Frank and his brother try to find their friend's car. On the way the brother's are get call a call from their dad that someone has found coins leading to a tower where a king stored his riches he thinks someone has been stealing the treasure. The brothers only have 12 hours to find out who is stealing it because the tower is crumbling! Will the mystery get solved or will the theif get crushed? Read the book and find out.

I tutor in an adult literacy program. My student, who is in his 30s and not a native English speaker, really enjoyed this book, and is plowing through the second book now.

Although the writing style is a little old fashioned, the plots and characters are interesting for adult new readers. If you're looking for reading material for an adult literacy student, the Hardy Boys may be a good choice!

I inherited an entire, almost complete set of vintage Hardy Boys mysteries from my dad, and because I am an avid Nancy Drew collector, I dove into them. Big fans of vintage mystery series like Nancy Drew or Tom Swift or The Happy Hollisters, should have no trouble opening up and letting the Hardy Boys in too. The Tower Treasure is a great opener for the series and introduces Frank and Joe and their friends and family. It's a great story and good on a rainy day. I'm about half way through the whole series right now - there are a lot more Hardy Boys than the original Nancy Drews - and I am enjoying it almost as much as I do Nancy.

Starting in the mid-1960s, the publisher of this series started to rewrite these books.

In part, of course, this was to spike sales. The publishers were sure that sagging sales in the 60s were due to obsolete slang terms, and that spiffing the language up would help. So, "roadster" becomes "hot rod," "bowler" becomes "hat," and "hip flask" becomes "stash."

If only this was the end of it, though. In 1927, it was just fine to use ethnic stereotypes and labels. The white people in the book casually used shocking terms to describe women, Mexicans and African Americans.

I won't repeat them here, in deference to today's well-placed sensibilities. But Franklin W. Dixon also rendered ethnic speech in a literal sense not seen today, and this, too, fell victim to the revisionist sensibilities that informed the editing job. Art is lost.

Given the opportunity, the "rewriters" also could have resolved several unsolved problems in the 1927 original. These issues remain a mystery, even eighty years later:

1. How did Chet actually recover his yellow roadster?
2. It seems, on page 67 of the original, that Frank and Joe actually trade identities. Did they ever revert to their actual selves before the end?
3. Who's Peggy?
4. The purpose for which the Tower was built is never established.

If you can get a hold of any copy of the rare 1927 original, you'll like it better. Well, in any event, this is a fun read, even as deconstructed.