Twisted Claws

Love this version, makes it look like a casefiles book

This is the 11th Hardy boys mystery. And one that is quite a bit strange. First of all its a smuggling ring based on a mysterious Caribbean island. The second it's all about pirates.

UK edition.

Quite what has changed here is anyone's guess. I have the original text file and a home scanned copy of the UK edition remake complete with cats drawn in the flyleaf. 

It has some similarities in common with the original, Pirate island / Smuggling ships called the Parrots, logs used for smuggling and a trip to Canada. But this is where it ends as this is a different story. Oh and an old book that details the Twisted Claw pirate lineage. 

Fenton Hardy tells the boys that he's onto an international smuggling ring targeting the De Graw collection in various museums. It seems that The Black Parrot, an old schooner is being used to transport it. The boys dress up as old salts and  try to blag their way onboard but none of the crew are friendly and end up in Canada. After many daring thefts they try to foil, they end up on the sister ship. Yellow Parrot winging their way to the Caribbean, paying a visit to the king of an unknown island that is the smuggler boss. 

Original

Frank loses his wallet complete with code book in. Pierre of the Black Parrot ship targets them to give them some papers from Fenton Hardy. When they fail to do so, he breaks in and scares Aunt Gertrude and their Bejayzus Oirish maid, Mary. When their mum comes back with a strange message they work out that their dad is kidnapped in Canada. Their trip there garners two of the Parrot gang captured and a daring rescue of their Dad from a forest fire. Later they get board on the Yellow Parrot schooner and manage to win over most of the crew. 

They reach Barracuda island home of the Twisted Claw smuggling empire. They sneak in and watch the strange meeting of the Parrot gangs .Back on board they get  the crew to mutiny when Pierre catches them and they send a last gasp SOS which rounds up the gang. 

Trivia.

Apparently the mystery island is 5 hours GMT behind where they live in Bayport..

You can read the original and UK version here and here.

AI Art

Elsa the undefeated

 We've been messing around with Bing A.I. putting in all sorts of stuff and seeing if the bastards in control will let us render it flesh. Its hit and miss our Pixar version of  the Chuckle Brothers was shot down and we had a few attempts to render Black Metal Nativity before hitting paydirt. But the only thing I've gotten a warning for is Drew Pickles being his swell self. It seems  they're onto him and his 308 mile long p-p-penis. 

 For those without a Microsoft account (had to reinstall windows without a serial, so yeah I have one.) there is also Craiyon which will produce some cosmic horrors and Stable Diffusion. 

Enough blather, you want to see cosmic horror. 

Edit It's given permission. Enjoy.

Tamest Aphex Twin

Vampire Savile

Bedtime Stories update or such.

 Just got done reading the Arctic Patrol mystery aka the Hardys in Iceland. And we have yet another cat this one is called Leo.  I'll add a photo of Leo when the printer isn't broken AF. But I'm drawing a blank on this as well. Guess it must tie in with the Uncle Weedle stories somehow, but I've long forgotten.

Tic Tac Terror

 Hello, book time again and a late era story UK wise. 

An espionage based one. A spy threatens to defect unless he gets an emerald from Colombia. That's the story and there is a slight sub tale of Chet Morton raising rabbits and white mice to sell to laboratories. 

It's not bad, but could do better, a lot better. The only saving grace is that you get  to see Biff Hooper in a rabbit suit, which he uses to troll Chet. In fact this seems to be the only time I've seen a picture of Biff, in any of the books. 

You'll want a better synopsis  then. 

OK seeing as the top paragraph is brief. The boys take on a  strange tale of a man coming back from Colombia with it seems no memory of why he was there, they find him in a coma in a run down block in New York city. There is also an agent called Igor who seems to be a master of disguise showing up in Joes camera. And to top it all a mysterious Government outfit called BOB. The Bureau of Bombs. Men In Black fans will be amused to know its being run by an Agent Smith. 

So this Tic tac toe thing...

Doesn't really come into it. The boys are run on a wild goose chase across NYC with them playing Noughts and Crosses against terrorists which is the limit of the Tic Tac Toe references.

I bet there are lots of differences, too, between  the US and UK edition.

No, there is a slight change to how the tic tac toe clues are read out but this could be the text file I'm working from. Apart from this all spellings that are normally corrected for us remain resolutely American.

You can get it from here. and here.

Necrolog John Pilbeam

 Sad to say we lost our branch founder early in September. I was on holiday and only found out about this now. 

He was a great writer and speaker, who travelled to many places in search of cacti. He had a place out in Chelsfield where he sold cacti and where I went for our first fish n chip supper. Most of all, he could write and his books were readily available for sale either at shows or at our meetings. 

I'll link to the only book I ever had of his as a beginner back in 198x or so.  But it wasn't just books for beginners, there were species specific guides for Stapeliads or some of the genera of  the Cactaceae.