New Releases
13: Bound for Danger – 10/16
Paperback – Hardcover – Kindle
Brother detectives Frank and Joe find themselves on the basketball court and in the midst of a dangerous team initiation scheme in this thrilling Hardy Boys adventure.
Joe and Frank are taken aback when Principal Gerther announces that they need more extracurriculars on their school transcript, and he’s signed them up for the basketball team. They think it’s odd because they both stink at basketball!
But the Hardys soon find out that their principal isn’t acting out of concern for their college applications; he wants them to solve a dangerous mystery on the team. It turns out that a band of masked players are kidnapping new team members and then beating them up, blackmailing them, and threatening them-all in an effort to boost performance.
Can the boys step up to the line and stop the shadiness?

Specter of a Hardy Boy Collector
Or The Treasure in the Storage Locker
By: John Vander Sloot
Reality: circa 2005:
My eleven-year-old daughter Katie stepped into my storage unit for the first time. Mom was working, so I took her along as I needed a few things from the 10X30 rented space. Donned in a dirty shirt, shorts that didn’t match and her favorite pair of Crocs, it was obvious it was a day with Dad, not mom. Mom would never let Katie in public looking like that.

To Katie, the storage locker was filled with wonderful things and her brown eyes were wide with amazement. For me, it was thousands of dollars of samples that I needed for my job. To Katie, it was newly found treasure. I started rifling through the plethora of boxes, picking items out for a sales meeting the following day. Katie copied me by rousing through boxes herself.

“Fish hooks, dad!” she cried as she opened her first box. I replied with a simple smile. Katie loves to fish with me. “Look at all these lures. You haven’t opened any of them.”

Inside the next box, Katie finds a tube with dials on top. “What is this, dad?” she inquired as she looked through the tube.

“A rifle scope,” I replied, stopping to show her how it works. She was fascinated at how the tube made objects appear closer, running around the storage unit with the scope to one eye, pretending she is on a ship and it is a telescope.

“Can I have it?” Katie asks, peering at me through the scope. Still scouring through my samples, I replied that it wasn’t a toy. Tossing it back, Katie continued to peek into various boxes, asking me to explain each new discovery.

“You really sell all this stuff?” she asked.

“You bet, sweetie. That is why I am not home a lot, I am out there selling all this stuff,” I answered.

“Then why is it all still here?” Katie innocently asked.

Chuckling, I gave her a hug. I stepped back, dropped to one knee and brushed her light brown hair out of her smudged face. “These are samples I show customers. When they order, the product comes from the factory it was made in,” I explained. She smiled and walked back to more boxes. I knew she didn’t quite get it.

After a few more boxes and twice as many questions, Katie came upon two big boxes of books. She pried open the brown, folded flaps and gasped out loud. “Look dad, books” she exclaimed. Me, festooned with samples in my arms, turned around and looked at Katie. “Wow, those are my old Hardy Boy and Nancy Drew books,” I replied.

“There must be thousands of them,” Katie cried as she starts rifling through them.

I had to think for a minute before I replied. “I bet there are more like 100 or so.”

“Did you read them all?” Katie asked in amazement as she continued to ransack through the Hardy Boy book box.

“Yep,” I replied, “when I was your age, I would read them over and over.”

“An alligator dad!” Katie exclaims and holds up a 70’s era Picture Cover copy of The Hidden Harbor Mystery before tossing it down and opening the other box.
Memory Beacons:

I smiled at her enjoyment rummaging through the box. My mind drifted back to when I read those books. ’74 – ’76 I figured – each and every one of those books were bought and read. I couldn’t recall why I had saved them. But I sure remembered when I read them.

Sundays. I read and reread every one of those books on Sundays. I chuckled as I threw some samples in my truck, thinking about how Katie is growing up so much different than how I grew up. Me at 11? Strict religion ruled the house, Sears Toughskins in puce were considered fashion and I wasn’t allowed to use the telephone – an emergency call might be coming in, you know? For Katie, there is no church. Clothing wise, it is hoodies and skinny jeans. As for telephones? I am reminded weekly of how EVERYONE of her friends has a cell phone but her.

Sundays. If Cadets on Monday night and Catechism on Wednesday night weren’t enough, there was Sunday – the actual instigator of Cadets and Catechism. Sunday. The day my parents put aside to punish me every week. It was the day I got up and had to start my day with a shower. Any other day I bathed, it was at night. Sunday was the day I got to wear the uncomfortable clothes, especially the shoes which were always too tight. Then off to the Church we would go. After a painful hour and a half, mom and dad got to go home. Not me, I got to go to Sunday School. 5 days a week wasn’t enough school for me, I had school on Sundays, too.

