The first several Nancy Drew reprints have introductions by women writers telling of Nancy Drew's influence. I don't believe you see the same phenomenon with the Hardy Boys mysteries, leading me to believe that Nancy Drew is a more iconic figure for women than the Hardy Boys are for men.
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| originally published in 1938 and revised in 1969, The Twisted Claw was the only Hardy Boys mystery the young Passing Tramp owned |
My sister, on the other hand, had some dozen or so Nancy Drews, all of which she read. I remember as a kid being fascinated with one of them, The Hidden Staircase. What young kid isn't fascinated by secret passages in old houses! My mother's very old home in Gratz, Pennsylvania had a sort of concealed staircase, which no doubt added to the book's appeal for me.
It was not until the Applewood editions began to appear when I was in graduate school that I learned that beginning in 1959 the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books had been heavily revised: shortened, modernized, simplified in language and shorn of racially insensitive material.
Naturally that set me off to get the facsimile editions, for I love Golden Age mysteries, as all of us here know! I was especially spurred to get them when I found out the Hardy Boys series was specifically inspired by the huge success in the 1920s of S. S. Van Dine's Philo Vance detective novels.
Did you read these books when you were young (er)? Did you read the original editions or the revised ones? Did they get you interested in reading adult mystery fiction? What were your favorite titles? Do you think the originals are better than the revised versions, or vice versa? Did you read both Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, or one or the other? Has Nancy Drew had more of an impact than the Hardy Boys? It would be great to hear from you in the comments!
Curt, I grew up with Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew though I read more of the former than the latter, some 70-odd hardbacks with their familiar blue spine. I think these were revised versions though I also had access to some of the early paperbacks. I didn't know the difference at the time.
ReplyDeleteI liked the innovative titles of all the HB books written by a team of ghostwriters though I once thought Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene were real writers. In fact, I remember being totally bowled over by the titles, the covers, and the stories behind them. It was also much later that I learnt Edward Stratemeyer had created the Hardy Boys. The series went through a lot of changes in the 80s and 90s with Frank and Joe Hardy's characters graduating from young adult to adult, I think. I never got used to the combined stories of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, though.
My friends and I would take turns, about two hours each, reading a Hardy Boys and passing it on before returning it to the local circulating library for another one in the series. I'm glad to see brand new reprints in bookstores. Although leaner in size and weight, they are the same as the hardbacks I read in my school days. Im not sure if they are Applewood editions.
Prashant,
DeleteI'm going to be writing a bit on the two early writes in the two series, Leslie McFarlane and Mildred Wirt Benson.
What beautiful memories! I read these novels (without crimes) when I was old eleven or twelve years, so ... 38 years ago. In a trunk in the basement of my parents, I still have the full collection or almost all the novels of Nancy Drew, a few of the Hardy Boys , I have got even less of the Pmlico Boys, and many instead of the 3 investigators (novels signed by Alfred Hitchcock, but not his)! The first novel I read with murder, The Egyptian Cross Mystery by Ellery Queen, determined the choice of abandoning those readings and instead embrace the new. Think a little: if instead of finding that fantastic novel to my aunt's house, I found a much less pretentious, maybe I would not be here reading your article, Curtis.
ReplyDeletePietro,
DeleteI'm kind of sorry I never read these books as a kid, but I found my way to mysteries anyway (and how!).
By the way, I am working on those questions!
I did read them as a kid, Nancy Drew anyway. I did not know about the revisions either. Sad that they do that. I will have to go look at the ones I have picked up at book sales for my grandkids and see if they are revisions or not! The old Nancy Drew movies were great too and now I am a lifelong mystery fan! Thanks for all the info on these books!
ReplyDeletePeggy Ann,
Deleteon the Thilling Detective Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew pages they give the dates of the revisions of the novels. I will provide a link in the next piece.
