The Hardy boys
This Book will blow your mind off with thrilling mysteries and action and adventure. Join Frank and Joe Hardy even there chums in this mystery series.
Stats for nerds
0recommend
3mentions
3people
2010–2025years
100% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Consider books in the vein of Hardy Boys[1]. Many of these books get revised over the years by the publisher. Imagine if the book on your shelf changed and when you went to read it again, the prose differed from how you remembered. People can disagree as to the extent to which the changes are good or bad (some are clearly fixes for "whoa, that was racist even for the year it was published" others are claimed by the original authors to have stamped out the small bit of originality they were able to slip past the editors), but something is lost when you lose things the way they were originally experienced.
1: For those who don't know, this is a kids book series with a single pen-name, but with each book written for-hire. Nancy Drew and Tom Swift were created by the same publisher in a similar manner.
- That is fascinating. It solves a puzzle for me: the books I read, which would certainly have been the 1959 revisions, were definitely of a 1950s and not 1930s sensibility. The feel is that of the beginning of the rock and roll era, when teenagers would drive around in cars of their own and devote themselves to fun, but the social and family structures were still stable. Nothing transgressive had happened yet, but it was about to. The late 1950s were nostalgic for themselves before they were even over.
My bet is that the 1959 revisions were a great contribution to the Hardy Boys' longevity. It sounds like the books were stripped down to their essence. Talk about uncelebrated. If McFarlane was at the bottom of the literary barrel, how about the anonymous hack who had to go in and clean up his work! Whoever it was, I'm on their side. Snobbish though every critic may be, you can't argue with those books' success. I don't mean success at selling copies; I mean success at captivating children, generation after generation.
Harry Potter had a similar ability to suck children into an imaginary realm and get them reading. But its popularity was more intense and perhaps short-lived. The Hardy Boys' effect has been more diffuse but extraordinarily durable. Maybe in 15 years someone will cut the Harry Potter books down to size and turn them into perennials too.
- I learned about the solar plexus (they were always knocking out goons by hitting them in that mythical spot)... never could seem to find it in real-life fights though...
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/146656.Hardy_Boys_Complet...
