"Ghost of the Hardy Boys" by Leslie McFarlane

Leslie McFarlane was a young newspaperman, working on the Springfield Republican in Massachusetts. A Canadian by birth, he’d grown up in the mining country of northern Ontario. One day, he saw an ad from an outfit called the Stratemeyer Syndicate that was seeking writers. His salary was something of a pittance, so he sent a letter of application. 

He received a package of two books and an explanation of how the syndicate worked. For each of the books published in a series, he would be paid $100. He would be provided a full outline. The books would not be published under his name but instead use a pseudonym. He could also never disclose he was the real author.

 

Given what his salary was, he accepted. A trial run was undertaken with the Dave Fearless series, several books of which had already been published. He passed the test of writing two chapters. He was hired as a freelancer, and he continued his newspaper job. After turning in several manuscripts, and being paid $100 for each, he was given a new project, one involving two brothers living in the fictional town of Bayport and who were amateur detectives. Frank and Joe Hardy were being born.

 

The Stratemeyer Syndicate was the genius of Edward Stratemeyer, who had picked up the legacy of the Horatio Alger stories. Stratemeyer has a number of popular series in publication, with The Bobbsey Twins being the most popular and Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys almost as popular. These books, often sneered at by literary types, were likely the most popular children’s books of the 20^th century, until the arrival of the Harry Potter stories. And they still sell.

 

Leslie McFarlane

McFarlane published his memoir of how he came to be “Franklin W. Dixon, author of The Hardy Boys,” in 1975 as Ghost of the Hardy Boys. The publisher Godine has reissued the book, smartly designing it to look like one of the famous Hardy Boys book covers. 

 

And while it describes just about everything you want to know about the books and the author, it’s also McFarlane’s story. It describes his upbringing in northern Ontario, how he became a newspaperman, the people (and characters) he worked with in various newsrooms, and how he came to write the famous series, and how he ended it. 

 

McFarlane is a born storyteller, including how his son discovered he was the author of what the boy knew, if his father didn’t, as the most famous boys’ book anywhere. He’s also funny, ironic, tongue-in-cheek, and high entertaining. Reading Ghost of the Hardy Boys is almost like reading one of the Hardy Boys mysteries; it uses that same light fast-paced, and cliffhanging style.

 

It’s a real treat to read how my favorite mystery series from childhood came to be. 

It's an Adventure!

I was an early reader. I can’t say exactly when it was that I started reading, but I know I was six when I bicycled up to the dime store and bought Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion, a hardback published by Whitman Publishing, for 59 cents. (Imagine a new book for 59 cents.) (Imagine allowing a six-year-old to bicycle to a shopping center by himself.)

I liked Trixie Belden, but nowhere near as much as I liked the Hardy Boys. The Hardy Boys books were first published in the 1930s; I read the familiar blue-binding reprints that began to be issued in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Joe and Frank Hardy were like my brothers. I helped them find the tower treasure, solve the great airport mystery, and discover what that Chinese junk was really all about. I rode in the back of their roadster (Nancy Drew drove a coupe). I got into serious trouble with them. I stood next to them in their father’s library as he sternly reprimanded the three of us. In all, I shared more than 40 mysteries with Joe and Frank. We had some great (and some scary) times together.

I wanted to be a real sleuth, which sounded so much younger and classier than “private detective.” Failing that, I would be a mystery writer. And, in fact, I started writing one when I was 10. My father owned a printing business, and one day he brought home a paperbound blank book for me to write to my heart’s content. I don’t remember all of what I wrote, but it was a mystery with a bunch of kids who find a secret passage behind a grandfather clock.

The Hardy Boys were what adventure was all about – excitement, danger, mystery, good guys and bad guys, teenagers outwitting all the adults and becoming heroes, and no mushy stuff.

I eventually outgrew the Hardy Boys, my mother sold my entire collection at a garage sale, and I went on to other things.

Life turned out to be a lot less like the Hardy Boys and a lot more about, well, day-to-day living. Most of us live lives that aren’t filled with danger, excitement, mystery and heroes. My life looks pretty tame compared to the Hardy Boys.

But every once in a while, I sneak down to the basement, and find the Hardy Boys books that I’ve picked up at garage sales, used book stores and book fairs, and discover that the adventure is still there, and Joe, Frank and I are tearing along the Shore Road in that roadster, on the prowl for the bad guys.


This post is submitted for the One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock. To see more posts on “adventure,” please visit the site. The links will be live at about 10 p.m. Central time tonight.

Illustration: Cover art for the “The Hardy Boys and the Tower Treasure” by Franklin Dixon. I'm really in the picture, too, just off to Joe's left, next to the tree.

Books from Childhood

My wife found me in the basement this morning. Instead of getting ready for church, I was looking through a shelf of old childhood books, trying to remember who wrote the Trixie Belden books. Yes, I could have gone to Amazon.com or Wikipedia, but with the computer off, it was quicker to go the memories-in-the-basement route. At least that's what I told myself (my wife knew better).

Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion is the very first book I can remember buying. I think I was 6 or 7 years old; the book was a little beyond my age group but I was one of those early readers. I bought it it for 59 cents at the local TG&Y dimestore, rode home on my bike and dove into the book.

The book had everything a kid could want. An old deserted mansion, a tomboy heroine with a rich best friend, a lost teenaged boy living on his own, a little brother who gets bitten by a copperhead, a mystery -- it didn't get much better than that. I read all of the Trixie Belden books published at the time, perhaps seven or eight books in all. (The series got reinvented a few years ago, and there are a lot more volumes than there were in the 1950s and early 1960s.)

From Trixie Belden, I graduated to the Hardy Boys. I liked Trixie Belden, but I loved the Hardy Boys stories. I read them all, starting with The Tower Treasure. These weren't the modern updates but reprints of the originals from the 1920s and 1930s, and included such incomprehensible words as "roadster." I had the complete set, and made the mistake of leaving them at my mother's house until it was too late -- she told me how fast they sold at a garage sale. But I picked up a few along the way at used book stores, and they're down in the basement, too, right near Trixie.

So are some books from the old Scholastic Book Service. A book club through school! And every month! Forget homework. I'd bring home the paper flyer with all the books being offered and pore over it. My choices were eclectic -- mysteries like The Mystery in Old Quebec; funny stories like Triple Trouble for Rupert; and occasionally even books that were obviously for girls, like Understood Betsy (a city girl is sent to live with relatives on a New England farm; I learned where maple syrup comes from).

One of these Scholastic books was called Ready-Made Family. It's the story of three children -- Hetty, Peter and Rosemary -- who are orphaned and adopted by a childless couple. Hetty needs braces and has all of the insecurities of a young girl; Peter's a born troublemaker (a lot of the tension of the book is about Hetty's fears that Peter will be sent back to the orphanage); and Rosemary, the sweet and pretty youngest of the three, is the one everyone falls in love with. I still remember feeling terrified when Peter breaks a window of the house next door, owned by a crotchety old man; I knew this kid was going to be back at the orphanage in no time. This is one book I didn't find in my basement (probably another garage sale), but wish I had. It rates as one of my childhood favorites. Obviously, since I remember the main characters and the plot.

Books can be powerful things.

Oh, that author's name. According to the title pages, the author of the first few Trixie Belden books was Julie Campbell, and then Kathryn Kenny.