Saturday Book Review!

The Ghost of the Hardy Boys

It seems there are three kinds of Hardy Boys readers:

1. Never read one.

2. Read one.

3. Read them all.

This analysis is the result of rigorous research. Okay, it’s just what I’ve heard men and boys say over the years.

I’m a number three, so I bought “The Ghost of the Hardy Boys” the minute I learned about it. It’s the autobiography of Leslie McFarlane, a.k.a. Franklin W. Dixon, the man who penned the boy detective stories that have sold more than 50 million copies.

Imagine a world in which there is no electronic media. Now, you’ve entered the life of writer MacFarlane in 1920. It would be 10 years before there was a radio in every home.

Home entertainment systems were books and periodicals, and America devoured them. In 1926, McFarlane, then a very young newspaper reporter in Ontario, answered an ad: “Experienced Fiction Writer Wanted to Work from Publisher’s Outlines.” Flat fee of $100. No royalties.

The ad was placed by the Edward Stratemeyer syndicate. Stratemeyer was a visionary. He saw books being devoured. In response he invented mass-market kidlit publishing to feed the monster.

He would send a story outline to a writer. The writer wrote the book. Stratemeyer got an empire. The writers got work. A hundred books was good money in 1926. Even better money ten years later during the Depression.

How Stratemeyer did it, and how McFarlane, typing in a lakeside cabin with no electricity or running water, fit into it, makes for fascinating reading.

How fascinating? Here’s a hint: McFarlane chronicles his personal Hall of Fame of Ghostwriting – wordsmiths who could generate 30,000 words a week with no sweat. He also tells of his own ghostwriting stint as Carolyn Keene, of Nancy Drew fame. He disliked the assignment.

For me, part of the charm of this book comes from McFarlane’s description of the eccentricities of small-town newspaper publishing. It was strikingly similar to the world I walked into as a headline writer for the my hometown daily in 1967 – The Fulton Sun-Gazette.

It’s a vanished era, all of it, but McFarlane breathes life back into it with the breezy, cheeky writing style that anyone who answered “all of them” will know.

I think this book would fit nicely into a Christmas stocking.