Boys practically fell over mysteries without even realizing anything was going on.

In the very first few pages of “The House on the Cliff” the Hardy Boys are frightened away from a supposedly haunted house: they hear blood-chilling shrieks as they explore the property, and after they have been scared away, maniacal laughter chases them.

Was I expecting too much for them to stop and say, “If their intent was to frighten us away, no rational human would chase us off with screams, then announce his victory by taunting us during our departure. Therefore, we are dealing either with an irrational human being, a phonograph, or a real ghost.”

No, no, no — what they said was, “Golly! Gee. I guess no ghost’s going to get the better of me! Let’s go back and investigate!”

Investigate your own dumbness, you dumb dumbheaded… dumbs. I mean, holy frijoles, couldn’t they at least pretend to be detectives instead of trespassers and petty thieves? And how come I didn’t notice when I read these at age eight?

Later in the book they discover the secret cave where the smugglers are hiding out. Do they wait for the police backup? Hell no. They decide to tackle an entire den of armed smugglers single-handedly on the argument that, “Well, we haven’t been seen yet… it can’t possibly get any more dangerous than it is now! Let’s keep going.”

And while I’m at it, what’s with Frank always being the sodding best at everything? What was Franklin W. Dixon saying by naming his lead character after himself? Sheesh.

2

Franklin W. Dixon was a pseudonym, and the Hardy Boys weren’t written by one person but by many different authors.

3

It’s been more than a quarter of a century since I last read a Hardy Boys book…were they all about smugglers? Or did they ever ‘investigate’ a murder? A kidnapping, perhaps?

4

A while ago there was a hilarious Photoshop Phriday at somethingawful.com on the Hardy Boys. Most of them were silly and stupid, but there were a few along the lines of “The Smugglers of Pirate Cove” or “The Mystery of… oh, fuck it, it’s obviously smugglers”. Is there even such a thing as smugglers of anything but drugs and Canadian toilets these days?

5

BTW, Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller are doing a Hardy Boys movie. I think just hearing that is enough for you to have about 40% of the movie laid out. It should be funny, though.

For their next remake: I’m pushing for Midnight Cowboy

6

Ben Stiller and “funny” don’t belong in the same sentence; he hasn’t been in a decent movie since “Reality Bites,” and if I saw that again, I’d probably hate it.

7

I read quite a few of the Hardy Boys books when I was a kid, and I don’t remember much of anything from them (which probably tells you something) except that they had a friend named Chet who drove a jalopy (whatever that is), and maybe another friend named Biff.

For a long time I could only read the Hardy Boys books my parents bought for me: the local library wouldn’t stock Hardy Boys books, because they didn’t come up to their standards of quality. Instead I had to check out The Three Investigators books, which had the same sort of appeal but were way better.

8

Well, Nancy Drew wasn’t much better - but come on - it had SOME entertainment value (and she had that spiffy roadster! :slight_smile: ) And yes, I have a huge collection of Nancy Drew books - including my mom’s from the 1940’s. And yes, I’ve been known to read them now and again. YES, I’m almost 40 - why do you ask?

9

The plot would thicken if Dixon knew how. What does it say about the creator of the Dixon pseudonym if he names the lead character after a fictional writer?

I looked up Dixon last night, actually; since he’d been putting out books for 50 years I sort of had the vague idea that Dixon started them but other people took over the franchise later.

“The House on the Cliff” was smugglers, yeah, with a sinister, evil, crouching, slimy Chinaman behind the whole operation. “The Hidden Harbor Mystery” wasn’t about smuggling at all, but a story about two feuding families whose antagonistic fires were kept stoked by a sinister, evil, crouching, slimy Negro behind the whole operation. Sheesh. I feel embarassed that I never noticed the racism in those books before. No wonder they were edited.

10

Heck, yeah! That’s why I started this thread.

11

Maybe you watched too much Scooby Doo. Sounds like the same sort of plot but without the dog or the girls.

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Homer: . . . these Hardy Boys books are great, too! This one’s about smugglers!
Bart: They’re all about smugglers.
Homer: No, not this one! “The Smugglers of Pirate Cove”. It’s about pirates.

13

What’s Scooby Doo got to do with anything? I just read “The House on the Cliff” this weekend and that was the plot. I’m not confusing it with anything else.

14

Didn’t think you were. I was struck by the similairites, that’s all.

15

The Hardy Boys t.v. series made my little heart go pitty-pat when I was 12. I had the biggest crush on Shaun Cassidy. Last year the 1st year of the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew t.v. show came out on DVD. I bought it and had a laugh at the included Parker Stevenson/Shaun Cassidy poster. It’s funny in the t.v. series you can tell the exact episode where Shaun Cassidy became “it” for pre-teen girls. After that, he sang in every episode.

Oh, and I read a few the Hardy Boys books (even though I was a girl) before the t.v. show came on and was mostly meh about them. Same for Nancy Drew actually. My preference was for The Three Investigators when I was at that reading stage which preceded the show by a couple of years.

16

True. It’s sad, really, but Scooby Doo is actually a step up. They at least pretend to find clues, follow footprints, and make deductions. They’re silly clues, obvious footprints, and illogical deductions, but so far in these two Hardy Boys books, their SOP is to invite all their friends to join them while they trespass, break into other people’s houses, commit fraud, theft, assault, and throw themselves into needless peril. Of course, they’re never punished because a) they’re “detectives” and b) they’re young and white.

17

Crouching Negro, Hidden Harbor?

18

Read the first book, The Tower Treasure. In it, Frank ‘n’ Joe set up a phony bomb scare to delay the Bayport cops from interrogating a dying suspect (the boys want their father, a private detective, to get first crack). They surreptitiously put an alarm clock in a box and leave it in the pushcart of a Italian fruit vendor. Then they hint to the vendor that the Black Hand will get him for overcharging and, hey, what’s this ticking box? “The Blacka Hand! The Blacka Hand!” yells the over-excitable vendor, and racially-tinged hilarity ensues.

19

Did you happen to notice that the book was written in 1927? :rolleyes:

20

Well, yeah. :rolleyes:

Oh, wait, I forgot. Racism was invented in 1956. Before then, everything was cool.