Perky fellows in a gay-looking speedwagon: The Hardy Boys return

At last, a revival of unexpurgated Frank and Joe.

By Steve Burgess

Oct 7, 1999 | Canadians have made notable contributions to the field of medicine. Fredrick Banting and Charles Best shared a Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin; Wilder Penfield helped map the human brain. Hens Selye discovered that mental stress affects physical health. Leslie McFarlane wrote the Hardy Boys books.

Scoff, if you dare. This man's prodigious work has brought comfort to millions of children confined to their beds with illness (or fake illness) through the years. Under the pen name Franklin W. Dixon, McFarlane wrote a series of assembly-line mysteries -- the first six of which have just been reissued by Penguin Putnam -- that became standard gifts for any boy laid up with measles (in the olden days of the '40s and '50s) or the flu (in the here and now). In fact, a backlash take on McFarlane might point out that Hardy Boys books, passed from sick to healthy young hands over and over, probably did more to transmit disease than any shipment of smallpox-infested blankets. Harmless youth entertainment or hazardous medical waste? They may be the most sneezed-upon novels in literary history.

"Literary" is perhaps too grandiose a term here. No one ever said the Hardy Boys stories were art, least of all McFarlane. He was hired in 1926 by Edward L. Stratemeyer, whose New Jersey-based Stratemeyer Syndicate specialized in juvenile tomes about Bomba the Jungle Boy and Tom Swift, the Boy Inventor. McFarlane was 23 years old and looking for ways to subsidize a serious writing career. He jumped at the chance to earn $100 per book (despite having summed up two sample Stratemeyer books as having "less content than a football bladder and no more style than a drunken camel").

At first, McFarlane worked from outlines provided by Stratemeyer on early franchises like Dave Fearless and then, in 1927, on a new series about two sons of a famous detective named Fenton Hardy from the little town of Bayport on Barmet Bay. "The Tower Treasure" was the first volume in a collection that would go on to sell more than 70 million copies (and eventually launch the brief but unforgettable career of Shaun Cassidy).

This avalanche of sales brought Leslie McFarlane approximately $4,000. In his autobiography, "The Ghost of the Hardy Boys," (Methuen/Two Continents), McFarlane wrote, "I never did learn what the W (in Franklin W. Dixon) represented. Certainly not Wealthy." Stratemeyer (who died just four years after hiring McFarlane and turned the business over to his daughters) was a true visionary -- both for hanging onto the rights to the books and for hiring a ghostwriter from a famously unlitigious nation.

"I was not swindled," the Canadian ghostwriter later insisted. "I accepted the terms of Edward Stratemeyer, and the importance of the money was related to my needs."

For years, McFarlane wasn't even aware of his status as the Hemingway of the schoolyard set. The autobiography recounts how, "sometime in the '40s," McFarlane's son, Brian, discovered his dad's secret identity. "Did you read these books as a kid?" Brian asked, seeing them on a dusty shelf. "Read them? I wrote them," McFarlane replied. He was astonished by Brian's awe-struck reaction. "Other boys read them?" McFarlane asked his son.

"Dad, where have you been? Everybody reads them."

McFarlane had created a surprisingly potent bit of magic. After receiving the first of Stratemeyer's sketchy plot summaries for the new series, he rejected the hack approach he'd applied to the Dave Fearless books. "I decided against the course of common sense," he wrote. "I opted for quality."

They weren't Dostoevsky, but if you were the right age they were great literature. The first eight books in the series -- including the six rereleased by Penguin Putnam -- were intended to be read in order, with the seasons changing to indicate the passing of time. The boys' characters basically broke down this way -- Frank had dark hair; Joe was blond. McFarlane, writing as Dixon, described them thusly: "While Frank was dark, with straight black hair and brown eyes, his brother was pink-cheeked, with fair, curly hair and blue eyes. Frank was a year older than his brother Joe, and usually took the lead in their exploits, although Joe was not a whit behind his brother in shrewdness and in deductive ability."

Generally, Frank was the thinker while Joe was more impulsive, and perhaps a little more athletic. I was blond, like Joe, and younger, like Joe. I liked Joe best. Franklin W. Dixon played me like a violin.

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