#57 The Firebird Rocket: 41st Anniversary Review

[tomswift2002]

The Firebird Rocket
Published: 1978
Written By: Vincent Buranelli
Other Hardy Boys by Ghost Writer: #20 Mystery of the Flying Express (1970, Revised), #22 The Flickering Torch Mystery (1971, Revised Text), #49 The Bombay Boomerang (1970), #51 The Masked Monkey (1972), #55 The Witchmaster's Key (1976), #56 The Jungle Pyramid (1977), #61 The Pentagon Spy (1980), #63 The Mummy Case (1980), #64 Mystery of Smuggler's Cove (1980), #65 The Stone Idol (1981), #71 Track of the Zombie (1982), #75 Trapped At Sea (1982), #77 The Crimson Flame (1983), Tom Swift And The Galaxy Ghosts (1971 under Victor Appleton II "ghost name")

Plot: The Hardy's are asked by their father to help out on a case involving a missing rocket scientist whose disappearance might endanger the launch of the Firebird Rocket.   Meanwhile, an employee of a US Senator asks the Hardy's to search for the US Senator's son who has been missing for at least a year.

Review:  So for the first 27 years of this book's existence, this was known as the second last Hardy Boys book of the Grosset & Dunlap hard covers! However, since 2005 it has been the 10th final book in the Grosset & Dunlap line. Also, The Firebird Rocket holds the distinction in the UK, Australia and the Commonwealth as being #48 in the Collins numbering order and that it was the last HARDCOVER book to be Anglicized and to get new cover art  and plugs for the previous and next books in the Collins series.  The next book, #49 A Figure In Hiding would be a direct printing by Grosset & Dunlap of the American plates, with the cover art being the American cover art, the text containing the previous plug for The Sinister Signpost , rather than The Firebird Rocket (although, the next book plug would be correct).

Also this was the second of five Hardy Boys books (not counting the novelization of select episodes) to be released alongside the 1977-1979 TV series The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries.  It was also the first Hardy Boys book published after the death of the original Franklin W. Dixon, Leslie McFarlane[/I] who had died in September of 1977. 

So I'm up to Chapter 10 right now.  So far I can tell that Vincent Buranelli is not as familiar with the series as he should be.  At one point, while Frank, Joe and Chet are flying to Australia, he has Chet reaching under his seat and grabbing the life preserver and inflating it, just because the plane encountered a really, really bad patch of air turbulence (it apparently caused the plane to drop about a 50 feet in two or three seconds), and Buranelli had Chet thinking that the plane was going to plunge into the Pacific Ocean!  It was meant to be funny and a cliff-hanger (it happened at the end of a chapter) but really it came across as showing just how out of touch the author was with his characters.  At this point, Vincent Buranelli had been writing Hardy Boys books for 8 years since his first two books, Mystery of the Flying Express (Revised) and The Bombay Boomerang were released in 1970, and he had written 6 Hardy Boys (including Express and Bombay) since then.  Of course, Buranelli had Chet flying to Northern Ireland in The Witchmaster's Key to take part in a biking race, and Chet even flew to a few places in The Jungle Pyramid, so Chet is a seasoned air flyer, so this whole scene of Chet thinking that the plane was going to crash into the Pacific and he was getting prepared was ridiculous.  Plus if Chet pulled that stunt on planes today, he could probably expect to be met by the Australian police once  the plane landed and banned from flying, rather than the casual wave off that the flight attendant gave him once Frank and Joe said that they would make sure that Chet had taken off the life preserved and stowing it under the seat again.