Hardy perennial.(The Secret Life of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate)(Book Review)

The Secret of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate, by Marilyn S. Greenwald (Ohio University, 384 pp., $32.95)

THE Hardy Boys books have sold more than 50 million copies since the first volume appeared in 1927. Countless young people have grown up on them, developing a love for literature through these unpretentious tales of Frank and Joe Hardy, two energetic teenagers who solve mysteries in the fictional small American town of Bayport.

This huge success was by no means the simple result of canny marketing or sheer luck. Although critics have long dismissed the books as insufficiently sophisticated and of scant literary value, such cavils overlook the great virtues of these stories. In fact, virtue and vice are at the center of the Hardy Boys tales, and the books' treatment of fundamental moral choices is a central aspect of their wide appeal.

The creators of the series were never greatly concerned with literary merit--they were out to secure a steady stream of money by appealing to a broad spectrum of young readers. The idea for the series came from Edward Stratemeyer, who built a publishing empire in the 1910s and 1920s on the strength of several child-fiction series written by ghostwriters from detailed synopses he provided. Among his highly successful series were those featuring Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, the Rover Boys, Dave Fearless, and Bomba the Jungle Boy.

A church-going straight arrow who was intensely concerned about moral issues, Stratemeyer took the formula of the dime novel and incorporated 20th-century conditions--including new technologies and social freedoms--to make his books unusually relevant and engrossing for young readers. He created a variety of authorial pseudonyms, one for each series, and quickly started to farm out the actual writing, mostly to hungry newspaper reporters looking for a little extra cash. One of these was Leslie McFarlane, an especially famished reporter based in rural Ontario, who began writing for Stratemeyer in 1926.

After cutting his teeth on several Dave Fearless books, which he found frustratingly silly and melodramatic, McFarlane accepted the opportunity to begin a new series relating the exploits of the two teenage Hardys. The attraction for McFarlane, as Marilyn S. Greenwald notes in this new biography, was that "the books would focus more on dialogue, plot, description, and narrative than on simple action." Stratemeyer retained his usual requirements that the books be written to an exact page count and that the author stick strictly to the detailed chapter outlines he provided; but, as Greenwald points out, the publisher allowed McFarlane "to insert his own style into this series, as well as his views on such diverse issues as authority, family, and life's small pleasures." Under the pseudonym of Franklin W. Dixon, McFarlane made the books his own. He wrote carefully and without condescension (often taking delight in driving his young readers to the dictionary to look up words such as ostensible and propounded), incorporating people and places he had encountered in his child hood in rough, rural northern Ontario.

McFarlane contributed the first 16 volumes of the series, plus a handful of later ones, before handing off the engagement for good in 1946. In the 1960s, Stratemeyer's heirs updated the books, revising, shortening, and bowdlerizing them for what is now called political correctness. This was by no means an improvement, and many aficionados prefer the original versions.