#27 Nowhere To Run - 30th Anniversary Review

[tomswift2002]

Nowhere To Run
Published: May 1989 (Physical, no digital)
Ghost Writer: Larry Mike Garmon
Other Hardy Boys by Ghost: Casefiles #36 Running on Empty, #39 Flesh and Blood, #43 Strategic Moves, #46 Foul Play, #126 Fire In the Sky.

Plot: Jailbirds always fly unfriendly skies!

Sparks fly when "Biker" Bob Conway roars into town, looking for Frank and Joe. The motorcycle racer needs their help to prove his innocence in a hijack case. The problem is, Biker just escaped from jail. To make things worse, some very dangerous people are looking for him. One is a bounty hunter; the others are members of a motorcycle gang called the Sinbads. Frank and Joe can't leave a friend in trouble, and they defy their father in taking Biker's case. The brother detectives burn rubber in a high-speed race with both sides of the law -- where murder is the final pit stop.

Review:  I'm only up to Chapter 8 in the book so far, but WOW, is it ever action packed!  And in this book, Frank, Joe and Fenton Hardy are all on different sides of the case!  We meet Morty Sims, another old friend of Fenton's from his NYPD days, who is now a private eye in New York, and has asked Fenton to work on his case as a consultant, because he doesn't know Bayport that well.  But Sims is the type of detective who is not afraid to bring in his crooks dead. 

However, Sims is on the trail of an old friend of Joe's, Bob Conway, who escaped from jail after being convicted of stealing a ton of watches.  And Joe doesn't like how Sims nearly shot Conway when Frank and him were bringing Conway to see Fenton. So there is a lot of tension in the book between Frank, Joe and Fenton. 

Now then a running gag throughout the Casefiles comes up in this book and that is Fenton's lack of cooking skills.  Joe says that he's tired of having fish sticks every night, while Laura and Gertrude are out of town.  Callie does offer to cook a lasagna for the boys, but so far they haven't had a chance to take her up on her offer.  But with Fenton, that reminds me of how in Time Bomb he apologized to Professor Reisenbach about his microwave cooking not being a good introduction to the 1990's. 

Timeline for this book:  There is mention of Trouble In the Pipeline being the boys most recent case, but then there is also mention of how Bob Conway only graduated from Bayport High 3 years earlier, and Joe has known Conway since Joe's first year of high school, which was also 3 years ago.  So in Trouble In The Pipeline I was figuring that Frank and Joe were probably 19 and 20, so I would actually say that it's been more like 5 years since Joe was in Grade 9 and Conway graduated High School, by the time Nowhere to Run opens, when I look at all the continuity things that I've read in the first 26 Casefiles and the 3 SuperMystery'88 books.  Might even be closer to 6 years since Joe entered high school, rather than 3.

[tomswift2002]

It's also interesting how Joe is a very good motorcycle rider, and learned how to work on motorcycle engines and car engines from Conway.  Of course, Frank and Joe have been riding motorcycles ever since Leslie McFarlane wrote Chapter 1 of The Tower Treasure way back in 1926!

[MacGyver]

I have not read this book in a long while but the main thing I remember liking about this is seeing how the case came together with Frank and Joe and their dad on opposite sides. That made for an interesting dynamic.

[tomswift2002]

So I finished it today.  As a kid I didn't like it (it's at #60 on my Top Ten) but I enjoyed the action this time around, but there were still things that I didn't really found worked.  Like, apparently Fat Harold has a Bayport judge on his payroll, and was able to call on the judge to spring him!  I don't recall this being followed up on in a later book, but it appears that Bayport was really corrupt, not just in the halls of municipal power, but also the halls of judicial power.

[tomswift2002]

Really, "Nowhere To Run" was a Joe book.  And I'm finding that really interesting with the Casefiles, especially the early books, since with the Mystery Stories, UB's and Adventures, the books tried to give both brothers equal billing, but with the Casefiles, sometimes the story calls for it to be about Frank, or about Joe.

Also another interesting thing with the early Casefiles is how involved Callie Shaw is.  With the Casefiles, it's like the editor was telling the authors to still keep Callie as people knew her as Frank's girlfriend, but move her away from the stereotypical 1920's to 1970's girlfriend that she had been presented as in the Grosset & Dunlap series, and make her an 80's woman, where she's not submissive to the male figures in the story and doesn't throw punches, which would've been unheard of for a woman in the 1920's to 1970's period to do or even be the "damsel in distress".

In "Nowhere To Run", Callie comes up with a plan to get the Hardy's out of an assassin's execution.  In a way, Callie has become the "Chet Morton" character of the Casefiles. 

Oh yeah, another Hardy chum makes a brief cameo, but that's it.  Tony Prito and Mr. Pizza appear for a page or two and then are gone with no call from the Hardy's for help. 

So it's interesting how the Casefiles were changing things up versus the Mystery Stories that Simon & Schuster had resumed by this point.  It was take this piece here and move it over here...take this other piece and change it like this, etc.