For those unfamiliar with Pendleton’s work he was the one who created The Executioner series featuring vigilante Mack Bolan.
I read them a lot as a kid as well as the other men’s action series published by the same publisher. They were published by Gold Eagle–an imprint of Harlequin Publishing famous for their romance “novels”.
I really don’t remember them being THAT poorly written. I remember the writing being simplistic and not that ornate but not really BAD.
I don’t think I had the concept of a “guilty pleasure” when I was a kid, nor the ability to distinguish between good and bad writing as long as it was technically proficient enough to get published.
But I do remember that the local public library didn’t carry the Hardy Boys books when I was the right age for them (though they did later), because they weren’t considered good enough. And I guess I accepted that judgment without really understanding it.
One thing that annoys me is when the author assumes the reader is incapable of inference. I read a book titled Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers in which Dave Lister had been living is a luggage locker when he obtained his job on the Jupiter Mining Corporation ship Red Dwarf but slept in his bunk all curled up, and the author had to add “luggage locker style” to the sentence because, apparently, he was afraid that his readers would not figure that out. No Douglas Adams was Grant Naylor. (“Grant Naylor” was actually two people, which may help explain the mehness of the writing.)
Maybe “guilty pleasure” wasn’t quite the right term. I certainly enjoyed the Hardy Boys when I was a kid, but, at least as I grew older, it was evident that they were formulaic and not terribly realistic.
The books have an interesting history. I think most of us know that the purported author, Franklin W. Dixon, was not real person, but initially the pseudonym for the ghostwriter Leslie McFarlane who wrote the first half-dozen or so of the books. He was made an offer by Edward Stratemeyer’s publishing house, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, to churn out a series of boys’ detective books starting around 1927. In later years, a whole stable full of other writers continued churning them out, all just looking to make a buck, and all under the name Franklin W. Dixon. Still, the books were entertaining enough for young readers and many of us look back on them fondly.
Another interesting thing about the books is that they were substantially rewritten around circa 1959. This was in part to modernize them, and also in part to clean up aspects that were thought socially unsuitable, such as racism and other inappropriate portrayals. There is a niche publisher called Applewood Books that re-issued some of them as nostalgia pieces, though most of us probably only ever saw the revised versions. I bought a boxed set of the first six originals many years ago just out of curiosity. It’s quite fascinating to page through the originals. Besides containing things like racism, the portrayal of police officials was completely different. In the modern books, although the Hardy Boys are always the crime-solving heroes, the Bayport police chief, Chief Collig, is friendly and cooperative with the boys. In the originals, the Chief is a pompous buffoon who considers them rivals, and his sidekick, a repellent moron named Oscar Smuff, is even worse.
I haven’t read any of the original Hardy Boys, but I did read my daughter the first original Nancy Drew. It had racist components also, and Nancy was younger than in the '50s version.
But in the context of bad writing, you nailed it calling the formulaic. But that may not be a bad thing. The formula they used (including a cliff hanger at the end of each chapter) worked in making them readable, if not exactly good. I’ve just looked at 94 books many of which were written by people without a grasp of any kind of story or formula, and I’ll take a Hardy Boys book any day.
Tom Swift books, which had to change the story because of changing technology, are even more interesting, and older than either Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. The original ones were written by the guy who did Uncle Wiggly. They were racist in the sense of having a stereotyped Black character, but he was at least heroic, and the race problem was solved in the '50s one by making Black people disappear. The science of the originals was better also.
But I was disappointed to find that there are no Tom Swifties in Tom Swift.
I wasn’t thinking of his Executioner series, which I’ve never read (and which is claimed to be the basis for Marvel’s Punisher character), but of his abysmal science fiction one-offs, like Cataclysm: The Day the World Died. Truly, truly terrible writing. I have lots of quotations from it in my Bad Writing file
Here’s something from an on-line review
But that doesn’t give you any idea of how appallingly bad the writing is – especially the dialogue. I’d quote some, but I haven’t got my file here.
I have a friend who got to write a Nancy Drew book, and I thought that was so cool. But she said there are dozens of rules that the writer has to follow (one I kind of liked: “At NO point should Nancy depend on a boy or man to get out of a fix.”). She’d agree with your “scaffolding” comment.
Then I had a friend who admitted, after years of knowing him, that he’d written two Hardy Boys books. I was excited, as those were my favorite books in grade school. But he really didn’t want to talk about them… I finally got the names of the books so I could read them, but I knew he’d never discuss the writing with me. Or the research (I do know he spent a summer living in a villa in a small Italian village).
By the way, I love the old 1920s-'50s Hardy Boys editions, partly for the pre-1959 editing, but also for the tweedy cloth covers. They’re usually $5-10 in antique stores, and the perfect thing to read in my just-off-campus coffee shop amidst the pretentious professors perusing Proust.
Cool. Were they the newer ones? (Nancy goes to college, etc. About time.) We never read any of them, but we did read some of the Nancy / Hardy Boys crossover books, aimed at a slightly older demographic than the old Nancys.
Another thing we noticed - no one ever dies in one of the old books. They mystery is always about something getting stolen or someone missing.
Here’s the Nancy Drew cover from the “old days:”
The first Nancy Drew I read was The Sign of the Twisted Candles of this vintage. It was given to me by an aunt who’d received it as a bday gift in 1942. I loved the 1930s-ish illustrations with Nancy in a bias cut dress and a finger wave bob. And her snappy little roadster!
They’re not very readable for adults.
