Amy’s Reviews > The Missing Chums > Status Update

The kidnappers' plan was to stage a fake drowning and then have the boys write postcards so everyone thinks they peaced out on vacation. Apparently after drowning.
Seems legit.

This thug's great vice is...drinking soda and getting into fights.

Coke must still have been putting cocaine in their drinks.

I can get why the Hardy Boys think it is a good idea to voluntarily get kidnapped so they can find their friends' kidnappers because they are teenage boys without fully developed frontal lobes but what is their Dad's excuse?

Joe: "You can't come with us."
Iola: * begins to cry *
Joe: "Aw shucks, you can come."

>.>

Frank and Joe go completely undercover. Full costume, makeup, "tough tone."
And then they go and blow their cover 5 minutes later.
This is why the Hardy Boys appealed to me more than Nancy Drew growing up. They might be dumb, but they keep the pace going.

"The boys may be nearer than I thought. I've already sent out a seventeen-state missing persons alarm."

Well, that is a weirdly specific alarm.

Alternatively, I'll accept the gritty, dark reboot where the chief of police is trying to get the Hardy Boys killed because I'm not really seeing an alternative explanation for why he sends them out in a broken motor boat in the middle of a storm to chase down bank robbers.

The chief of police (a) being backup to arrive at a bank robbery and (b) laughing at the idea of the Hardy Boys having anything to do with said bank robbery despite eyewitnesses really makes we wish we had a gritty, dark reboot where the Hardy Boys are two clean-cut school boys who secretly rob banks in their free time and trade off their Dad's fame to trick the local police.

*And a bank robbery. How could I forget the bank robbery?

3 chapters in and we've got the police chief asking two teenagers to take on a case, a guy falling from a boat house ceiling into the water below during a prank gone wrong, a sailboat trying to ram a motor boat, two thugs threatening a store owner, and...chicken dinner. What the plot lacks in character development it more than makes up for in pizzazz.