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. 

Forgotten Books: Roy Rogers and Dale Evans in River of Peril - Cole Fannin (Frank Castle)

When I was a kid, I read a lot of the juvenile novels published by Whitman, many of them based on TV shows or movie stars I liked. I was a big Roy Rogers fan, so I would have read this one if I’d ever seen it. Clearly, I just never came across a copy. Until now. (That’s an Internet scan of the cover, by the way. My copy is beat up and has loose covers.)

ROY ROGERS AND DALE EVANS IN RIVER OF PERIL is a clumsy title for a pretty good book. Unlike many of Roy’s movies and his TV show, which were contemporary Westerns including modern technology and even Cold War espionage, this novel is in a more traditional Western vein with nothing more advanced than railroads and the telegraph. As the book opens, Roy is on a secret mission for an unnamed U.S. president who’s pretty clearly Theodore Roosevelt, which places the time period as very early 20^th Century.

Roy’s job is to find out who’s trying to keep settlers out of the Bitter River country in Idaho, which the president wants to open for settlement by homesteaders. He’s assisted in this effort by a talkative old-timer named Kammas Tibbs, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Gabby Hayes. Dale shows up, even though Roy tried to keep her from taking part in what might be a dangerous job. There’s a gang of bad guys ramrodded by a head henchman who would be played by Roy Barcroft is this was a movie, and a mysterious mastermind behind all the villainy. Since this is a novel aimed at young readers, nobody gets killed, but there’s plenty of gunplay and a few brutal fistfights, plus some good scenes involving the rapids in Bitter River. This is almost a plot that could have worked as one of Roy’s late features directed by William Witney and written by Sloan Nibley.

Speaking of writers, the author of this novel is by-lined Cole Fannin, but that was actually veteran pulpster and paperbacker Frank Castle. Castle wrote a bunch of hardboiled Westerns and crime novels, but he was a thorough pro and could turn out juveniles like this, too, and in fact wrote quite a few of them. He had a very distinctive style in some of his paperbacks, but either he kept it under control on this assignment or some of his more oddball sentence structures were edited out. What’s important to me is that I enjoyed this fast-paced yarn and thought Castle did a good job of capturing Roy and Dale’s personalities. If you’re a fan of their movies, I think this book is well worth reading if you can find a copy.

Forgotten Books: Gene Autry and the Thief River Outlaws - Bob Hamilton

There’s a chance I read this book when I was a kid, although I don’t remember it at all, because I read a lot of the juvenile novels published by the Whitman Publishing Company of Racine, Wisconsin. This one was published in 1944, but that doesn’t matter because they stayed on the kids’ section shelves of public libraries for years. Whitman published hundreds of them, I’d say, some featuring original characters created for the line, but many of them starred popular characters from movies, radio, TV, and comic strips.

GENE AUTRY AND THE THIEF RIVER OUTLAWS is very much like one of the B-Westerns Autry made for Republic Pictures, although toned down somewhat for kids. Gene, a roving troubleshooter, is asked by a friend of a friend to investigate some sabotage plaguing the construction of a railroad bridge over Thief River Canyon. It’s the usual bit where the old-timer who owns the construction company has to complete the bridge by a certain date or else lose the lucrative contract. Gene’s investigation quickly turns up a suspect, but he has a hunch something else is going on, so he continues to dig around and winds up in danger a couple of times before everything is straightened out satisfactorily.

Overall, this is a fairly mild book, as I mentioned above. There’s one murder, but it takes place off-screen. Not much gunplay and only a couple of fistfights. But the pace moves along fairly quickly and the author at least makes an attempt to throw a few twists into the plot. He also does a good job with the colorful sidekick character, a Gabby-like old codger called Tennessee.

Dust Jacket Back

GENE AUTRY AND THE THIEF RIVER OUTLAWS was written by Bob Hamilton, whoever that was. He wrote a couple of other Gene Autry novels for Whitman, or at least they were published under that name, but that’s all I know about him. It could well be a pseudonym or house-name. But this one is competently written and entertaining in a nostalgic way. I’m not sure I’d recommend it to anybody who didn’t read these books as a kid, but if you’re an old codger like me, there’s a good chance you’d enjoy it, too.

