#9 The Genius Thieves

[tomswift2002]

The Genius Thieves
Published November 1987

Plot:  When someone breaks into a high-tech safe at the Bayport Bank, without leaving any traces of how they cracked the safe, the bank president calls in Fenton Hardy and his sons to find out who did it.  In the meantime, someone is also transferring millions of dollars out of the bank by overloading the computers every day during the mad lunch hour rush.  With the slimest of leads to go on, Frank heads to Chartwell Academy where he enrolls as a student, while Joe stays at home with Fenton to work on other angles.  However it is soon clear that someone at Chartwell know that Frank is no student there, and will do whatever they can to get him expelled---expelled to the nearest grave yard!

Review:  I'm only up to Chapter 6 so far.  It's been about 15 years since I last read the book, so while I remember somethings, I don't remember a whole lot of the story.  And so far, its a so-so book. 

Funny thing with The Genius Thieves, its cover has been used on numerous Hardy Boys books in the UK, where the cover art has been flipped.  On hardyboys.co.uk I see that the cover was used for a 1991 3-in-1 of The Clue In The Embers/What Happened at Midnight/The Sinister Signpost published by Dragon Books (although I don't even recall reading a scene that had Joe dangling from a water tower, while Frank punched an axe-wielding bad guy in any of those books), a 1995 2-in-1 Armada book featuring The Genius Thieves/Hostages Of Hate and the original 1990 Armada single release of The Genius Thieves. 

[MacGyver]

Armada, Collins and those Dragon omnibuses all seem to rely a lot on action-packed covers to sell books. It certainly worked for me as a kid, particularly when they featured the artwork of the late, great Peter Archer.

[tomswift2002]

But still, when you buy a book, you king of expect the cover art to reflect one of the stories.

[MacGyver]

Oh, yeah- of course. I never got those deals either. Maybe it was a rush job and they just had to use something?

[tomswift2002]

Well, I just finished the book.  The beginning was slow, but then the ending was really quick. 

It's funny, but with #80 Dead Of Night everyone seems to think that the author of that book was writing an epilogue to the Ring Of Evil Trilogy, and even doing flashbacks to previous Hardy Boys cases that involved the Assassins.  However I just realized that there is one flashback in Dead Of Night, that either the author didn't realize he was doing or maybe he was the author of The Genius Thieves, because TGT is not an Assassins book, I never remembered this before.  But in The Genius Thieves the author had Joe go mad in a graveyard in the late-night/early-morning hours and start swinging a shovel around after being hit with a chemical---in Thieves it was a pheromone spray, in Night it was a dart that had been dipped in crazy juice.

Anyway, another book I was thinking of when reading The Genius Thieves this time was Bound For Danger.  Bound for Danger wasn't out the last time that I read the book, but this time I was reminded of the plot to BFD---although The Genius Thieves had a much better plot---with no helicopter---involving a school, than Bound For Danger's father-trying-to-make-his-son-look-the-best-on-the-school-basketball-team plot.

Rating:  6.5 out of 10

[tomswift2002]

Also this was a very Frank-centric story.  Sure Joe was there, but Frank was the main character.  It was like Cult Of Crime was a Frank book, Deathgame was a Joe book, and See No Evil was a Callie book, Frank carried most of the book in The Genius Thieves.  That's something that we haven't seen in 13 years, ever since the Undercover Brothers came out in 2005, since the 1st person format does lend itself to having just Frank or just Joe carry the book.  Or I guess the editors at S&S demand that  Frank and Joe get equal screen time.

But it was also interesting to get a look back at 1987 and juxtapose it with 2018 in terms of computers.  At one point in The Genius Thieves, because the thieves are transferring funds from the Bayport Bank and Trust by internet hacking, Frank calls Fenton and asks him to meet him at the local electronics store in Kirkland, since the boys needed Fenton to talk to the owner and explain that they were detectives, so that they could get information on who had modems at Chartwell Academy (and the owner says that the school had banned the kids from buying modems since they didn't want the kids cheating).  Reading about people buying modems in 2018 is kind of antiquated, since nowadays every computer comes with a modem built in, whether its a laptop, desktop, tablet or smartphone (at one point Joe calls Frank on the van's car phone, which was one of the forerunner to the modern cell phone).

[CalvinKnox]

It has been a while since I last read it, but I do remember liking this one.  I think what I liked about it was the fact that the story seemed more mature than other books with the Hardys at school i.e Crime in the Cards and Undercover brothers.  I was also in grade 9 at the time I read it, so I could relate well to the story.  It was also neat that Chartwell School was mentioned in a few later books

[goldie3]

Also this was a very Frank-centric story.  Sure Joe was there, but Frank was the main character.  It was like Cult Of Crime was a Frank book, Deathgame was a Joe book, and See No Evil was a Callie book, Frank carried most of the book in The Genius Thieves.  That's something that we haven't seen in 13 years, ever since the Undercover Brothers came out in 2005, since the 1st person format does lend itself to having just Frank or just Joe carry the book.  Or I guess the editors at S&S demand that  Frank and Joe get equal screen time.

In general, I feel a lot of the casefiles, especially the ones featuring network, are heavily Frank centric. Maybe because most of these feature Joe as the distressed lover, with Frank taking up bulk of the work.