Why Found-Again? Because I’ve watched more cop shows than you’ve had hot dinners. Heck, given Law & Order marathons, probably more than I’ve had hot dinners.
Quick! How many coins are lying around the book as a silly observation exercise?
The Premise: This week’s chapter is about observation and memory, and we’ve got an actual murder for this one! Police chief Collig’s rookie-cop nephew has been killed at a traffic stop, and the chief and the Hardys are investigating—which seems less weird when you remember how few police officers Bayport seems to have. Sure, it’s a conflict of interest, but they’re probably down to nine guys and one over-18 civilian!
Sidekick Chet once again along for the ride, the boys set about looking for clues while teaching their chum how to train his powers of observation. This starts with simple memory exercises and then, once they find the car involved in the shooting, moves on to a discussion of how law enforcement records things out of the ordinary in their surroundings. Sure enough, our bad guy was recently questioned by another cop, at which time he gave a terrible alias:
Someone needs this as a nom d’internet ASAP.
Granted, his name is Amos Chipman, so it’s not as bad as it seems (and this may be a good time to point out that every villain in this book has a name that sounds picked from The Big Book Of Fictional Longshoremen). Through some canvassing the area, the Hardys find their man, leading to the noirest illustration in the whole handbook.
In case you’re worried, they just wing him.
The Verdict: I liked this one, even if the chain of clues is started by the pure dumb luck of Chet spotting the car. The writers ably made up for the lack of technical detail in this chapter with a pretty good story—though there’s yet another cigar/cigarette clue. I wonder how much case clearance in Bayport would drop if everybody just quit smoking.
As a bonus, one of my favorite movie scenes about observation, from the Holmes-Watson role-reversal comedy Without A Clue:
Next time: We start a new Jonny Quest! I’ve been waiting to say that for weeks.
Why Found-Again? Because a lifelong fascination with CSI stuff had to start somewhere. It probably wasn’t here, but I’m not sure that matters. Just look at that adorable book.
Portrait of the detective handbook as a gentleman thief—probably the only gentleman thief we’ll see in here.
The Premise: In “The Safecracker’s Calling Card,” the Hardy clan—plus friend Chet— gets called in to assist a burglary investigation, which leads to our characters learning about modus operandi, profiling, and what sort of information is collected for a “Wanted” notice. It also, (un?)fortunately for impure modern readers, leads to a discussion of safecracking techniques.
My apologies if you already saw me post this on Twitter, but wouldn’t you?
As a story, this chapter was solid, even though the “whodunit” part is solved almost immediately thanks to Fenton Hardy’s enormous card catalogue of villains (and to one of the thieves leaving his jacket, complete with dry-cleaning tag, at the crime scene—honestly). Just like in “The Case of the Shabby Shoes,” our heroes do a lot of legwork, and there’s a suspenseful quest—culminating in a mini-manhunt during which we learn how to track a fugitive—to bring the thief to justice.
This chapter also manages to neatly work in all the skills from the previous stories: fingerprints are searched for, shoeprints are taken, and Chet even goes briefly “undercover” to confirm the residence of the bad guys. And although the techniques are, as ever, a little outdated and analog…
I love a good diagram–even when John Doe has the official hairdo of the Hardy Boys books.
…the story hints at a few things that will become important in the crime stories that have followed it: going through trash for clues, for example, and the rise of intellectual property theft (the safecracker steals proprietary jewelry designs as well as the usual cash and bonds). I recently read an article about another prescient Hardy Boys plot, and it’s interesting to see the trend stretches back to at least the 1970s.
So far, budding crime lords can take the following lessons from this book:
Don’t leave fingerprints. (This is clearly the most easily memorized. It’s been two chapters since our last meaningful fingerprint.)
No smoking foreign tobacco while you’re working.
Did you have more clothing when you went in there than you have now?
Is your way of working so familiar that, say, a private citizen friendly with the police would suspect you immediately upon seeing your handiwork?
Maybe buy new shoes with unmarked soles before every job.
Don’t use your brothers as accomplices if you can help it.
As for lessons for the good guys, I think Fenton’s been spending a little too much time around his kids.
The Verdict: Probably the best story so far, unless you’re the security guard who got blackjacked on the first page.
You didn’t think I’d leave you without folk music with St. Patrick’s day coming up, did you?
Of course you didn’t. Here’s one adapted from a William Allingham poem…
Get out your tissues for this one.
My favorite singalong song in this selection:
*goes down rabbit hole involving a YouTubed live performance of Robin Williamson covering “It’s All Over Now (Baby Blue)”* Sorry. Where was I?
!!!!!
That… was not technically Irish, but it was fantastic. Moving on!
