#49 Dirty Deeds (31st Anniversary Review)

[tomswift2002]

Published: March 1991
Publisher: Archway Paperbacks (1991-1999)
Author: Unknown as of May 2022

Plot:
In gold country, greed is king -- and every road a mine field!

The Hardy's get the shaft!

Frank, Joe, and Callie are off to Virginia City, Nevada, heart of the Comstock Lode, to visit Callie's friend Kerry Prescott. Kerry's father, Ted, has developed a system to extract new gold from old mines -- but the deeper Ted digs, the more danger he finds. Someone means to put him down for good!

Gold fever is running high, and lives are at stake. But Frank and Joe stake a claim of their own: they're out to put a stop to a gold-digging, gun-toting gang of desperadoes. The Hardys head for a showdown eighty feet underground, where they discover just how wild the Wild West can be.

Review:  I remember reading this one around 1998, and I think that was the last time.  I remember I found it was pretty slow.

[tomswift2002]

Also all printings have and excerpt for Tom Swift #1: The Black Dragon in the back.  I've got a 3rd printing from October 1995 that still has the Dragon portion even though the book was out of print by that point.

[tomswift2002]

This is another of those Casefiles where Callie plays a big role.  The Hardy's are in Nevada visiting Callie's school friend that moved with her dad 2 years before from Bayport to Nevada.

Also, I'm getting vibes like this is a similar story to Breakdown In Axeblade, as the Hardy's are in a small town that doesn't like outsiders and the local Sheriff seems to think that they are troublemakers.  Although this time there's a deputy sheriff who seems to be on the Hardy's side.

[tomswift2002]

So the cliff-hanger for Chapter 6 and the opening of Chapter 7 has someone putting a snake into Joe's bed, and no one thinks to look for how someone, at 3 a.m. got into a house that was supposedly locked.  Everyone just acts like Joe fell asleep in public place and the perpetrator just dropped it off.  Doesn't make sense.

[tomswift2002]

So I finished the book last night.  The first few chapters were slow going but then the book sped up to where the last chapters were page turners. 

As I mentioned previously, this book is similar to the Mystery Stories #94 Breakdown In Axeblade that was published in February 1989.  Although there are differences.

For one Dirty Deeds was not about the environment.  Instead, in the end the owner of half the town wanted to build an amusement park and didn't want the mines re-opening because it would cause dust and dirt to fly all over the town and would keep tourists away.  Yeah, not about the environment, just a clean freak with a generational jealousy. And he's been doing these criminal acts for a decade, since another engineer (who appears throughout the book, and had completely passed from memory from my first read 25 years ago).

Anyway,  just like any western (and the book is set around a town that sounds like your classic movie western set—-although the Hardy's and Callie never visit the Saloon), there are a number of gunfights.  And both Frank and Joe handle a rifle and pistol on a couple of occasions.  And then you have the repentant sheriff who says that he was a good cop years ago, and then after some pretty damaging evidence comes to light, vows to be return to that way.

But you also have the Hardy's staging a jailbreak, and apparently after what happened with the damaging evidence, all jailbreak charges against Frank and Joe are dropped, and all is forgiven.

Rating: 6.5/10

[MacGyver]

I haven't read this one in many years and pretty remember nothing about it other than that it is set in the West. Thanks for the refresher with the review.  

[tomswift2002]

Another interesting thing with this book is the color of the Hardy Boys Casefiles logo.  This is the fifth in a row where they departed from the Casefiles classic red-orange flame coloring, because of the background colors, since that wouldn't have stood out from the yellow sand. We saw a similar color scheme on #31 Without A Trace, but that one had the really dark and light at about 50% of the logo for each, but here the really dark only took up about 5-10% of the logo.