The Shore Road Mystery

Infobox Book
name = The Shore Road Mystery
orig title =
translator =


author = Franklin W. Dixon
cover_artist =
country = United States
language = English
series = The Hardy Boys
subject =
genre = Young adult literature
publisher = Grosset & Dunlap
release_date = September 1, 1928
media_type =
pages = 212
size_weight =
isbn = ISBN 0-448-08906-8
preceded_by = Hunting for Hidden Gold
followed_by = The Secret of the Caves

"The Shore Road Mystery" is Volume 6 in the original The Hardy Boys book series published by Grosset & Dunlap and is one of the "Original 10", generally considered to be the best examples of the Hardy Boys, and Stratemeyer Syndicate, writing.

Plot summary

In the Hardy boys' hometown of Bayport, there have been a lot of car robberies on Shore Road. Mr. Hardy has to go to New York and work on a case involving smuggling foreign firepower into the country, so Joe and Frank have to figure out the mystery by themselves. Each time the police chase down a stolen car, a truck pulls out to block the police, and the stolen car gets away. The man driving the truck is a farmer named George Birnham. The Hardys know that their friends the Dodds hired man named Ray Slagel to work for them on their farm. The Hardys don't know much about him so they go to ask the Dodds. The Dodds say they hired him but then fired him because he didn’t do any work and was lazy, mean, and just wanted money. They also discover that Slagel may be the man they want.

Slagel and his car-stealing gang listen in on this conversation, and after the Hardys leave the Dodds' house they kidnap the Dodds. The next day, everyone suspects that they left town because they were accused of stealing the cars because the cops had found a stolen car with some of the Dodds' stuff in it.

The Hardys and Chet locate the cave where Slagel and his men were hiding. The stolen cars were nearby, each repainted a different color. The Hardys and Chet find the Dodds inside the cave, bound and gagged. When Chet and the Hardy boys attempt to sneak out of the cave, they are caught by Carlton Melliman, a New York businessman who is the leader of the car theft gang. He is a very rich man as a result of his arms smuggling. He and his associates was stealing the cars and having them transported in Birnham's truck. Then they were painted a new color in the cave. Then they were sent to foreign countries by boat. The foreign countries hostile to the U.S. would pay them in heavy firepower such as mortars, rocket launchers, bazookas, machine guns,and nerve gas and send them to New York where they were smuggled and Melliman’s men received them.

The Dodds are put in a car, which is to be launched into the water so they will die. The Hardys and Chet are put into a room with canisters filled with toxic gases. Two of the three canisters were filled with oxygen. A guard standing at the entrance of the room is to let the poison out when given the signal and then run out of the cave because they were going to blow up the entrance.

The Hardys knock over the oxygen tanks and the air sprays out. The guard runs out saying that the gases had been knocked over and they were filling up the room. Then two masked men run in and say that it is just oxygen. One of the masked men takes off his mask and draws a knife, stabbing the other man and the guard. The Hardys' rescuer is Mr. Hardy. He had snuck onto the ship pretending to be a crew member.

When Chet and the Hardys (including Mr. Hardy) get out of the cave, the Dodds are sitting on the ground all wet with a blanket wrapped around each of them. There are almost a dozen men in police custody including Slagel and Melliman. The Hardy boys had solved the mystery and saved a lot of lives.

This book was rewritten in 1964, reducing the page count to 178. The rewrite involved the investigation into a missing treasure.