The Hardy Boys Casefiles: Cult of Crime by Franklin D. (Steven Grant) Dixon

An early icy morning must have made me feel nostalgic because for some reason I pulled this Hardy Boys novel off the shelf from a stack of them. The Casefiles series was my gateway into the Hardy Boys and probably wetted my appetite for mystery fiction in general. They are very much a product of their time, late 80's-90's but that's the right time for my nostalgia button so it worked out. The whole series is aimed slightly higher age-wise than the original run of books, wanting to hook early teens with a bit more action and a spy angle. I read them checked out from school libraries in the form of the kinda-Frankenstein paperback/hardback that libraries used to do. Between the Casefiles and a probably bad in retrospect Canadian TV series from the same time-frame I 've been a Hardy Boys fan ever since. Though I haven't read one in ages or pretty much any "young adult" fiction. 

I found out that comic author Steven Grant wrote for the series a while back which peaked my interested. I'm a fan of his "2 Guns" comic and his work on the Punisher. Veteran pulpster Ron Goulart also wrote a couple and I'll probably have to read one of his next, I always enjoy Goulart's work. It's fitting that both of these two writers have Men's Adventure/comic-booky backgrounds because the Casefiles series has a definite feel of a teen's Men's adventure series. Frank and Joe have a tricked out van with all the electronic gizmos, get into a ample fist-fights, handle a gun or two and get chased around to take down the bad guys. While still hitting all the right buttons for a Hardy Boys tale, their large group of friends and their private detective father who never seems to do much.

"Cult of Crime" is about a cult (obviously) and a rescue mission to save a (maybe?) unwilling friend of Frank and Joe. Frank starts by going undercover into a cult where that their friend has joined and who their father Fenton had tracked down. The girl is 18 so Fenton couldn't bring her home, but Frank and Joe being the Hardy Boys decide to step in and take matters into their own hands. Along the way they get framed for murder, hop a train, met a crazy old hermit draft-dodger/smuggler and take his under ground tunnels to safety, fight off murderous cult-members/criminals, try and stop a riot and bank robbery and then uncover a deep dark family secret. It's sort of like a teenage Race Williams novel with a bit of a Lew Archer book mixed in. I read it in an hour or so between sips of a lot of coffee and had a lot of fun. Steven Grant keeps the pace moving in a breakneck-cliffhanger style and if I didn't read it when I was a kid, I missed out cause I would have loved it. It was nice to step back from the blood-and-guts for a minute and enjoy a tamer version of all of the stuff I enjoy.