… including a friend of mine. He had a photo of an Italian villa over his fireplace where his family would spend their summers. And one of the Hardy Boys books he wrote was “The Secret of the Italian Villa”!
By the way, I much prefer the original “un-modernized” versions, which I scour antique stores for.
So you might see me with an old tweedy-looking hardcover in a corner of the coffeeshop… looking astute, but I’m really reading about “Joe and Frank’s best chums rattling down Main Street in Chet’s jalopy.”
I used to read my kids Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books, a chapter or two at a time, as bedtime stories ca. 2018 to 2020. They began to prefer Hardy Boys, despite being girls, but eventually outgrew both series. I still haven’t outgrown them.
These were re-written ones, but dating from the 60s, I think.
Wow. I never knew they were originally in red hardcovers. Most of the ones I had were blue hardcovers with illustrations. The last 2 books, I think, were actually just paperbacks.
I don’t remember the last time I was in a book store. Are the books still in print today and have they been updated in the last 50 years?
I inherited a set of Hardy Boys novels from my older brothers and remember The Tower Treasure well. I’ve never gone back and re-read any though.
Fans of Encyclopedia Brown might appreciate the cartoon shorts, Dicktown which answers the question “What happens to an Encyclopedia Brown-type kid when he grows up?”
I read the Hardy Boys (and Nancy Drew; I was not limited by the gender of the teen detective) when I was a kid in the 1970s, so they would have been the revised versions current at that time. These would have been the ones with the blue covers. It was a huge deal to me when the TV series with Parker Stevenson, Shaun Cassidy, and Pamela Sue Martin showed up. At last, I could see my favorite detectives as real people!
A few months ago I bought “The Original Adventures of Frank and Joe Hardy Megapack” on my Kindle, which reprints the original versions of the first 8 Hardy books. Interesting. Rougher and more violent than the books of my youth. Not as overtly racist as I was expecting, but that’s mostly because “ethnic” characters rarely appear. This is in contrast to the original Rover Boys or Tom Swift series, both of which featured a black servant as a regular character, so that each installment would have some minstrel-show type “humor.” The Hardys dispensed with that, at the expense of giving us a mostly white Middle American world, apart from the occasional “swarthy” criminal.
I remember Frank and Joe being 18 and 17 years old, respectively, in the books that I read as a kid. In the originals, they were 16 and 15, which makes it even more remarkable that they were getting into shootouts, killing wolves, and conducting criminal investigations with only the tiniest bit of help or supervision from their father. Indeed, Fenton Hardy took an amazingly hands-off approach to parenting, usually leaving the boys to conduct their investigations independently of his own, even when they were working on the same case. He did not want to exert “undue influence” on them, you see.
Edited to add: by the time I got to middle school, I had graduated to the Three Investigators, and I never looked back. They were infinitely cooler than the Hardy Boys, who were always pretty square.
Ditto. Always the hardbacks with the blue spines. I remember the characters but no plot points.
I have re-read a couple of the Three Investigators books (as mentioned by @Pork_Rind) as an adult—the earlier ones, written by series creator Robert Arthur, which I recognized as a kid were the best, and superior to the Hardy Boys books. They still hold up but are definitely for kids, leaving me wondering what’s the closest thing we have to a “Three Investigators for adults.”
Heads-up to interested folks. That megapack is ‘on sale’ at for the Amazon Kindle for 99 cents. I enjoyed the updated books as a kid. Very curious to see what I missed in the originals.
I never read the Hardy Boys as a kid, but I happened to pick up and read the The Secret of the Old Mill a couple of years ago (the revised edition from 1962). The most interesting part was the nostalgia and reading about bygone days. I kept being struck by how different life was in the not-too-distant past.
I was also a Three Investigators fan. I read every book I could get my hands on when I was in middle school. The first two I read were The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot and The Mystery of the Green Ghost.
A few years ago I found many of them online. Those are nostalgic too, mostly because I remember reading them the first time.
I’ll join the club of folks who read a bunch of 'em as a kid but have not revisited any of them since. Every once in a while I think about getting one or two, just to see how I’d react to them all these years later, but it never seems like a high enough priority.
