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

After reading and enjoying Leslie McFarlane’s memoir, GHOST OF THE HARDY BOYS, recently, I decided to read more about the Hardy Boys series. Mark Connelly’s THE HARDY BOYS MYSTERIES, 1927-1979: A CULTURAL AND LITERARY HISTORY, was published by McFarland & Company in 2008 and is still available from Amazon. It covers some of the same ground as Leslie McFarlane’s book but goes into much more detail about Edward Stratemeyer and the syndicate he founded to mass-produce children’s and juvenile series books, as well as everything that happened after McFarlane left the series for good in 1947.  (Earlier, McFarlane had taken a hiatus from the series from 1938 to 1941, resulting in five Hardy Boys novels written by John Button.) I haven’t actually read a Hardy Boys book for at least 55 years, but during the time I was a fan, I read books from all different eras of the series, so I found Connelly’s book informative and enjoyable.

Connelly’s style isn’t as breezy and fast-moving as McFarlane’s, of course. McFarlane was a fictioneer while Connelly is an academic. And that also means there are entire chapters on race, gender, and class in the series, but those subjects get a pretty even-handed treatment from the author and Connelly doesn’t get bogged down in lecturing. It’s interesting to see how attitudes evolved and publishing practices changed in response. (I still think the early books were much better before they were rewritten, though.) He also covers the various TV series based on the series. I remember the Hardy Boys serial that ran on THE MICKEY MOUSE CLUB and liked it at the time, although to be honest I was more of a Spin and Marty fan.

McFarlane’s memory played one pretty good trick on him in the writing of his memoir, and Connelly repeats that mistake from GHOST OF THE HARDY BOYS. When McFarlane went to work for the Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1926, his first assignment was to write a book in the Dave Fearless series, which was published under the house-name Roy Rockwood. McFarlane writes at length in his memoir about how thrilled he was to be Roy Rockwood, because when he was a boy he read all the Bomba, the Jungle Boy books by Roy Rockwood. That’s not possible because the first Bomba book wasn’t published until 1926, the same year McFarlane went to work for Stratemeyer. However, Stratemeyer used the name as early as 1905, so McFarlane certainly could have read books with that pseudonym on them. Just not Bomba. (By the way, I can certainly understand how he felt. I was thrilled to be Brett Halliday.)

I’ve digressed here. THE HARDY BOYS MYSTERIES, 1927-1979 is a fine book and I enjoyed reading it. If you’re a fan of the series, or just of boy’s adventure books in general, I recommend it and think it’s well worth your time. And I’m now in the odd position of having read more about the Hardy Boys in the past half-century than I have of their actual exploits.