Back in post 7.
Only one. It was about the crew terraforming another planet. About halfway through the book, somebody heard a noise from outside, and they realized that the atmosphere generators had made enough air for sound to travel in.
Also, the crew used cigar-shaped spacecraft, but the bad guys (Russians? Chinese?) used less efficient saucer-shaped craft. All I really remember.
I don’t think I read the Tom Swift books but I did read the Danny Dunn ones. Also the Henry Reed books.
I would say that Keith Robertson’s Henry Reed books, like their approximate contemporaries the Ramona the Pest, Henry Huggins, etc. books by Beverly Cleary, are generationally a bit different from the early 20th-c. Stratemeyer series. On the other hand, a lot of those series went on for decades and overlapped chronologically with later works, so probably no clear generational cohort lines can be drawn between them.
shoot! missed that. thanks
I’m not sure how old I was when I last read them. The two things that come to mind about the Hardy Boys were that they had this code with their dad that told them he was acting under duress, which started one of their cases. The other bit is a silly bit where their friends challenged them to figure out the order in which they had bought fast food from three different places–milkshakes, hamburger, and fries, in that order.
The book series I’ve not seen mentioned yet that I had whole sets of were the Happy Hollisters. This was an entire family that, wherever they went (often on vacation) they’d run into a mystery they had to solve. The main thing I remember about that series is that every, single, chapter, ended on a cliffhanger.
I also vaguely remember some other series similar to Encyclopedia Brown with the answers in the back. I think it might have been a spinoff with a girl?
I haven’t read tried to read a Hardy Boys book in decades. Even as a pre-teen I quickly realized how dry, repetitive, and ridiculous the books were. The Three Investigators was more my style. And I liked the Choose Your Own Adventure type books, then Dragonlance.
I never got into the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, or Nancy Drew, although I knew they existed when I was at the appropriate age. Perhaps it was because my mom and several other family members were teachers, and hand-picked my educational material. They stayed away from the “common culture” offerings (the snobs).
I was subscribed to the Junior Literary Guild book-of-the-month club for my age group around early teenage years. I think many of those books had similar themes and stories; they just weren’t centered on a single, continuing, character or group of characters.
Some examples:
(1) Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet, by Eleanor Cameron. A science fiction story about two boys who help a strange, small, greenish-tinted man build a rocket to visit his home planet. This planet was somewhere between the Earth and Moon, which made a rocket more possible. The planet could not be seen by ordinary telescopes; it required a special filter.
(2) Scavengers in Space, by Alan E. Nourse: Two boys can’t find their dad. Dad was a cosmic explorer and asteroid miner who goes missing. They use all the tools that might be available in the near future to track down dad’s last location; uncover and foil a plot to take over the galaxy.
(3) Star Surgeon, another Alan E. Nourse book. Nourse authored several books, all with a futuristic, space theme. This one follows Dal Timgar, a young doctor fresh out of space-medical school, on a Star-Trek-like trip. The ship encounters other planets and civilizations who are asking for medical help. Quite a few thought-provoking problems crop up; how to diagnose an illness when you don’t know the alien anatomy? Dal’s pet, a small, fuzzy animal, saves the day by serving as a host for a strange bacteria.
(4) Mystery of Satellite 7, by Charles Coombs. Two boys trying to unravel a mystery of why satellites don’t launch properly.
(4) Wildlife Photographer, (I can’t remember the author.) A young boy, after graduating from high school, buys an expensive lens and plans to spend his summer before going to college taking nature pictures. His heavy telephoto lens becomes a defensive weapon when he is attacked.
(5) SOS at Midnight, by K6ATX, Walter Tompkins. Tompkins gives his high school senior his own ham call letters, and he mentors a younger guy about ham radio. Both are kidnapped, and Tommy and Spud use their electronic skills to fool their captors and notify rescuers. This book developed into a series as Tommy grows up, meets a girl (a ham, of course) and enters college.
I have often thought that many of these books would make great movies, whether the protagonist’s ages would be preserved or not. I can even envision saleable product tie-ins, like Fuzzy, the ball of fluff in Star Surgeon.
I remember a bit from one book where the brothers (and maybe Chet too) were face to face with the bad guys, and they were going to have to fight their way out of it. So, like, they’re on the school football team, right? At this confrontation, one of them calls a play, and they run forward doing the stuff they would have done on the football field for that play, knowing what the others were going to do. And thus coordinated, they were able to prevail. Woo-hoo!
I think that was true of most, if not all, of the Stratemeyer Syndicate series. They didn’t want you putting the book down just because you’d gotten to a convenient stopping place.
