The Haunted Fort
ISBN: 0448089440
Description
A series of baffling art thefts leads the boys to New England, where they find that there's a lot more at stake than just a few stolen paintings.
Reviewed on 24th December 2020
The forty-fourth Hardy Boys story is again one that I read as a child but have no memory of. This time the boys, along with their ever-present friend Chet, go to visit Chet’s uncle at an art school on the trail of treasure.
Plot wise it’s quite good - there’s a lot going on and a lot feels like the detectives are doing some detecting for once. But they still don’t seem to properly do mystery solving, it feels very much like at this point in the 1960s they just bumble through and conveniently stumble upon exactly what they are after.
The dated nature of the stories - again the female characters are limited to flirting and crying - is made even more notable by a couple of weird moments of Confederate glorification, which I’m sure wouldn’t be left unaddressed in a work written today.
So mixed feelings about this one.