I used to read the Hardy Boys as a kid, though by that time they were the revised and updated versions. I took a few along some years ago on a boat trip a friend and I went on, just as mindless nostalgic entertainment. The formulaic simplicity and obvious plot holes were enjoyable in their own right. The Hardy boys were hailed as brilliant young detectives but in fact every case they solved was due to just pure dumb luck, because the hack writers couldn’t think of anything clever.
At some point I was sufficiently intrigued by stories about the modernized revisions and why they were necessary that I bought a collector set of six reprints of the originals, published by Applewood Books, which came in an attractive little case.
Some of the updates were unremarkable, like elimination of blatant racism and updated descriptions of vehicles and airplanes. Others were more interesting from a social standpoint. In the originals, Police Chief Collig was a hapless and vindictive incompetent who resented the Hardy Boys for solving cases that the police couldn’t. In the revisions, he became a collaborative friend who admired their skills. I guess this was to instill in young minds a desirable respect for authority.
I read both whenever I could get my hands on one. We couldn’t afford to buy them. My parents used to park me in the book section of the discount store they went to (anyone remember Two Guys?) - while they shopped, knowing I wouldn’t move a foot. I read Hardy Boys; I think I could finish a book in three trips.
I had been doing that for a few years when they moved in a table of 2 for 25 cents paperbacks. That I could afford. The first two I bought were sf: a robot anthology and a book I choose strictly for the title - Ellison Wonderland.
Like many, I read Hardy Boys books as a boy. Frank and Joe, Chet, Callie and Iola. They were very real to me. I also read some Tom Swift. I drifted away from them. Then, when I was a teen, my friend and I started reading Hardy Boys books for a laugh. Didn’t last long, as I got hooked on sci-fi in there somewhere and put all that behind me.
I read a bunch of these in middle school. I could usually figure them out on my own before the reveal.
Not sure if I read the lobster one or not, but I guarantee it had do with the fact that cooked lobsters turn red. This change in color is obvious to anyone who has seen a live lobster and a cooked one. But perhaps not obvious to someone who has only seen a cooked one (or maybe only a picture or a description of a cooked lobster).
Many (if not most) of Encyclopedia Brown’s mysteries involve knowledge that most people pick up along the way. So they really only work on kids.
Naturally, Frank and Joe had girlfriends – Callie Shaw and Iola Morton, Chet’s sister. They admired the Hardy boys and their detecting skills with girlish fawning. Iola was depicted as slim and pretty, though her brother Chet couldn’t stop eating and apparently resembled a blimp. The main point, however, was that the Hardy boys did have girlfriends as a sort of nascent preparation for adulthood, but the relationship was pure and totally platonic. It had to be there but it couldn’t go too far. There was never any fucking going on in the Hardy Boys books!
The Hardy boys’ father, Fenton, was a much-admired private detective who solved every case. The mother was the perfect housewife who knew nothing except how to pack the boys sandwiches for their outings on their motorboat, The Sleuth. There was also a live-in grandmother who was always shrieking at the boys that whatever they were up to would result in no good, heavens to Betsy!
I also read a good deal of Tom Swift, in which Tom managed to create inventions in his garden shed that had defied the best scientists and engineers in the world. And remember Eradicate Sampson, the loyal Black servant who followed Tom around like a loyal dog, performed menial tasks for him, and was constantly awestruck by Tom’s genius? I think that was actually more blatantly racist that most of the stereotypes in The Hardy Boys.
The case: $50 goes missing from the local school. EB suspects that shy classmate Luther witnessed a bully, Bruno, steal the money. But Luther is afraid to speak up, so he speaks to Encyclopedia and his friend Sally in a sort of code, emphasizing words like “legible,” “tormentor,” and “headache.” Somehow from that, Encyclopedia discerns that the money is hidden under an eraser in the school. He lets Luther know that he understands him by randomly dropping the word “onion” in a sentence.
If you don’t get it, don’t worry. Not even Sherlock Holmes could figure this out. Page 94 of the mystery explains that the common element of all of those words is that they have the same letters at the beginning and the end: “LEgibLE,” “TORmenTOR,” “HEadacHE,” and “ONiON.” A ton of leaps of logic are included in this particular case-cracking: That EB and his friend would be able to immediately recognize this commonality in conversation, for example, or that the detective would be able to go into the school and find the right eraser in the right classroom. More likely, Sobol’s publisher was so pleased by the series’ success that they just stopped giving a shit.