I went through a period where I was reading a bunch of those early kids series books, which were available on Kindle in “Megapacks” similar to the Hardy Boys Megaback I mentioned above. I read the original Tom Swift (not Tom Jr., but the earliest series), such minor series as the Motor Boys and the Radio Boys, and the granddaddy of all the Stratemeyer series, The Rover Boys.
As I mentioned above, earlier series like the Rovers and Tom Swift each had a stereotyped black servant as a regular character, leading to each book having several scenes of ethic “humor.” By the time of the Hardy Boys, that had largely been dispensed with. It didn’t take long to notice that most of the different series had amazingly similar adventures. Everyone ended up visiting a jungle environment, an icy environment, took a trip “out west,” had an adventure on the ocean, had an adventure involving an airship, and so forth. This was especially strange for the Rover Boys. Despite being nominally set at a boarding school, the Rovers travelled the entire world. And somehow no matter where they ended up, their mortal enemy Dan Baxter was always lurking behind the nearest bush or in the nearest ice cave. It was remarkable.
I read all of these series because I was, for awhile, contemplating writing a book about those early kids’ series, a project that never came to fruition. But based on this thread, maybe there is some interest in the subject.
My mom had an old copy of the Nancy Drew book “The Clue in the Crumbling Wall”. I might have leafed through it once when I was a kid, but I was more interested in some of the other series mentioned above (The Great Brain, Encyclopedia Brown, Danny Dunn, and for Canadian content Bruno & Boots).
Oh! Now I understand the reference of the old, old, Looney Tunes “The Dover Boys at Pimento University”. Doesn’t make the toon any better, but now I understand they were parodying something.
The one in the original Tom Swift books was an awful stereotype, but slightly redeemed by acting heroically in at least one of the books. The problem was eliminated in the Tom Swift Jr. books by eliminating Black people entirely. That character was more or less replaced by a stereotyped Texan who ran a chuck wagon.
They were products of their time. I noticed that the '50s Nancy Drew books often had a sentence inserted saying Nancy went to church on Sunday, just to prove she wasn’t a godless Communist I guess. Had nothing to do with the plot, ever.
I almost mentioned that cartoon, but thought that I was getting a bit long-winded already. It’s actually a remarkably close parody of the Rover Boys series (which was already nearly a generation old when the cartoon came out in 1942). Starting with it’s full title: “The Dover Boys at Pimento University, or, The Rivals of Roquefort Hall.” All of the Rover Boys books had that sort of title structure, with an alternative title introduced by the word “or.”
The cheese-related names in the title (Pimento and Roquefort) reflect the fact that the Rover Boys series included a school called “Colby Hall” (actually the school attended by their sons, in the second Rover Boys series; the original Rover Boys attended Putnam Hall). The Rovers’ nemesis, Dan Baxter, became “Dan Backslide” in the cartoon, while Dick Rover’s girlfriend Dora Stanhope became “Dora Standpipe.” Someone involved in making that cartoon, probably Chuck Jones, certainly did their homework.
I just found that on YouTube and saw that Dora Standpipe attends Miss Cheddar’s Female Academy.
Sounds of these old series might enjoy the modern Jasper Dash series, a gleeful send up of children’s literature from the mid to late 20th century.
The three main characters are children who are protagonist of their own book series, out of place in the modern world. Jasper Dash is a boy genius inventor who speaks in 1930s slang. One of his friends is the star of a babysitters club adjacent series, and the other is the star of a series of children’s horror books.
My favorite in the series is Jasper Dash and the flame pits of Delaware, but they are all tremendously fun.
Loved the Alvin Fernald books! I learned so much about cryptography from “Alvin’s Secret Code.”
I found a reference to a 1983 failed series pilot movie called The Tom Swift and Linda Craig Mystery Hour, which I’ve never heard of and nobody outside of a crazed obsessive has ever seen. You have to read the one review on IMDb.
And Linda Craig? She appeared in half a dozen titles from 1962-64 with a reissue in the 1980s. Lori Loughlin played her and Willie Aames played Tom. She was a 16-year-old in the modern west who solved mysteries. But not the mystery of who thought this would be a good idea.
I mentioned it in passing in my post earlier. There were two serials produced under contract for the MMC, The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure and The Mystery of the Ghost Farm. Both are available on YouTube.
I was a huge Danny Dunn fan.
I was, too. Kind of an updated (and more believable) Tom Swift.
By the way … anyone else feel cheated that the Tom Swift books didn’t have any “Tom Swifties” in them?
Oh, man, I loved watching my kids going crazy at a Scholastic Book Fair!
And if they picked up books that were more advanced (or creepy SF, like the Animorph books), then I’d read those to them at bedtime.
(I’m glad I had kids … if for no other reason than to experience childhood all over again through their eyes.)