This next one is quite special to me: years ago, the Future Ex-Husband and I went to a local restaurant for corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day. They’d hired bagpipers for the night, who went from dining area to dining area playing “The Orange and the Green” and a few other holiday standards; then they stopped. The pipers conferred for a few minutes… played “The Orange and the Green” again… stopped again… and then played this.
And we’ll end as we began—wondering why I’m playing the Irish Rovers and studiously ignoring “The Unicorn Song.”
Why Found-Again? Because I was an inquisitive child literally surrounded by the kinds of evidence this chapter, “The Case of the Shabby Shoes,” talked about. If I could’ve talked my folks into the plaster, I might still have tractor-tire casts lying around.
Much like the story, the book is getting around a bit.
The Premise: The police—still frighteningly short-staffed—call on Fenton Hardy, his kids, and their friend Tony when thieves ambush an eccentric businessman and crack his skull.
Although it probably contains almost as much technical information as the previous story, “The Case of the Shabby Shoes” works much better as a story.
…with a couple of rhetorical exceptions.
There are a number of different locations involved, the Hardys interview witnesses, and there’s even a chase before the bad guys are brought to justice. It’s also not clear until the end whether the case will be murder, which effectively amps up the suspense. And along the way, we’re given a lot of practical tips for gathering different varieties of physical evidence—which is handy, because these miscreants leave all kinds of stuff behind:
The good old days when everyone didn’t learn from Law & Order about wiping their prints. Aww. (Pro tip: do not leave exotic cigarette butts at your crime scenes!)
The Verdict: Positive. This is the best mix of mystery and reference material the handbook has provided so far, and it even includes a diagram showing you how to make a plaster footprint cast. I’m also noticing that most of the villains in these tales are former convicted criminals, which makes this book unlike most mysteries I’ve read as an adult.
Next time: Let’s see if we can finally get Jonny Quest to that darned temple.
Why Found-Again? Because I was sure as a kid that I had the detection “right stuff”—and by that I mostly mean a magnifying glass. For the fingerprinting chapter, “The Clue of the Cashbox,” we can add Johnson’s Baby Powder, Scotch tape and a paintbrush to the list.
Our book, posing with three things that have jack-all to do with fingerprinting.
The Premise: With the town’s fingerprint specialists out of commission, Frank and Joe get pressed into service when a doctor’s office is burglarized. How small is this police department, anyway?
I mentioned last time that The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook was written in collaboration with retired law enforcement, and this chapter clearly leans heavily on the consultant. Frank and Joe spend no fewer than seven pages explaining to their hapless pal Chet how fingerprinting works, in excruciating detail and with frequent reference to “persons” as though the Hardys just arrived from narrating Dragnet—and all before we even get to the crime scene. From there, it’s a ratio of five lines of story to 15 lines of technical information and everything you ever wanted to know about collecting and comparing fingerprints, analog-style.
I can find no evidence that skin oils and sweat are the same thing. I think Joe is, as the British say, telling porkies here.Fingerprinting must be even more important in a town where everyone has the same hairstyle…
The Verdict: Mixed, but mostly positive. As a story, “The Clue of the Cashbox” is abysmal; the first chapter did a much better job of integrating knowledge into a real narrative, and the solution to this “mystery” turns out to be a nephew ex machina anyway. My childhood self, who bought the book for the technical information in the first place, ate this section up—and though the techniques are dated, it remains a fascinating little glimpse into ’70s forensic science. Just try not to imagine poor Chet going into a boredom coma in the first half and let the dusting techniques wash over you.
Random Notes:
I did, in fact, attempt to raise and lift fingerprints with baby powder and Scotch tape when I was a wee thing. My parents had a Formica-topped wooden coffee table that may have been the only surface capable of responding to this treatment. I taped the results to construction paper. Ah, youth.
Here is a neat forensic science website I found while researching whether finger oils and sweat are the same.
Next time: How lost can a city be if Benton Quest can find it?
With the newest Coen brothers film, Hail, Caesar!, in theaters, the whole internet seems to be ranking their movies—no two lists agreeing on anything, as far as I can tell. Once I realized I was reading those lists looking for Miller’s Crossing, this week’s re-viewing chose itself.
Why Found-Again?: Miller’s Crossing is my favorite movie from the Coens by far, but since it demands my full attention, it doesn’t get rewatched like those movies I can both love and do paperwork with.
The Premise: Pity poor Tom (Gabriel Byrne): his boss Leo is being crowded by a rival crime mob. He’s got the kind of gambling debts that get the attention of leg-breakers. He’s sleeping with his boss’s girlfriend. And he’s the one tasked with saving her con-man brother (John Turturro), who’s in over his head and about to earn a trip to Miller’s Crossing—easily the most beautiful spot for an execution in all of cinema. Tom’s only chance to survive may be to betray everything he loves.
