Hardys In Review

The Haunted Fort
Spoiler Alert!
Synopsis: A long-distance telephone call from Chet Morton’s uncle summons Frank and Joe Hardy and their staunch pal Chet to a summer art school, located near old Fort Senandadga which is reputed to be inhabited by a ghost. The young detectives assignment: recover two famous oil paintings stolen from the valuable Prisoner-Painter collection owned by Jefferson Davenport.
Mr. Davenport, millionaire sponsor of the Millwood Art School, reveals that one of the famous Fort Senandaga pictures painted by his artist ancestor, General Jason Davenport, contains a clue to the hiding place of a priceless chain of gold.
Vicious threats and deadly traps beset Frank, Joe and Chet as they search for clues to the stolen paintings and the gold treasure–a search that is complicated by a stormy fued between a proud Englishman and an equally proud Frenchman over the military history of the ancient fort.
Comments: This story originally appeared a couple of years after I had given up reading the Hardy Boys for more typical teenage pursuits. At the time, I little realized just how lucky I was! The mid-60’s was a low point for the Hardys and this story (along with The Secret Agent On Flight 101) represents the series’ nadir. It’s almost as if the Syndicate was deliberately trying to destroy the series.
There are just too many characters running around in this book and the author doesn’t know how to handle them very well (actually, not at all!). The characters rush to and fro in a purposeless frenzy, there are numerous pointless scenes and many acts of senseless violence. Even in the few rare scenes that do somehow contribute to the plot, it’s clear the author simply does not know how to write. Really, he doesn’t have a clue! His ham-handed approach to exposition and characterization and his apparent tin ear to dialog is laughably bad. It’s clear who the culprit is early into the book, despite the antics of obvious red herring, Ronnie Rush. There is more suspense in wondering if the sun will rise in the morning than there is in this entire story.
Although the basic premise of the story (lost treasure in old fort/clue in painting) is a pretty good one (and frankly, the only halfway decent thing in this whole abortion), the execution is abysmal. Furthermore, the idea of the treasure being a gigantic solid gold chain is simply ludicrous. In the first place, what type of imbecile would make such a thing during a war then haul it up to the middle of nowhere and hide it? The treasure could just as easily have been a far more sensible cache of gold coins or bullion. Can anyone tell me why a Civil War prisoner would be held captive in an upstate New York pre-Revolutionary fort? And why would he be allowed almost free run of the place? Why, despite the fact that everyone knows his name, is he invariably referred to as “the Prisoner-Painter”? Stupid, Stupid, Stupid with a capital “S”!
Some of the scenes are so absurdly idiotic that they border on the surreal. Can anyone imagine a full grown man being so terrified of a rubber sea serpent that he would jump out of his boat? Or that anyone would seal a boy in a steel drum, throw him in the middle of a lake and NOT expect him to die? Or how about Frank and Joe being completely conversant in the esoteric terms used to describe the various parts of an 18th century fort? Then there’s Chet winning an art contest with a painting he’s forced to revamp at the last minute after a vandal smears paint on it! Furthermore, if I never hear or read the word bateau again, it will be bateau goldarn soon for me!
If this story were to made into a movie, only the demented directorial talents of the immortal Ed Wood Jr. (who made Plan 9 From Outer Space, Glen Or Glenda and countless other grade Z epics) would be able to do justice to it’s complete imbecilic lunacy. Fortunately for all concerned, Ed is dead, so the chances of this horror reaching the silver screen are thankfully nil.
According to the archives in the NY Public Library, this story was heavily edited by the staff at the Syndicate. This is hardly surprising, since author David Grambs clearly is unfit to write even a coherent grocery list! Grambs first work on the Hardy’s was his abominable revision of The Shore Road Mystery in 1964 and he continued to display his startling ineptitude in his revisions of Footprints Under The Window in 1965, The Secret Of Skull Mountain in 1966, finally culminating in the odious The Secret Of The Lost Tunnel in 1968. At that point, apparently someone at the Syndicate came out of a coma long enough to realize that Grambs was either an idiot, apathetic or incompetent (or maybe all three) and informed him that his services would no longer be required. The rumour that the Syndicate sued him for taking money under false pretenses is undoubtedly false but they certainly would have been well within their rights in doing so. His work on the series is so atrocious that I’ve often wondered if English was Grambs’ primary (or even secondary) language or if he was somehow related to the Stratemeyer family.
Enough! It would be child’s play to go on skewering all the idiotic things that occur in this story or to continue lambasting the author’s total incompetence but why go on beating this poor, dead horse? Suffice it to say that this story ranks among the worst in the Hardy canon, surpassed only by the unreadable and totally meritless The Secret Agent On Flight 101 (which, by the way, will NEVER be reviewed here!).
Rating: F
Suitable only for masochists, long-suffering reviewers or diehard Hardy fans who have read every other story (twice)!