Funny how the mind drifts back and certain suppressed memories suddenly get unlocked from some chained box in the brain. I recalled the time I got expelled from Sunday School. Our homework was to draw a picture of what one loves the most about Easter. Being torn between my peppery Aunt Connie’s chocolate bunny I got every year and the answer I knew the teacher wanted, I improvised. I drew a chocolate bunny on a cross, complete with blood coming out of the nail holes. Needless to say, my dad literally dragged me out of Sunday School by the nub of my ear. I remember him uttering unfamiliar words like “Sacrilege” and “Blasphemy”. And here I thought it was sheer brilliance.

Dad would always pick me up from Sunday School and then home for a huge meal. It always confused me that dinner was served at 1pm only on Sundays. Every other day, the big meal was served at night. After dinner there was “the wait”. I had to stay indoors, regardless of the weather. Outside, the rest of the neighborhood was riding bikes, skateboards and one kid had a Puch Moped. Not me, I had to stay inside and wait for the 6pm church service. It was the Sabbath after all.

Somewhere in this childhood social clash; I found the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. No clue when or how I got my first books. All I remember is the homemade bookshelf I had in my bedroom. A mismatch of bricks and lumber I had scavenged from the new construction sites around our home (looking back, it was probably considered theft!). Aligned on those hackneyed shelves were a vast collection of HB and ND PC (politically correct) books. Every Sunday afternoon I would sequester myself in my bedroom with these books and read and reread them dozens of times. It didn’t matter if it was Nancy or Frank and Joe, they were next to each other in the store – so they were the same to me.

I smiled and was thankful I was giving Katie a different upbringing. One would need a world class shrink to analyze how my upbringing affected my parenting of Katie. But one thing I knew: if it was sunny and 80 on a Sunday, Katie and I were going be outside.
Back to Reality 2005:

I was snapped from my haunted memories when Katie exclaimed, “Dad, look at this cover!” She had found the Nancy Drew box and held The Secret of Mirror Bay in her trembling hands. “Can I read them like you did?” I smiled at her eagerness. Despite her upbringing being so different than mine, having her read these books seemed to make sense to me. They saved me at her age. Not the way the preacher talked about, no. These books literally saved me in a different way. Now sitting there on the floor of the storage unit, they were about to change my life again.

“Tell you what, Katie,” I replied “you pick out two Hardy Boys and two Nancy Drews and we will take them home and read them together as a family.”
Katie didn’t even reply, she tossed “Mirror Bay” on a shelf and delved back into the wondrous boxes. Picking by the attraction of the cover, Katie left with 4 books in hand.
The next 18 months are a special memory for me. Every night we could, the family would read Hardy Boy and Nancy Drew books together after dinner. Katie, dad and mom would all read out loud to each other – powering through the 20-chapter books in two nights flat.

But the time was short lived. Katie moved on to books like the Michigan Chillers series by Jonathan Rand. Then the whole vampire thing erupted and Katie was hooked. I remembered I moved on from them too. In fact, the last HB book I had in that box of books was 1976’s The Witchmaster’s Key. So my window must have been about 2 years, too.
A Collector is Born:

The summer Katie moved on from the HB and ND books was a hot one. It was a blistering Sunday morning with the humidity in the 90’s and the high temperature to be the same. The family decided to pack a picnic lunch and take our pontoon boat on our lake and park it. My bride started packing the picnic basket (in retrospect, I see the irony) and I had to run to my storage locker first. My wife had piled up the now discarded HB and ND books and asked me to take them back to the storage locker.

I loaded up the books and took the two-mile drive. I opened up the unit, grabbed the books and walked inside. I thought of the moment Katie and I were there 18 months ago. I let out a big sigh and escorted the books to their respective boxes. For some odd reason, I decided to organize them in the box, so I started taking them all out so I could put them back in in numerical order.

But there was an anomaly in that first box of HB books. Tucked in the bottom of the carton were two odd books. One was a thick, light blue book with red coloring on the top of the pages. The Sign of the Twisted Candles was boldly written in orange lettering. I recognized the title, but not the format. I opened it up and was shocked to see 25 chapters and a glossy frontispiece. Below the ND, was a thick brown book. I grabbed and stared at the dark brown title Hunting for Hidden Gold. Again, a bright frontispiece and more than 20 chapters. I was baffled.

Forgetting the organizing, I threw all the books except the two anomalies, back into their boxes. I grabbed the samples I needed and shut the storage locker. I was going to reread an Agatha Christie book on the boat, but decided then and there to check out these odd books instead. When Katie found the HB and ND books, she thought she had found a treasure. What I didn’t realize at that moment was the storage locker was going to give me a new gem as well.

We spent the day on the lake. The girls would bob in inflatables alongside the pontoon while I was propped up in the boat with a cooler of beer, the Tiger’s game on and my two new book finds. At first, I couldn’t recall where these two books came from. Then another door in my memory creaked open a little and I recalled how they came to be. My audacious aunt Connie, the instigator of the chocolate bunny fiasco, had given them to me for my birthday in the late 70’s. An avid garage sale hound, all my birthday and Christmas gifts came from her haunts in other people’s discarded wares. She meant well by giving them, but I must have simply tossed them, unread, on my homemade bookshelf. Aunt Connie didn’t know I had moved on from juvenile series books. But here they were 25 years later.

