Hardy Hijinx

Dislaimer: For all literary purposes related to this post, Frank and Joe Hardy are both of the legal age of consent.

I finished book 5 this morning, Hunting for Hidden Gold.  

Book 3, The Secret of the Old Mill, barely lent itself to smuttification: the best thing about it is Lester, a boy around Frank and Joe's age who is rescued, first from drowning in the mill race, then from the gang of counterfeiters who are book's bad guys; and whom the Hardys promise in the last chapter to take on as a new chum—only he's never heard from again in the canon. 

Book 4, The Missing Chums, was a bit more fun to corrupt, with Chet and Biff, and then Frank and Joe, captured by a criminal gang and chained up naked. I got to develop Joe's increasing aversion to wearing clothes and his deep attractions to Tony Prito's dad and to big black... snakes. The 'girlfriends' of the series, Callie Shaw and Iola Morton, are fully complicit as beards for Frank and Joe (but still regret that said manflesh is not for them). Also, Chet bags a federal Revenue officer. 

But with Hidden Gold, I feel like I've hit a stride. It was an easy lob of a pitch—I mean, the majority of the plot takes place in Lucky Bottom, Montana, so we begin on page 1 with Joe's driving need to go be a lucky bottom in Lucky Bottom. The boys' dad Fenton is laid up with some broken ribs in Lucky Bottom whilst his 'friend' Hank Shale nurses him back to health (and offers to be the new Mrs. Hardy). The boys accidentally stay at a gay bathhouse in Chicago and have a fun foursome in a car with a couple farmers. Joe flirts with all the help, sniffs outlaw underwear, and just never lets up on his extreme horniness (Frank calls him 'satyriasical'). And Frank gets Grizzled Prospector Syndrome—or at least is about to as the book ends. 

I've also cranked up the silly factor, with characters meta-commenting on the book's (and their own and each other's) virtues and faults, random cultural references (e.g., Venture Bros., Francis Poulenc, MST3K), and various non-sequiturs and absurdities. I have realized I need to abandon a steady temporal setting; these original novels were written in the late 1920s and it's fun playing with the cultural and linguistic markers ('I'll say it is!') but just as the rewrites sought to update those markers by a few decades, I need a bit of leeway, e.g., to situate a modern gay bathhouse in jazz age Chicago. 

Anyway, I'm really happy with this one. Next step is to create counterfeits out of copies of the 1960s picture cover hardback. And the first step of that is finding a reasonably close paper stock.