A couple of the original (1930) Nancy Drew covers, with her in a cloche hat, bias-cut dress and coat:
I missed this earlier. Kidnapped was one of a handful of books I picked up dirt cheap at a book store sale - all classic reprints. I finished it and didn’t mind it. One other book - The Sea Wolf, by Jack London, was good enough I read it at least one more time. I quite liked it. Another book from that time that greatly disappointed was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Dry prose that frequently detoured into, literally, page after page of the scientific names of the sea life that they encountered. I never saw anything else like it before or since - it was just beyond gratuitous. Finally, after yet another one of those lists, about halfway through, I gave it up. I gave up on books only rarely at that point - I’ve since decided life is too short for books I don’t enjoy.
I have to point out that the most common translations of 20,000 Leagues – the ones you get in those Barnes and Noble omnibus volumes and used as the basis for audiobooks – are almost invariably the abysmal early one by Lewis Mercier (AKA Mercier Louis). They use it because it’s cheap, and now in the public domain. But it’s really, really awful, as Walter James Miller points out at considerable length in his The Annotated Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Lewis would completely botch simple translations (“The Badlands of South Dakota” came out as “the disagreeable country of South Dakota”) and would remove huge chucks of the work.
There have been a great many good translations issued since the 1960s – probably more than for any other Verne novel – so there’s no need to read Lewis’ translation.
On the other hand, if your complaint is Verne’s technical asides and often drawing up lists of creatures and of books, I’m afraid that those are in Verne’s original. Newer translators have them just as Lewis did – they’re just more accurately translated. It’s part of Verne’s writing , especially in his earlier works.
This is how my wife and I read as well and it’s where bad writing can seriously affect enjoyment of reading.
Our son has/had challenges with reading. At one point he said ‘when I read I just see words on a page. I don’t picture anything in my head.’ This struck me as odd at the time, as I confess it never occurred to me that someone could ever experience reading any other way than the way I do. No wonder he finds the process of reading so laborious when it’s a never ending struggle for comprehension. We spoke to his teacher about this and she said it was not at all uncommon, and that even good readers sometimes don’t evoke images while reading.
I find myself wondering if reading fiction would be at all enjoyable without the mental images that accompany the storytelling.
I can’t imagine it would be that great, honestly.
But for me, bad writing is more like having an car that sputters and lurches if the actual wording is bad, or maybe like having heavy traffic if the pacing and story isn’t well done. It takes what’s a pleasant drive where I can view the scenery, to one where I’m having to pay most of my attention to the car or the driving conditions.
Most writers are workmanlike enough that the “driving” part is minimal, and I can concentrate on the story and ideas. Some though, are exceptional and it’s like driving a Corvette on an empty road with gorgeous mountain scenery and weather. And a sorry few are like driving a junky beater, in heavy traffic, in freezing rain.
Yes, some readers see “mental movies” or images of what they read; others don’t. I know this has been discussed before, and I thought we’d had at least one thread specifically devoted to it, but the closest thing I’ve been able to find is this:
If I can’t see the characters in my mind’s eye, I can’t enjoy the book. That’s the problem I had when trying to read Ulysses; I couldn’t visualize Leopold Bloom. Even Joyce’s drawing of him lacks definition.
Interesting. It sounds a lot like the way I perceive having to suffer through podcasts or video versions of just about anything that could be written. Painful and a massive waste of my time. I can read faster and stay more focused than having to passively sit there and actively listen at talking speed. Reading articles or even transcriptions of podcasts/interviews is far, far better as far as information transfer goes. The one that aggravates me the most are video reviews of items. They’re nearly completely worthless IMO.
But I gather a lot of people don’t feel that way and would rather listen to or watch a review/podcast/instructions than read it. The only time the video stuff is actually useful is for things like repair instructions where they use the video camera to actually show you where the weird screw is, or how things fit together, or stuff like that which is difficult to determine from a line drawing or schematic.
Fortunately, nowadays you can usually adjust the playback speed in most video and audio; so if speed is your only issue, you can just play whatever it is at 2x (or whatever).
Of course, you still may be able to process written information faster than you can process aural input; but for other people it’s the other way around.
Sure, definitely. I’m just saying that a lot of the time if I’m looking for a review of a product, I’d much rather find an article, skip to the score/final review, and then skip back for the reasoning if the review is not just stellar.
But with some guy on YouTube, I have to skip around without any sort of organization and hope I luck across the part you’re curious about, or suffer through the whole guy blabbering on in stream-of-consciousness about why that video card is or isn’t good. It’s infuriating. I realize some people would rather watch that sort of thing than read a written review, but I don’t get it, unless that person is borderline illiterate.
I don’t get pictures in my head – I always thought “mind’s eye” was a figure of speech, and only discovered recently that most people actually think they’re seeing something – but that certainly doesn’t make reading a struggle for comprehension, except maybe in the rare cases in which what’s being described in the writing is some sort of complicated diagram. My comprehension just isn’t linked to visual images.
And I read a lot, both fiction and non-fiction, and most definitely enjoy it.
Do you have trouble understanding what a character’s doing or how they’re relating to other people if you don’t have an image of what that person looks like, or what the room looks like that they’re in, or whatever? Because I don’t. It can certainly matter to the story whether the room is large or small, or whether it’s ritzy or simple or filthy or decrepit, or whether they’re actually in a forest or field and what time of year it is and what the weather’s like and whether the growth is healthy; but I have no trouble keeping track of all that without a visible image in my head, either.
And I can certainly still do what I call “falling into the book”: becoming so immersed in it that I lose track of time and of whatever else is going on.
It’s just a different framework of thought.