The girls came out of the lake for lunch and we feasted on cold fried chicken, vegetables, chips and we even had cake (well, if you call Hostess “King Dons” cake…). Almost done with Hunting for Hidden Gold, I reread the snowball fight scene with Chet and Con Riley to the girls. There never was a chapter like that in the PC books I grew up with. The humor, the slower pace of an age gone by and of course, the disregard for the law, all richly written in a different style of prose.

I was hooked after finishing both books that sultry summer day. After that, I did some research and found out there was a whole different world out there than the HB and ND I grew up with. I quickly started combing used book stores and antique shops for any of the old books deemed “Completely Different” or “Drastically Altered”. Today, I sit on a modest collection of Hardy Boy books from all eras. I have every Yellow Spine DJ book and every Wrap Around DJ book. I only have a few White Spine books, as these have proven tough to find organically.

Today, my bride of 24 years refers to my collecting as my “Midlife Crisis”. “It could be worse,” I always quip, “the crisis could be fast cars and faster women”.

I have enjoyed collecting the books and the hunt may be the best part. But looking back, I find it a strange tale of how I got here. As a youth, the PC books really saved me. Then I got to enjoy them again with my daughter. Finally, the HB’s gave one more time and provided me a remarkable hobby. I wonder what Edward Stratemeyer would have thought of that?

Ah, he probably would have advised me to buy that ’69 Chevy Chevelle SS with the 396 in it.
Author’s Note: A special thanks to Jeremy Morong for the edit. A Hardy Boy enthusiast himself, he is also the author of several books including The legend of Hummel Park and The Adventures of Braxton Revere.

 

Hardys In Review
Hunting For Hidden Gold (Revised Text)

By John M. Carlson
Spoiler Alert

Hunting for Hidden Gold (Revised Text) was my first Hardy Boys book, which I got when I was about 7. I was too young to read it myself – my reading level then wasn’t even Laura Lee Hope, let alone Franklin W. Dixon – but my mother read it to me. I fell in love with the book, and I had my mother read it to me countless times. Meanwhile, my father got stuck endlessly acting out this book when he played with me.

I recently reread this book. One might think I’d still have it totally memorized, but such is not the case. Plus, of course, I’m reading it with adult eyes, not the eyes of a young boy.

In this book, Fenton Hardy is hired to investigate an armored car service holdup that took place in Montana. He goes there, and tracks the ringleader of the gang, Big Al, to Lucky Lode. Unfortunately, Lucky Lode is not a lucky place for Fenton, and he ends up injured. Fortunately, Frank and Joe are on one of their endless vacations from school (like usual!), so they fly to Montana to help.

Frank and Joe also get involved in another case in Lucky Lode. The second case involves missing gold. (Thus the title of the book.) Years before, Black Pepper’s gang held up some men who were mining gold together. Bart Dawson, one of the miners, escaped with the miners’ gold. The miners planned to meet later on and split the gold. But Dawson totally disappeared with the gold. So Frank and Joe are faced years later with finding Dawson and finding the gold.

There are plenty of smaller mysteries that may or may not be connected to the armored car robbery or the gold mystery. A mysterious blue light sometimes appears in the town’s cemetery, and mysterious music sometimes comes from an abandoned dance hall.

Since this is a Hardy Boys book, there are plenty of near-death situations, such as a cave-in of a mine tunnel. There is also the typical threatening note telling the Hardys to drop the case, but (unusually) it’s spray painted on boulder, which is sent crashing through the wall of the cabin where they are staying.

In some ways, this book is a bit different than other Hardy Boys books. Fenton Hardy is injured, so he is pretty much limited to giving advice. So he can’t come charging in during Chapter 20 to save the day. The boys are alone when they finally face Big Al in the end, and they have to rely on themselves. Their friends, including Chet Morton, aren’t even around after about page 16. And the book mostly takes place far away from Bayport.

The plot was fun when I was young. It’s still fun now that I’m not so young; however, I now notice real flaws in this book. This book is a revised text book, and I don’t need to check the copyright page to know that fact. It feels “thin” as I read it. It feels like action-action-action. There is no real character development. There is no lengthy description of anything. There is none of the humor a Leslie McFarlane book has. There are no extended fun scenes with the Hardy Boys having fun with their friends.

It is, frankly, a little painful reading this book, since it was once my very favorite book!

However, this book is readable, if not as readable as a McFarlane book. Indeed, it may well be one of the better revisions. (Admittedly, this isn’t saying much!) I am able to make it though all 177 pages. I can also imagine many young kids of today might like this book. But the book will likely disappoint original text devotees.