When You Find Yourself in Someone Else's Memoir

I started reading the memoir Ghost of the Hardy Boys because I loved the Hardy Boys mystery books as a kid and because I knew a little of the story of how they came to be. Leslie McFarlane (1902-1977) didn’t write all of the 60 books in the series published under the name of Franklin W. Dixon, but he wrote the first third of them. McFarlane was responsible for the 22 books between The Tower Treasure in 1927 and The Phantom Freighter in 1947.  

I read all 22, roughly between 1960 and 1963. I loved them. They even inspired me to write, or start to write, my own mystery. The handwritten manuscript, forever lost, was about 25 pages of a group of kids finding a secret passage from a grandfather down into a cave. I was 10 years old. Yeah, I could see the books had some old-fashioned words, like roadster and coupe for types of automobiles. But I didn’t care, even though I looked up the words in the dictionary. (If you’re interested, a coupe was a two-door car, the name borrowed from a type of horse-drawn carriage. A roadster is what we would call a convertible today.)

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph: University of Iowa School of Journalism office in the 1920s.