"The Mystery of the Black Rhino" and "The Case Of The Psychic's Vision" are considered by quite a few people to be some of the worst Hardy Boys books. I discovered a possible reason why they are both so bad, they are both ghostwriten by the same person! The ghostwriter is George Edward Stanley, also wrote these other Hardy Boys books:
-One False Step
-The Secret Of The Soldier's Gold
And quite a few Nancy Drew books including 4 Clue Crew books. I only discovered this when I searched for Nancy Drew books and edventuly ended up on his website.
Nice find, Dan. I don't remember much about "The Mystery of the Black Rhino" offhand- other than that it reminded me some of the "Black Rhino" episode of "MacGyver". :D 8)
And yeah- "The Case of the Psychic's Vision" was definitely not great- a real departure from the usual mode for Hardy Boys stories. I finally brought myself to read it as I had kinda held out on this one until I got it at the library. I will say this for it- there is at least one pretty cool reference to the fact that The Hardy Boys series started in 1927. There are a few other neat inside jokes like that, which makes it really bad that there are some cool things like that in the book, but so many other things going on that I don't really like. (I'm generally particularly wary of supernatural-themed books in the series and it didn't sit too well with me with Frank being attacked by a demon of some sort and both Frank and Joe being so readily willing to believe in the psychic world and actually learning how to channel their psychic energies and so forth. Typically the Hardy Boys would debunk such things like psychics and find a logical explanation. Though having said all that, I do believe in the spiritual kingdoms of God and the devil. And as a Christian, I'm generally looking pretty carefully at how that's characterized in books that I read.)
The Secret Of The Soldier's Gold was pretty good, but The Case of The Psychic's Vision is a book that should've never been published. And The Mystery Of The Black Rhino & One False Step are also stories that were not that good.
Haven't read any of his books. Interesting discovery, Dan.
I also liked "The Secret of the Soldier's Gold" pretty well- if only just for the title! It was neat to see The Hardy Boys using "The Secret of" and "The Mystery of" again for a few of these later Digests.
There were a few writers that really got it right and some that just fell very, very short. I guess that is the risk you take when you have several different ghostwriters.
Well, S&S could do a better job at picking these writers, but whatever...
Yeah we have to take what we can get or write our own fan fiction....That's about it.
The Secret of the Soldier's Gold is actually one of my fav digests.