I Spy With My Little Eye Something Beginning with "I" (The Hardy Boys: Tic-Tac-Terror - Franklin W. Dixon)

Member Name: keeperofthematri

Product:	The Hardy Boys: Tic-Tac-Terror - Franklin W. Dixon
Date:	24/08/09 (36 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well paced, exciting

Disadvantages: Weak ending, unrealistic in parts

Frank and Joe Hardy are the teenage sons of famous private detective Fenton Hardy and his wife Laura. Together, (and sometimes from help with family and friends) they investigate all sorts of crimes & strange occurences....

The Tic Tac Terror was published in the US in 1982 & was the seventy fourth in the series. The book first appeared in the UK in 1983 and was numbered 72 when it was published by Armada.


The book opens with Frank, Joe and their dad's colleague, Sam Radley, discussing the fact that they haven't been able to contact Fenton Hardy who's in South America. Just as they're about to leave for a beach party they're contacted by a Mrs. Orva Danner who's worried that something has happened to her brother. She knows that he boarded a flight from South America, that he was bringing something valuable home with him and that he landed safely in New York, but, after that he's just vanished.

There's drama at the beach party when a diver tries to pull Joe's girlfriend Iola under the water and tells her that Frank and Joe are next. They also discover pictures of five men on Joe's camera that he didn't take. Then Chet turns up with an envelope marked "Fenton Hardy Urgent BOB!". Who's BOB? Nobody seems to know.

Later, the boys interview Mrs. Orva Danner and discover that she contacted a firm called Gort Security to ask them to provide a guard to meet her brother, Jasper Hunt, when he landed in New York. Journeying to New York they meet up with Ira Gort, head of Gort Security who tells them that even though Mrs. Danner's brother landed at the airport he never met the guard. The boys do some further investigation and ultimately track down Hunt to a "slummy rooming house" where they find him in a coma. Whatever he had with him that was valuable has disappeared.

Returning to Bayport the boys finally make contact with "Bob" and discover that it was "BOB" who sent their father to South America to break up a spy ring known as HAVOC. The letter addressed to their father proves to be from a HAVOC agent codenamed Igor with an offer to defect and give the government all the information it needs to combat HAVOC. The five pictures on Joe's camera are all of Igor who is a master of disguise.

But things are never that straightfoward as the emerald which is going to be used to "pay" Igor for his defection is stolen and HAVOC appear to be aware that he's about to defect and are determined to prevent that at all costs.......


The usual supporting characters who appear in this book are:-

+ Fenton Hardy
+ Laura Hardy
+ Aunt Gertrude
+ Chet Morton
+ Biff Hooper
+ Tony Prito
+ Phil Cohen
+ Iola Morton
+ Callie Shaw
+ Chief Ezra Collig


This book has some plus points. It's reasonably well paced and has enough incidence contained within the pages to hold the attention of the reader. The idea of having someone from a spy organisation 'defect' and offer to spill the beans to the government is an interesting one and starts of reasonably well. I remember quite liking this book when I was a teenager and I think that was more down to the excitement factor and the fact that Biff, Tony and Phil get a little more to do in this story than they do in some of the others.

On the downside if you're looking for any sort of realism then this book falls woefully short. There's nothing quite so outrageous as the kidnapping of the President which featured in the previous book "The Billion Dollar Ransom" but anyone with half a braincell can work out who "Igor" is. Not the most sensible method of choosing a codename I've ever come across.

The characterisation also leaves something to be desired in various parts of the book. Chet's current get rich quick scheme here is probably the only time in the entire series that I've found the character annoying and the fact that he's at a museum in New York exactly at the same time as Frank and Joe is very contrived. I could almost forgive that if he was there to drive the plot forward in some way but the whole sequence just comes across like page filler.

Then, of course, you have to ask yourself why "Igor" would use a couple of teenage boys as go betweens for him and the government and why, later, he allows them to pick him up after HAVOC are out to catch him. If that wasn't bad enough the ending is weak, contrived and badly written. After building things up to make the reader think that "BOB" is under serious threat from HAVOC we have Frank and Joe saving the day along with some rather convenient assistance from another source. Yawn.

So, all is all, this is a book to avoid for any child looking for any semblance of realism. If all they're bothered about is some excitement and aren't too bothered by a dodgy ending then look no further.....

At the time of writing the new and used paperbacks are available from 1p upwards.

Summary: Seventy Fourth Hardy Boys Nook