THE HOUSE ON THE POINT

Twenty years after using Winnie the Pooh to bash Christianity, feminism, and the conservative establishment (The Tao of Pooh, 1982), Hoff is at it again, resurrecting teen sleuths Frank and Joe Hardy and their chums to promote nature, art, observation, invention, imagination, teamwork, and right-brain thinking. The plot—the heroes’ father, private eye Fenton Hardy, disappears during his investigation of a smuggling gang operating in Bayport, and his sons search for him in a spooky house overlooking Barmet Bay—might be described as freely adapted from the Hardy Boys’ second adventure, The House on the Cliff (1927). As Hoff’s preface and epilogue announce, however, his many changes—updating the setting to 1947, differentiating the sleuths and their buddies more sharply, giving them more emotional depth, making all of them closer observers and sharper detectives, providing backstories for Mr. Hardy and his sister Gertrude—are designed not to create a parody or pastiche of the pseudonymous, factory-created original novel but to rescue its promising yarn from Dixon’s meandering plotting and clunky, epithet-rich prose. The result is a strange curio that neither reads like the original (though Hoff’s description of Mrs. Hardy as “an attractive blonde with alert, inquisitive eyes” could have come right out of Dixon) nor represents a significant improvement in complexity or maturity.

It’s like reading a new YA story, complete with 21st-century developmental bromides, whose characters happen to have the same names and move through the same places as in some book you dimly remember from your childhood.