Plot Summary (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 loan 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 Kuntz, 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 Katawa's fantastic treasure.
Read more about this topic: The Secret Warning
Famous quotes containing the words plot and/or summary:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)