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The Hardy Boys Mysteries, 1927-1979: A Cultural and Literary History

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I still enjoy reading a Hardy Boys on those days when the little grey cells are operating at less than full steam. To some that may be a confession, but it is also a qualification to review this book.

Important scholarship has developed around children's series, of which I'm an interested bystander, fascinated to better understand the construction of this reading pleasure that so shaped my youth. From ages 7-12, the Hardy Boys were the great joy of my life. Only much later, learning about the intensive study given the Nancy Drew series by feminist critics, did I discover the secrets of the Stratemeyer syndicate--and the ageless Franklin W. Dixon.

Mark Connelly's study, the first such devoted to the Hardys, is an essential volume, demonstrating an impressive grasp of the series itself and the relevant documentation. His account is scholarly and well-researched, integrating countless apt quotes from the series itself along with the autobiography of their primary ghostwriter, Leslie McFarlane. Connelly follows a cultural studies approach, with a wealth of observations on such issues as race, class, and gender, along with the less obvious impact (or non-impact) of World War II and the cold war. The illustrations are choice and rendered with quality. Although this book will be appreciated by the fan, Connelly retains critical distance and judgment. It should have been published by a University Press, but its appearance under the McFarland brand (perhaps appropriate considering McFarlane!) reveals the gaps that University Presses sometimes leave, and McFarland's own importance in studies of popular culture.

Outside of a few unfortunate leaps in logic, there are significant highlights to Connelly's study. He offers an enlightening discussion of the fictitious Bayport and its creation from McFarlane's memories of his youth. Connelly notes Bayport's physical landmarks and ethnic mix, surely essential to the series and part of what gave it topicality. Bayport has become, in popular conception and especially for youth, a locale arguably as important in the national psyche as Lake Wobegon, Yoknapatawpha County and Winesburg, Ohio.

As central as Bayport is in the Hardy mythology, Connelly wisely recognizes the vibrant role of geography and travel in the appeal of the series. Mobility and vehicles, whether motorcycles, the boat the "Sleuth," and airplanes, all serve both as wish-fulfillment and a way to keep the stories contemporary. The devices were no less integral than gadgets were for James Bond. Yet unlike supposedly adult heroes, the Hardys never become reckless with the vehicles at their disposal.

The formula Connelly reveals is one of action, rather than violence, as what distinguished the series from adult fiction and placed it with ratiocinative, rather than hardboiled, private detectives. (For all the amusement from Aunt Gertrude, the boys have more in common with Miss Marple than Philip Marlowe.) Connelly makes an interesting case that the plots of the mysteries themselves, for which we can thank the syndicate, are often weak, and that it is the writing, characterization, and details provided by McFarlane and others that allowed the brothers to achieve immortality.

Connelly discusses such standbys in analyses of children's series books as the cultural wars with the library community. Not until the recognition that such stories led to voluntary reading were they approved, and it was only in 1999 that the Boy Scouts belatedly accepted the Hardys as reading and acknowledged the enthusiasm every scout had known for 70 years. I have always believed that youthful fans of the Hardys graduate, as did I, to Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers.

The problem with this book is inherent in the series itself. There are really two separate Hardy Boy series, old and new, and Connelly fuses them inconsistently. If, like me, you read the Hardys in the 1960s and collected by titles from both new and used bookstores, you might not have known that there were rival texts for Volumes 1-37. Beginning in 1959, the "classic" texts composed by McFarlane and others were "purged" by the Stratemeyer syndicate in the guise of updating them to modern police procedures. In fact, much more was undertaken than updating styles and slang, and eliminating occasionally racist sentiments and use of dialect. Reading an original, and the rewrite, back to back, reveals a jarring contrast of plot and style, and how much "dumbing down" the syndicate did to appeal to television-weaned generations. The books lost the texture of language and background in favor of narrative economy and brevity.

Simultaneously with the rewrites, the syndicate also issued new titles, volumes 38-58, when the Grosset & Dunlap Hardy series ended. However, Connelly discusses all of these 58 volumes, while concentrating on the original texts of volumes 1-37, not the rewrites picked up by youth today. This creates a dissonance, and suggests it might have been more advisable to limit the book to 1927-1959, the era of those originals, particularly since Connelly minimizes comparing the formal and stylistic differences between the competing texts.

At the same time, Connelly touches on only a few points of the massive number of subsequent Simon & Schuster Hardy Boys volumes since 1979, not offering even a few cursory pages on this aspect of the series. By not carrying the saga a bit further, Connelly has missed the opportunity to broaden the focus to encompass the whole Hardy phenomenon. He already exceeds his chronological boundary in coverage of television and theater, yet ignores pastiches like Benjamin Hoff's The House on the Point and Chelsea Cain's Confessions of a Teen Sleuth that are actually more central to his thesis, with their evocation of the style of the early novels. Nonetheless, despite this contradiction, we must be grateful to Connelly for providing a major step in Hardy scholarship.

I purchased this item as a gift for someone else, so cannot adequately review it.