The Hardy Boys are fictional teenage brothers and amateur detectives. They live in the city of Bayport on Barmet Bay with their father, detective Fenton Hardy, their mother, Laura Hardy, and their Aunt Gertrude. Frank, the older brother, is eighteen, and his younger brother Joe is seventeen. The brothers nominally attend high school in Bayport, where they are in the same grade, but school is rarely mentioned in the books and never hinders the Hardys in solving mysteries. In the older stories, the Hardy Boys' cases are often linked to the confidential cases their detective father is working on. He sometimes asks them for help, while at other times they stumble upon villains and incidents that are connected to his cases. In the Undercover Brothers series, begun in 2005, the Hardys are members of an organization known as American Teens Against Crime, which assigns them to cases. The Hardy Boys are sometimes assisted in solving mysteries by their friends Chet Morton, Phil Cohen, Biff Hooper, Jerry Gilroy, and Tony Prito, and, less frequently, by their platonic girlfriends Callie Shaw and Iola Morton (Chet's sister).