Now Available: Twerp in Time: Missing! Lost City of Gold - James and Livia Reasoner

Dennis Fletcher has a problem...or two. He's extra-smart, and even though he's skipped a grade, he's still bigger than a lot of the older kids! Making friends is hard--and something he wants more than anything. When he invites two of his classmates over to work on a group project, they suddenly find themselves in the middle of Coronado's Conquistadors--and Dennis's execution is slated only a few days away! How did they travel back in time to the 1500's? And how are they going to get back to their own time before Dennis meets his end? The pouch of special powder around his neck contains the answers--if only he can figure out how to use it to save them all and get them home to Texas--500 years in the future!

(I think this is a pretty entertaining book for kids--or for old geezers who never grew up, like me.)

Forgotten Books: Rescued in the Clouds, or Ted Scott, Hero of the Air - Franklin W. Dixon (Frank Duffield)

A couple of weeks ago there was some discussion in the comments on one of the posts about the Hardy Boys series. I remembered that while I don’t have any of the original Hardy Boys books on hand (or any of the newer ones, either, for that matter), I do have several books in another series by “Franklin W. Dixon”, so I decided to read one of them.


The Ted Scott Flying Stories were launched about the same time as the Hardy Boys, and according to what I’ve read on the Internet, Ted Scott, dashing young aviator, was even more popular than Frank and Joe for a while, with the books about him outselling the Hardy Boys novels. Ted Scott is a pretty blatant fictionalization of Charles Lindbergh, to whom the books are rather brazenly dedicated, along with a number of other early aviators. The first book in the series, OVER THE OCEAN TO PARIS, has plucky young flier Ted Scott becoming the first man to fly the Atlantic and becoming America’s hero in the process. I don’t have that one, but I do have RESCUED IN THE CLOUDS, the second book in the series, and it picks up with Ted returning to a hero’s welcome in his Midwestern home town, only to run afoul of some old enemies.


The plot of this novel really meanders around, as Ted has a series of adventures centered around flying. He stops a train from crashing off a bridge that’s collapsed. He organizes an air show to raise money to build a hospital. He locates a witness against the con man who swindled his elderly foster parents out of a fortune. He rescues flood victims, performs a daring mid-air rescue of two men from a burning plane, and even (attention Bill Crider!) fights alligators. But no matter what the odds against him, Ted Scott never gives up and fights on with a smile on his face, because Ted Scott is nothing if not stalwart.


The writing in this book is really old-fashioned, not surprising since it was published in 1927. It’s hokey, melodramatic, and driven by incredible coincidences. And yet RESCUED IN THE CLOUDS has its moments. Some of the flying scenes, if put on film, would make spectacular stunts. There are also some nice satiric bits about the commercialization of heroes and how everybody but Ted Scott tries to cash in on his fame. According to one website, the actual author of these books was someone named Frank Duffield, whose only other publications seem to be in the field of non-fiction about coin collecting. He certainly wasn’t a polished writer, but as I said above, at times there’s some decent yarn-spinning in this book. As far as I know, Duffield didn’t write any of the Hardy Boys books as Franklin W. Dixon, but he may have done other boys’ series work for Edward Stratemeyer.


While most readers today probably wouldn’t make it very far in a book like this, those old boys’ series novels are, in their own way, historical documents. This one gives what’s probably a pretty accurate picture of the adulation that greeted Charles Lindbergh on his return to the States. And as creaky as it may be, it has a certain charm to it. I may never read another Ted Scott Flying Story, but I have to admit, I’m a little curious about what happens in the next one, OVER THE ROCKIES WITH THE AIR MAIL, OR TED SCOTT LOST IN THE WILDERNESS. Gee whillikers, I wonder if good old Ted will survive?