Neer read Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew when I was a kid. Instead I was intersted in The Happy Hollisters probably because the family was a lot happier than mine was. I was always looking for examples of what a real happy family was supposed to be like. I also read The Three Investigators, tore through those books very quickly over a period of two years They reminded me of smarter versions of the Scooby Doo cartoons I was also addicted to as a kid. I only read the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew once I began selling vintage mystery novels. So my first Stratemeyer syndicate book wasn't read until I was in my 40s! And I read the unexpurgated originals. I think it was the very first Hardy Boys book that I tried -- THE TOWER TREASURE. I also read some Nancy Drew books but don't remember the titles or the stories at all.
ReplyDeleteGosh, I had never even heard of the Happy Hollisters! There seems to be an endless supply of children's mysteries.
DeleteAh, Scooby Doo...this was my favorite show EVER as a young kid in the early seventies. Obviously my first exposure to mysteries. I was amused to see my nephews were drawn to Scooby and friends back when the Cartoon Network launched the great revival. Scrappy Doo is a minion of Satan, though, surely.
I had heard of The Three Investigators but can't recall ever having read them.
I read a bunch of the Hardy Boy titles as "hard cover" with blue binding. They were peddle as teen adventures and were suitable for the cottage as well as at home. Lots of kids I knew read them ... we are talking late 1960s here. I did not know they'd been "freshened up" and I am sure it did not occur to me they were written when my dad was a boy! "The Tower Treasure", "The House on the Cliff", etc were around the house.
ReplyDeleteSo were the related Nancy Drew for my sister.
But I also remember the related series of "Tom Swift, Jr" who had lots of space adventures. These dated from the mid-50s and they felt "old" to me at a time when Neil Armstrong was about to set foot on the moon. But they were engaging at the time, nonetheless. Not surprisingly, they were from the same anonymous author mill.
Alexander,
DeleteSome of the books they updated to include rock music groups, the space program, etc. In the older books the Hardys and Nancy Drew are more disrespectful to the police (who are portrayed like nincompoops sometimes, in the fashion of Golden Age mystery), and this is changed in the later ones. But you probably read some of the originals, titles that hadn't been updated yet.
I had the idea in the 1970s that the Hardy Boys books never went back farther than the 1950s. I probably would have been more likely to read them had I realized some of them went back to the 1920s, but than I was an odd kid!
I had my mom's original Nancy Drews when I was growing up in the 60s and I also got the new ones for Christmas every year. I much preferred the originals, especially the illustrations. Our local library and schools did not carry any Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys, because they were not considered "good literature" for students.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the responses everyone! I'm reading The Hidden Staircase right now in the Applewood edition and enjoying the period milieu a lot. It's like what we associate with the Golden Age mystery, in so many ways.
DeleteThe revisions took place over many years and vary with each book. The Hidden Staircase, for example, was revised in 1959, but The Mystery of the Ivory Charm, also from the 1930s, wasn't updated until 1974! Same with the Hardy Boys books.
My brother-in-law read all the Hardy Boys books that had been published when he was an adolescent in the 1960s (and Tom Swift), but he never went on to read adult mystery novels, oddly.
I don't really know why I never read the Hardy Boys as a kid, I didn't even do it when the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew television series started back in 1977, I think, when I was eleven. I did watch the TV series though!
Audra,
DeleteI can see why they revised the books, to bring them up-to-date for teens (and of course some of the portrayals of groups is a problem for modern readers), but the historical detail in the original versions is fascinating to me. And as I understand it the originals were longer, with more detail and a richer vocabulary.
I wonder where your local schools and libraries were? I find that hilarious that these books weren't considered "good" literature! You poor kids! My schools had these, Tom Swift, Bobbsey Twins (it just came to me I read a Bobbsey Twins, Dr. Funnybone's Secret, about 1973, that I really liked), the "Little House" books (I did read most of those--no mysteries though!).
It was a small town in Oregon. When I was in high school I overheard an elementary school librarian, who had been presented with donated Nancy Drew books, say to a teacher "I don't think we want THESE books associated with a school library" and the teacher agreed! I think they thought of them as pulp fiction, not suitable for the high standards they had for the illustrious students in their domain.
ReplyDeleteThat's hilarious, when you consider that Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were published by a company that boasted in the late 1960s that their books didn't have a single "hippie" character!
DeleteOf course in the last decade there were people who thought that the Harry Potter books promoted Satanism!