''The Secret Warning'' is Volume 17 in the original
The Hardy Boys
The Hardy Boys, brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, are fictional characters who appear in a series of mystery novels for young readers. The series revolves around teenage amateur sleuths, solving cases that often stumped their adult counterparts. ...
Mystery Stories published by
Grosset & Dunlap
Grosset & Dunlap is a New York City-based publishing house founded in 1898.
The company was purchased by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1982 and today is part of Penguin Random House through its subsidiary Penguin Group.
In recent years, through the P ...
.
This book was written for the
Stratemeyer Syndicate
The Stratemeyer Syndicate was an American publishing company that produced a number of mystery book series for children, including Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, the various Tom Swift series, the Bobbsey Twins, the Rover Boys, and others. It pu ...
in collaboration by John Button and
Leslie McFarlane in 1938.
Between 1959 and 1973 the first 38 volumes of this series were systematically revised as part of a project directed by Harriet Adams, Edward Stratemeyer's daughter.
''The Hardy Boys Online:'' Revisions
/ref> The original version of this book was rewritten in 1966 by James D. Lawrence resulting in two different stories with the same title.
Plot
Revised edition
On a stormy night, the Hardy boys receive a visit from Captain Early who tells them the story of Red Rogers, the ‘Jolly Roger
Jolly Roger was the England, ensign flown by a piracy, pirate ship preceding or during an attack, during the early 18th century (the latter part of the Golden Age of Piracy). The vast majority of such flags flew the motif of a human skull, or � ...
’, and Whalebone Island, where the ghost is said to haunt. The next day, the boys receive a map in the mail showing a red 'X' on Whalebone Island. They assume this is a treasure map so they, along with their friend Chet Morton
Many characters have appeared in the fictional series of books about The Hardy Boys.
Character history
Original series
At the beginning of the original Hardy Boys series, Frank is only 16 years old (as opposed to 18 after the revisions betwee ...
, go to meet their father and explore the island. As they approach, they see the abandoned lighthouse
A lighthouse is a tower, building, or other type of physical structure designed to emit light from a system of lamps and lens (optics), lenses and to serve as a beacon for navigational aid for maritime pilots at sea or on inland waterways.
Ligh ...
flashing a warning to them in Morse code
Morse code is a telecommunications method which Character encoding, encodes Written language, text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called ''dots'' and ''dashes'', or ''dits'' and ''dahs''. Morse code i ...
. On the island, they find their father who tells them about a solid gold bust of an Egyptian Pharaoh
Pharaoh (, ; Egyptian language, Egyptian: ''wikt:pr ꜥꜣ, pr ꜥꜣ''; Meroitic language, Meroitic: 𐦲𐦤𐦧, ; Biblical Hebrew: ''Parʿō'') was the title of the monarch of ancient Egypt from the First Dynasty of Egypt, First Dynasty ( ...
which was owned by Mr. Zufar. While it was being shipped to America aboard a freighter named ''Katawa'', the ship sank and Mr. Zufar is making an insurance claim for one million dollars. However, the insurance company has received a tip that the head was not on the ship when it sank and Mr. Zufar is trying to defraud them.
The Hardy boys end up on the salvage ship
A salvage tug, also known historically as a wrecking tug, is a specialized type of tugboat that is used to rescue ships that are in distress or in danger of sinking, or to salvage ships that have already sunk or run aground.
Overview
Few tugbo ...
that is sent to search the ''Katawa'', which happens to be sunk very close to Whalebone Island. While they are on board, they notice another salvage ship in the area as well. Once the diver is lowered to the sunken ship, he finds that someone else has already been there and stolen some of the ship’s equipment. On a later dive, the diver is nearly killed when a squid triggers a booby trap that was intended for him.
The boys leave the salvage ship when they receive notice that their father has gone missing. They return to shore and locate their father and the missing Pharaoh’s head and put a stop to a plan by Mr. Zufar to sell the real head while also collecting the insurance for the head which was supposedly sunk. In the end, while the bad guys nearly capture them, the rival divers come to their rescue, having earlier revealed that they were searching for a U-boat sunk by Captain Early during World War II. As a result of an earlier rescue the boys performed, the divers were going to give them a share of the treasure and had come to do so when they found them in trouble. While the mystery is solved, the boys discover that the money the other divers were after is actually counterfeit.
Original edition
The Hardy Boys meet up with a professional diver by the name of Roland Perry, who is employed by the Crux Brothers diving company. After the boys rescue Perry from a mishap on the water, they lend him one of their father's suits, and Perry heads off to his next job at nearby Bailey's Landing. But the suit happened to contain important notes for the case that the elder Hardy was working on, so he sends the boys to retrieve them. Along the way, they run afoul of two thugs, Bock and Simon.
After retrieving the notes, the boys stick around to help Perry raise a yacht belonging to a wealthy businessman. In the process, they become entangled in Perry's bitter feud with another diver, Gus Bock, the unscrupulous owner of a rival diving company. Kuntz employs the thugs Bock and Simon, and repeatedly tries to sabotage Perry's diving operations, putting Perry's and the boys' lives at risk. Mysterious notes left at the Hardys' hotel serve as the eponymous secret warnings, foretelling misfortune, but the boys are undaunted.
At length the yacht is raised, and Perry moves on to his next job: searching for treasure in the sunken ocean liner ''Katawa'' off of Reed's Point. They enlist the aid of eager photographer and inventor Earl Chipsley and his remarkable underwater X-ray motion picture camera. But the second mate of the ''Katawa'', Clark Hornblow, institutionalized after having gone mad at the time of the wreck, insists the riches are elsewhere, having been stolen by other officers using a lifeboat. What's more, Kuntz and his henchmen will stop at nothing to claim the gold and diamonds for themselves. The Hardys are beset by dangers above and below the surface of the sea as they attempt to secure the ''Katawas fantastic treasure.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Secret Warning, The
The Hardy Boys books
1938 American novels
1938 children's books
1966 American novels
1966 children's books
Grosset & Dunlap books