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.