In addition to the just-plain-fun of a crime story and the interpersonal twists—pretty much everyone mentioned above takes a swing at Tom in the course of the movie— Miller’s Crossing is a study in conflicting loyalties, obligations, and brains vs. brawn. To me, though, this is a love story at its most platonic, with Leo and Tom almost a modern take on King Arthur and Lancelot in a corrupt Camelot where the mayor and police chief are sold to the highest bidder… and all done in language that is 80% 1930s gangster flick and 20% poetry.
This is probably the prettiest movie I have ever owned on DVD. (It’s certainly the prettiest American one; Amelie is the only other contender that leaps to mind.) Exhibit A:
Exhibit B: Gabriel Byrne. Yowza.
The Verdict: This may also be as close to a perfect movie as I own: a gorgeous, well-constructed film with the atmosphere of a long-forgotten golden-age noir that never seems to be cribbing or parodying its inspirations. Indeed, the only thing wrong with Miller’s Crossing is its tendency to make viewers say “What’s the rumpus?” as a casual greeting for days after viewing. It’s a fantastic film that, if my reading is any indication, is undervalued by the entire internet.
Might go well with: Pasta, whiskey, a Chieftains CD, Oscar.
Next time: Into the jungle with Jonny Quest, who is absolutely the person you want rooting around old temples.
This one’s going to be a multi-parter every other week until it’s all done.
Why Found-Again: When I finally saved up enough allowance to buy this, sometime around 1983 or ’84, it immediately became my bible.
Not the copy I had in my youth. You can tell by the lack of Cup-O-Noodle stains.
Readers of this site have no doubt noticed I can be insufferable about things I’m interested in—why, yes, I am still yelling at the end of Highlander whenever I watch it as though expecting a different result, how did you know?—and one thing I have always been interested in is a detective story. My parents, who I have to assume thought they were getting one of those kids who would tell them what happened at school that day, suddenly found themselves saddled with a would-be miniature Magnum, P.I. blathering on about various kinds of surveillance while not eating her vegetables.
Mysteriously, regaling my family with the details of detective work in no way caused Dad to hurry up and build that network of Three-Investigator-style hidden offices I wanted. Maybe I should have picked up How To Win Friends And Influence People first?
The Premise (Entire Book): Written in conjunction with a retired FBI agent, this book uses fictional teen detectives Frank and Joe Hardy in various scenarios to teach young readers sleuthing skills. (I have the revised 1972 edition.) It essentially works out as half guidebook, half story collection.
The Premise (Chapter 1—Undercover Work): When a plastics factory suffers a series of thefts, the owner enlists the help of the Hardy Boys’ father, who sends Frank and Joe undercover as delinquents in need of jobs.
They do kind of look the part.
The boys manage to infiltrate the group responsible for the thefts, only to be inadvertently ratted out by the factory owner, who obviously should’ve been in the briefing pictured above.
The Verdict: Above all, I remember this book as being hilariously dated, even at the time I was first reading it. This chapter was less Starsky & Hutch than Dragnet, though, heavy on common sense and following procedures. There were, however, a few odd moments:
Even without taking this willfully out of context, Frank Hardy really looks like he’s up to no good. I think it’s the sideburns.Typewriter banter among thieves! What has the march of progress cost us?
Not bad at all so far.
Next time: Jonny Quest eludes yet another attempt to destroy his globetrotting family. Doesn’t narrow it down much, does it?
Can we start a new rule that watching movies with lots of fire will melt actual snow?
Why Found-Again? Here are the things I remembered about Legend before rewatch:
Tim Curry as the devil (yes, technically he is “Darkness,” but if you go around with red skin and giant horns and evil schemes, these little mistakes of identity are bound to occur);
Unicorn maiming!;
Still less frightening than The Dark Crystal.
I’m not so sure about that last part anymore.
The Premise: Mischievous (read: a jerk) princess Lili (Mia Sara) spends all her free time with half-feral forest boy Jack (Tom Cruise). When a unicorn viewing goes horribly awry and allows goblins to kill one of the beasts, winter falls upon the land, and a separated Jack and Lili try to undo the damage she caused. Jack joins in with a mob of capricious faeries, while Lili is captured and slated to become the bride of Darkness.
I sometimes wonder if I’ve become more susceptible to background music as I get older, because I was keyed up through most of Legend in a way I didn’t remember from my youth, even knowing what was going to happen. (It’s doubly odd because I could have sworn the unicorn maiming was more graphic than we actually see here; if anything, I had less to worry about.) I also didn’t remember Lili being as irritating as she proved to be, which improved the story; her temptation by Darkness, perhaps the most famous part of the film, isn’t the attack on an innocent girl I recalled so much as a logical attempt to play on Lili’s character flaws.
