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June 18, 2006
Nancy Drew's Father Part 5
Continued from The New Yorker article by Meghan O'Rourke
In 1926, ninety-eight per cent of the boys and girls surveyed in a poll published by the American Library Association listed a Stratemeyer book as their favorite, and another survey showed that the Tom Swift books, which the syndicate launched in 1910, were at the top of the list. Thirty-one stories were in full swing. Yet Stratemeyer still wasn't content. He had noticed the growing popularity in the twenties of adult detective fiction and of pulp magazines like Black Mask, which was founded by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. As the journalist Carol Billman points out in "The Secret Stratemeyer Syndicate," Stratemeyer saw that this detective fiction, grafted onto an adventure story, might appeal to children. In 1926, the year that the S.S. VanDine's "The Benson Murder Case" introduced Philo Vance to the world, Stratemeyer wrote the outline for the first three volumes of a series that proved more popular than any that had come before: the Hardy Boys.
If the Hardy Boys emerged at roughly the same time as hardboiled detective fiction, they were also a distinct counterpoint to it. Where private dicks like Sam Spade were wise, urban, cynical, hard-drinking, and suspicious of "dames", Frank and Joe Hardy were innocent, suburban, fresh-faced and clean-living. They have an amiable, distant relationship with women; their mother packs a delectable picnic lunch, and no one seems to notice when her name changes briefly, in mid-series, from Laura to Mildred. Iola Morton and Callie Shaw - Frank and Joe's "special friends" - turn up primarily to be saved from danger and to praise the boys. ("Oh, I really think Frank and Joe are too wonderful for anything!")
As Marilyn S. Greenwald tells it in a new biography, "The Secret of the Hardy Boys" (Ohio; $32.95), Stratemeyer found the Hardy's first ghostwriter, the young Canadian newspaperman Leslie McFarlane, through a classified ad in a trade paper. Stratemeyer sent him outlines, cautioning McFarlane to remember that these books were less flashy than their cheaper counterparts: "You perhaps understand our cloth books go in a different field from the paper volumes and the stories are not quite so melodramatic." The books were to be two hundred and sixteen pages and twenty-five chapters. For the first one, "The Tower Treasure," McFarlane would be paid a lump sum of a hundred and twenty-five dollars - a figure that required Stratemeyer to sell sixty-two hundred and fifty books in order to make a profit, assuming that the royalties were around two cents a book. As for McFarlane, he later wrote. "I greeted Frank and Joe Hardy with positive rapture . . . There was, after all, the chance to contribute a little style."
Stratemeyer's initial Hardy Boys outlines were two pages long, and set the breezy tone for the books. The first began:
Joe and Frank Hardy are on their motorcycles on an errand for their father, Fenton Hardy, the famous detective. It is Saturday, a holiday from the Bayport High School which they attend, springtime . . . The shore road, the rocks below - the racing auto - will it hit them? Narrow escape - anger of a middle-aged man who ran car and anger of boys. "A road hog," they say.
A cast of characters sent to McFarlane dictated that the boys' Aunt Gertrude be "peppery and dictatorial" and that the mother, Laura, be a "sweet singer." Frank is dark, Joe blond. The boys are to have a barn with a gym; Fenton Hardy is equipped with a James Bond-worthy library full of dossiers on jewel thieves and an extensive wardrobe of disguises. (These more fanciful plot elements dropped away in later volumes.)
To Be Continued with the creation of Nancy Drew . . .
Posted by mysterygamers at June 18, 2006 12:26 AM