Mystery

Fully realizing these are young adult books at best, this one was a bit of a snoozer for me. The whole tone and tenor of the boys and their mystery seemed off...seemed forced. They are often slightly silly, and surely pure as the new-fallen snow, but this was lacking something......it was effort....took me 2 weeks to finish....not a good quality in a Hardy Boys book. But my quest continues to own and read every example of both the original brown series and the second blue series. ( )

Beautiful cover art, but the story within is a mess. Lots of lucky coincidences that help the Hardy boys solve the caper. And though the title says "mystery" of the Flying Express, there really is no mystery regarding the train itself. ( )

I’m thoroughly confused — the Goodreads listing seems to think that this book is about a hydrofoil and involves signs of the zodiac, whereas the copy of the book I own is most definitely not about either of these things.

OK, apparently this book was REWRITTEN with a completely different plot and the same title. The ORIGINAL story of the Flying Express, which I read, involves a foreign spy camp that Fenton Hardy has been asked by “the Government” to find. And naturally his teenage sons are the perfect assistants.

This book relied very heavily on coincidence and random helpful strangers, and some details were maddeningly vague, as though the author couldn't be bothered to do any research. The spy camp is in "the West" (if the Hardys go into the West, will they remain Galadriel?) and one of their flights is announced at the airport with the statement "Plane Number 6 is ready for boarding". PLANE NUMBER SIX??? What the heck kind of airline is that? Are there only six planes in the country at this point? Jeez.

Not funny was the fact that Chet Morton was drawn as a one-note caricature of “the fat kid”. He spends a lot of time “waddling” and is motivated primarily by food. Never mind that he probably isn’t actually fat by 21st-century standards. And then there was the unfortunate moment when I deduced that the train porters were black (before they were described as “coloured”) because their dialogue was written in awful dialect :(

I hope the rewritten version would avoid these pitfalls, although the coincidence and random-stranger thing is probably more difficult to give up. Overall, I can't say I recommend this story. ( )

1941 edition