The movie is certainly heavy-handed in some respects, but the only real weak point in my re-viewing was the final fight…though the swordplay seems like a good, solid background for building an interest in Highlander later on. Even the music is different in those scenes, as if Jerry Goldsmith had stepped out for coffee and John Williams started doodling on his paper, and I found myself looking around for Indiana Jones when I should have been watching evil get defeated.
Legend was the first role I ever saw Tim Curry in, and I managed to become a fan without knowing what he actually looked like for a good two years. As attractive as the unicorns and candy-colored forests are, his Darkness makes the movie…and, disturbingly, no small amount of sense sometimes. In the ’80s, the parochial-school kid in me thought of him only as the devil, but the performance never lets you forget Darkness’s bullish aspect—even in the final fight, his neck is pierced with arrows like picadors’ lances.
Random Notes:
We have a credit at the end for “Unicorn Master”; I wonder if that’s higher, professionally speaking, than the Unicorn Wrangler for Cast A Deadly Spell. At any rate, it’s something that would never leave my resume, even if I were interviewing to become a bank president.
Was there any “fancy” little girl who didn’t dream of owning Lili’s evil dress?
It never occurred to me to make comparisons between this and The Last Unicorn, one of my favorite movies, before now—possibly 12-year-old me wasn’t prepared for a story where The Red Bull struts and talks (and the bull and Prince Lir are the same guy…and Haggard is a fireplace… Hm. Maybe I’m still not ready).
While this was one of my earliest encounters with the idea that faeries aren’t all Tinkerbell and flower costumes, there was also this, one of the most feared objects of my childhood:
From The Golden Book of Poetry: illustration by (the unintentionally terrifying) Gertrude Elliott for the poem “Little Orphant Annie”
The Verdict: Still a nice, solid fantasy film, even though the end wobbles far more than I’d remembered. It’s a movie that doesn’t seem to want to end, and maybe that’s why director Ridley Scott seems to understand Lili’s fascination with pretty things so well.
(It may also be time to admit that I’m into guys who wear a little chain mail. There. I said it.)
Might go well with: Mead; Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood books, which are myths and lore with the pastel stuff brushed off; and Cold Comfort Farm, since I spent the first three minutes of the movie thinking of Lili as Elfine.
Why Found-Again? I remember loving this show during its original run, but now that I look it up, I can’t figure out how I even managed to watch Picket Fences; I was in college at the time, and TV reception in the dorm was frequently abysmal.* (The exception was Fox, which is how I watched The X-Files.) I must have liked the show even more than I thought.
The Premise (“What Have We Here?” Version): Imagine if Northern Exposure eloped to the mainland US to marry Law & Order, and they compromised by living in Wisconsin.
The Premise (Official Plot Version): Picket Fences centers on the smallish town of Rome, WI, and especially on the Brock family. Father Jimmy (Tom Skerritt) is the sheriff at a time when Rome happens to be fielding some extremely weird crimes; his wife Jill (Kathy Baker) is the town doctor.
This face is merited at least once an episode.Behold, the woman who helped make Mister Frost worth (re)watching.
Though the whole town is an endless source of intrigue, much of the action centers around Sheriff Brock’s police station, where deputies Kenny and Maxine (Costas Mandylor and Lauren Holly) are always on the job—and, if memory serves, occasionally each other. And if you wondered what Holly Marie Combs got up to before Charmed, she plays the oldest Brock child here.
I have, however, saved my favorite for last. I’d forgotten until I saw Fyvush Finkel’s cheery face how much I love the character of Douglas Wambaugh, the lawyer who might as well be a Weeble the way he pops back up after getting smacked down in court. Wambaugh is relentless and never at a loss for words, and he is my hero.
He’s also running for mayor in season 1, which is probably only one reason that guy would have a poster of himself.
The Verdict: I’ll be honest: I didn’t expect this show to have aged well, and parts of it haven’t. But I still love Picket Fences and all Rome’s townspeople. It’s been a long time since I saw a show full of “quirky” characters who nevertheless feel real; maybe it’s an art we’ve lost, or maybe it’s the result of my being without cable for ten years. The latter seems likely.
Might go well with: All kinds of cheese, for all kinds of reasons.
*Previous generations told of walking to school in the snow; lying on my dorm bed and looking almost straight up at the TV on top of the wardrobe—the only way I could get Animaniacs to come in clearly—somehow doesn’t have the same ring of hardship, but will definitely hurt your neck.
Let’s ease into the cold weather with songs that may cause car-dancing, violent lip-syncing and dramatic gestures!
This is not only a great song, but it’s the only time I ever felt good about the haircut I had when it came out. Admittedly, Patty Smyth wears it better than a nerdy 10-year-old.
My current favorite car-dancing track:
I blame any affection I have for this video on a parochial-school education:
Just try keeping your feet still:
And what I strongly suspect is my future favorite car-dancing track:
