Negative, Ghost Writer

 I only recently found out about the existence of Leslie McFarlane's Ghost of the Hardy Boys, which made me sad, given it has a copyright of 1976, well before I read any of his work. (While I get the impression this is a much later edition, and heaven knows if it itself got edited and ghostwritten...)

See, Mr. McFarlane wrote under many different names, probably the most famous being Franklin W. Dixon, as well as a handful of Carolyn Keene, Victor Applegate, ad Roy Rockwood. The former there being most of the first 40 hardcover volumes of The Hardy Boys, which sold for 10 cents, with him being paid roughly $100 a volume. That he also enjoyed a writing career outside of the Strathmeyer Syndicate isn't what he got asked about that often though. Which I think is largely why he wrote this, since he did have quite a life when he wasn't being a phantom novelist. 

Admittedly, the narrative here is on the non-linear side, as we learn about how he came to be employed by Strathmeyer before jumping back in time, before returning to  the Boys near the end. This gives us time to hear about his newspaper days, and any number of good stories of people he worked with through Ontario and Massachusetts, as well as discussions on what he was thinking when he wrote certain books.

Along the way, we get an education in how syndicate writing works, and his rather ...aloof... feelings towards the series he created.  (So, when he starts with the syndicate, he's writing Dave Fearless, a young man who's also a deep sea diver, and therefore is running afoul of bad storms, murderous relatives, man eating sharks, octopi that are hungry, etc. I'd love to track one or more of this down, since they sound like pulpy fun. He gets asked to start the Hardy Boys, which means writing three "breeder books" that will get released at the same time, and hopefully spark enough reader interest to get a series going. The process is, he gets an outline, he fleshes out the outline into a novel, occasionally adding his own own flourishes to the narrative; things like the Boys getting monetary rewards AND a big feast, since the readers in the age range are always hungry. He does get feedback on things like "Make the cops less buffoonish", which leads to making spinster Aunt Gertrude a source of humor. Given the Syndicate gave birth to Nancy Drew, The Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, The Rover Boys....they knew what they were doing.)

 It is kind of interesting to lean that Mr. McFarlane never really did realize exactly how much impact his unknown work had on generations of boys, and indeed, the only thing that seems to upset him about the entire situation is seeing what happened in the 50s when the revisions to the books happened. (By most accounts, the books got revised to get rid of some unfortunate racism and update the language; the side effect was the books got rewritten and a lot of the things people enjoyed [pacing, character relationships] got taken out. [Fer instance, it's mentioned that in the original introduction of Aunt Gertrude, there's a scene of her arriving from the train station and haranguing the Hardy Household, adding comedy to the scene. In the revision, she's just kind of appears and never leaves.] Some of this, I get. Of the reprinted and revised hardcovers, I only finished a few, and that was mainly due to the pulpy illustrations drawing me in. Even in the very early 80's the revisions from 30 years prior made the books seem horribly outdated. Which is probably whey I got sucked into the more contemporary "Digests", which saw publication starting in 1979.)

I'm kind of needle dropping here, because there's a hell of a lot in the book that really deserves discussion that I really just don't have the energy to explore here. I will say I highly recommend reading this to anyone who got sucked into one of the Syndicate series.

Violating a rule here

 So, normally I don't blog or list of good reads when I read something that qualifies as Intermediate Readings, since those reviews are generally better left to teachers teaching kids in the age range. However, after running across The Hardy Boys Ghost Stories while going through boxes in the basement, I'm going to go ahead and blog and log it, since I've actually had a lot of fun rereading this slim volume. 

Amazon has a better pic, but this is my copy.

 So I've probably owned this since second grade, and it remains in decent condition. (I have a few other volumes out of this particular set of adventures; you can click the tags on this to see the overly long essay I wrote about their history.) However, what surprised me on rereading was how well the stories in here have held up.

 That has nothing to do with the accidental homoeroticism involving Joe Hardy at all.

We start with "The Walking Scarecrow", which gave me nightmares as a kid. Boys are on their way home from hiking, break down, decided to walk to the farmhouse they saw to use the phone, but feel like the scarecrow warned them away from the house. Seriously, while not a ghost per se, the Scarecrow seems to be doing its best to drag Joe and Frank out the farmhouse. Which, at the end, we find out is because lightning strikes the house as they return from a wild goose chase and the house burns down. 

Next is "Mystery of the Voodoo Gold", in which Frank and Joe get told by a Fortune Teller in Underground Atlanta not to do a few things, which they promptly do, which leads to nearly drowning in a root cellar where Simbo, a voodoo protection doll, watches over his master's treasure. 

Then comes what it likely my favorite of all of them, "The Disappearance of Flaming Rock". Joe and Frank are in Arizona, near a town that vanished off the face of the Earth. Literally. Seems a prospector his Flaming Rock, and found the town deserted, but things like dinner on the stove still cooking, and a swinging light in the church bell tower. When people went to look, they found the town gone, as if it never existed. Frank and Joe drive up, and guess what they find? Seems the town hanged the local Apaches, so the Great Spirit cursed Flaming Rock and all its inhabitants to wander the spirit world for all eternity homeless. 

Fourth story is "The Phantom Ship", wherein Frank and Joe's fishing boat dies and they get taken aboard an 18th Century Whaler. Inhabited by 18th Century Crewman. Who think the modern boys are insane, and somehow manage to get everyone really confused as to where the are. This is also an old favorite, since honestly, the ghost ship should have made them walk the plank for mutiny.

Then comes the illustration from the front cover, "The Haunted Castle", where Frank and Joe wind up in a Haunted Castle in Scotland. Their appearance winds up fulfilling a prophecy, which sets the ghost free of a witch's curse. 

We finish with "The Mystery of Room 12", in which Joe is haunted by the ghost of a sailor's son. Joe finally gets the boys flute back to him, and resolves the ghost's fetter. 

Now, while all of this is really really improbable, not the least of which is how two high school kids can be all over the globe for this stuff to happen (a problem with the entire series, that you don't particularly think about when you're in the age range), it's still fun reading, with more than a little learning hidden in the bare bones stories. (You get an age appropriate lesson in whaling, information on Widow's Walks, exactly how poorly settlers treated Native Americans, why you listen to the gypsy lady with the crystal ball.) Even nearing 50 though, this scratched a nostalgia itch I was unaware I had, and brought back some childhood wonder that the series of this era inspired in me. 

But Seriously, I blame Joe Hardy illustrations for much of my sexual awakenings.

He's so prolific that his first book was in 1939 and his latest was last year....

A few dollars on Ebay later and I seem to have bought a few lots of Hardy Boys novels.

Which, given this blog is mostly devoted to adult reading material, the works of unappreciated ghost writers needs some recognition from the youngster in me.

Given how long the Boys have been around, I'm fairly certain most of you are familiar with their exploits, or that of their occasional cohort Nancy Drew (or Tom Swift, or Cherry Ames, or The Bobbsey Twins...)(or the TV show, which I watched on DVD a few years back for no real reason) and so I should be able to get by with a fairly short synopsis here.

The basic premise is that the Hardy Boys are brothers, Frank, 18, with dark hair and Joe, 17, with blond hair. Depending on what series you're reading in and what year will bring out a picture of what they look like for that era. Some of the older hardcovers have them in chinos, while the newer paperbacks involve jeans and tee shirts. Frank and Joe are Fenton Hardy's progeny, Fenton being a famous detective. The family lives in Bayport with Mom, Fenton, and Aunt Gertrude. They have a fairly diverse group of friends, like Phil Cohen  (Jewish) and Tony Prito (Italian immigrant). Chet Morton was chubby to fat, and Iola Morton was Joe's girlfriend until she blew up in a car bomb in Casefiles #1, Dead on Target. Frank, on the other hand was dating Cassie. Almost all of these characters got dragged in at one point or another, and usually in some kind of jeopardy by the end of it.

The cases rarely involved murder, although they did seem to wind up breaking up smuggling rings quite frequently. The usual scenario was people would seek Fenton out to solve something, and he'd either ask the boys for help, or being unavailable, the boys would take on the case. And they traveled extensively. I wish I had their travel budget at their age. (Mind you, based on the very few Carolyn Keene books I read about Nancy Drew, she also had a travel budget from hell. The one book of hers I bought involved Nancy and Co. in Venice, Italy.)

I still remember my 1st grade introduction to the boys. My classmate, with the name Sixten Otto (who'd write it out as 610 and a picture of a car and who also taught me to play Canasta) brought in either The Mystery of the Chinese Junk or Night of the Werewolf. Which of course lead to one of my family's visits to Upper Valley Mall in Springfield, Ohio, where my brother would buy music at Camelot and my Dad would escort me to B. Daulton, wherein I found shelves and shelves of Hardy Boys books waiting for me to blow my allowance on. (And oh boy, did I blow money on them.) I usually bought the paperbacks, numbered from #59 up, since they were cheaper  than the hardcovers. Well, that and the hardcovers got tripped up in archaic language and the aforementioned chinos. (I kind of thought The Missing Chums would be about stolen shark bait, actually.)

I used to half-joke that Joe was my first crush and a strong indicator early in life that I was gay.  I found out later that I obviously wasn't the only one with feelings like that when I found Mabel Maney's Nancy Clue and the Hardly Boys: A Ghost in the Closet at one of the small bookshops near Wright State. I still laugh at that book, what with one modern lesbian trapped with stuck in the 50's Nancy and her "friend Nurse Cherry Aimless and the Hardly Boys... It was a spot on spoof of the genre made even funnier by the straight faces all the principles had.

Some notable titles in the original 190 + a few one offs series include While the Clock Ticked, which featured Joe and Frank tied to chairs while a mas scientist tried to blow them up; Cave-In, where Frank and Joe wound up in California during ski season trying to figure out who the ghost miners were; Sky Sabotage, where Frank and Joe go to Florida to figure out what happened to a missing satellite and a pair of missing dolphins; and The Hardy Boys Ghost Stories, which involved 6 cases of the boys encountering the actual supernatural.

That list title bears mentioning since pretty much every other book in any of the various series  that had supernatural elements ended up being a Scooby Doo mystery, wherein the element was not real, and easily explained during the resolution. In the Ghost Stories, we get real ghosts and phenomena, but they of course do no real harm. Like the Scarecrow that comes to life and chases them out of an abandoned farm house just before lightning hits and burns the place down. (May I add that one gave me nightmares for a few nights.) Or a later tale where the boys wind up on an 18th century Ghost Ship filled with whalers, wherein the ghost on the ghost ship gets them to safety.

I mentioned the Casefiles above, and I suppose I should mention them in passing. In Book 1, Dead on Target, Joe turns 18. His girlfriend blows up in a car bomb. The series was aimed at older kids, and read a bit like Rambo solves mysteries. It was more miss than hit for me, mainly because I got sick of the whining that tended to become vigilantism in Joe following Iola's death.

I guess they have a newer series aimed at millenials and the generation that are kids now, but I haven't bothered, since the updated graphics make the boys look like escapees from 1 Direction.

I still love the boys, even if I long since outgrew them. So many memories of my childhood are tied to them. And I really hope that other kids find as many happy memories in them when they grow up.