The Hardy Boys
The Hardy Boys, brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, are fictional characters who appear in a series of mystery novels for young readers. The series revolves around teenage amateur sleuths, solving cases that often stumped their adult counterparts. The characters were created by American writer Edward Stratemeyer, the founder of book packaging firm Stratemeyer Syndicate. The books were written by several ghostwriters, most notably Leslie McFarlane, under the collective pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon.
The Hardy Boys have evolved since their debut in 1927. From 1959 to 1973, the first 38 books were extensively revised to remove social and ethnic stereotypes, modernize content, and shorten the books.
A new Hardy Boys series, the Hardy Boys Casefiles, was created in 1987, and featured murders, violence, and international espionage. The original "Hardy Boys Mystery Stories" series ended in 2005. A new series, Undercover Brothers, was launched the same year, featuring updated versions of the characters who narrate their adventures in the first person. Undercover Brothers ended in 2012 and was replaced in 2013 by The Hardy Boys Adventures, also narrated in the first person.
Through these changes the characters have remained popular; several new volumes are published each year, and the adventures have been translated into over 25 languages. The boys have been featured in five television shows and several video games, and have helped promote merchandise such as lunchboxes and jeans. Critics have many explanations for the characters' longevity, suggesting that the Hardy Boys embody wish fulfillment, American ideals of boyhood and masculinity, a well-respected father paradoxically argued to be inept in the later books, and the possibility of the triumph of good over evil.
On January 1, 2023, the original editions of the first three books entered the public domain in the United States. Under current copyright laws, the revised editions will not be in the public domain in the United States until 2054.
Premise
The Hardy Boys, Frank and Joe Hardy, are fictional teenage brothers and amateur detectives. Frank is eighteen, and Joe is seventeen. They live in the city of Bayport on Barmet Bay with their father, detective Fenton Hardy; their mother, Laura Hardy; and their Aunt Gertrude. The brothers attend high school in Bayport, where they are in the same grade, but school is rarely mentioned in the books and never hinders their solving of mysteries. In the older stories, the Boys' mysteries are often linked to their father's confidential cases. He sometimes requests their assistance, while at other times they stumble upon relevant villains and incidents. In the Undercover Brothers series, the Hardys are members of and receive cases from American Teens Against Crime. The Hardy Boys are sometimes assisted in solving mysteries by their friends Chet Morton, Phil Cohen, Biff Hooper, Jerry Gilroy, and Tony Prito; and, less frequently, by their platonic girlfriends Callie Shaw and Iola Morton.In each novel, the Hardy Boys are constantly involved in adventure and action. Despite the frequent danger, the boys "never lose their nerve ... They are hardy boys, luckier and more clever than anyone around them." They live in an atmosphere of mystery and intrigue: "Never were so many assorted felonies committed in a simple American small town. Murder, drug peddling, race-horse kidnapping, diamond smuggling, bank robbing, kidnapping, dynamiting, burglaries, medical malpractice, big-time auto theft, even the hijacking of strategic materials and espionage, all were conducted with Bayport as a nucleus." With so much in common, the boys are so little differentiated that one commentator facetiously describes them thus: "The boys' characters basically broke down this way – Frank had dark hair; Joe was blond." In general, however, "Frank was the thinker while Joe was more impulsive, and perhaps a little more athletic." The two boys are invariably on good terms with each other and never engage in sibling rivalry, except in the Undercover Brothers series.
Frank and Joe are somewhat wealthy and often travel to far-away locations, including Mexico in The Mark on the Door, Scotland in The Secret Agent on Flight 101, Iceland in The Arctic Patrol Mystery, Australia in The Firebird Rocket, Egypt in The Mummy Case, and Kenya in The Mystery of the Black Rhino. The Hardys also travel across the United States by motorcycle, motorboat, iceboat, train, airplane, and their own car.
Creation of characters
The characters were conceived in 1926 by Edward Stratemeyer, founder of book-packaging firm Stratemeyer Syndicate. Stratemeyer pitched the series to publishers Grosset & Dunlap and suggested that the boys be called the Keene Boys, the Scott Boys, the Hart Boys, or the Bixby Boys. Grosset & Dunlap editors approved the project, but, for reasons unknown, chose the name "The Hardy Boys". The first three titles were published in 1927 and were an immediate success: by mid-1929, more than 115,000 books had been sold. The series was so successful that Stratemeyer created Nancy Drew as a female counterpart to the Hardys.Ghostwriters
Each volume is penned by a ghostwriter under the pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon. In accordance with the customs of Stratemeyer Syndicate series production, ghostwriters for the Syndicate signed contracts that have sometimes been interpreted as requiring authors to sign away all rights to authorship or future royalties. The contracts stated that authors could not use their Stratemeyer Syndicate pseudonyms independently of the Syndicate. In the early days of the Syndicate, ghostwriters were paid a fee of $125, "roughly equivalent to two months' wages for a typical newspaper reporter, the primary day job of the syndicate ghosts." During the Great Depression this fee was lowered, first to $100 and later to $75. All royalties went to the Syndicate, all correspondence with the publisher was handled through a Stratemeyer Syndicate office, and the Syndicate enlisted the cooperation of libraries in hiding the ghostwriters' names.The Syndicate's process for creating the Hardy Boys books consisted of creating a detailed outline with all plot elements, drafting a manuscript, and editing the manuscript. Edward Stratemeyer's daughter, Edna Stratemeyer Squier, and possibly Stratemeyer himself, wrote outlines for the first volumes in the series. Beginning in 1934, Stratemeyer's other daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, began contributing plot outlines; she and Andrew Svenson wrote most plot outlines for the next several decades. Other plot outliners included Vincent Buranelli, James Duncan Lawrence, and Tom Mulvey.
Most early volumes were written by Canadian Leslie McFarlane, who authored nineteen of the first twenty-five titles and co-authored volume 17 The Secret Warning, between 1927 and 1946. Unlike many other Syndicate ghostwriters, McFarlane was regarded highly enough by the Syndicate that he was frequently given advances of $25 or $50, and during the Depression, when fees were lowered, he was paid $85 for each Hardy Boys book when other Syndicate ghostwriters were receiving only $75 for their productions. According to McFarlane's family, he despised the series and its characters.
After co-authoring Volume 17, John Button, with Volume 18, The Twisted Claw, took over the series full-time until 1942; McFarlane resumed with Volume 22, The Flickering Torch Mystery. McFarlane's last contribution was Volume 24, The Short-Wave Mystery ; his wife, Amy, authored Volume 26, The Phantom Freighter. Over the next several decades, other volumes were written by Adams, Svenson, Lawrence, Buranelli, William Dougherty, and James Buechler. Beginning in 1959, the series was extensively revised and re-written. Many authors worked on the revised books, writing new manuscripts; some of them also wrote plot outlines and edited the books. Among the authors who worked on the revised versions were Adams, Svenson, Buechler, Lilo Wuenn, Anne Shultes, Alistair Hunter, Tom Mulvey, Patricia Doll, and Priscilla Baker-Carr.
In 1979, the Hardy Boys books began to be published in paperback rather than hardcover. Lawrence and Buranelli continued to write titles; other authors included Karl Harr III and Laurence Swinburne. In 1984, the rights to the series were sold, along with the Stratemeyer Syndicate, to Simon & Schuster. New York book packager Mega-Books subsequently hired authors to write the Hardy Boys Mystery Stories and a new series, the Hardy Boys Casefiles.
Legal disputes
In 1980, dissatisfied with the lack of creative control at Grosset & Dunlap and the lack of publicity for the Hardy Boys' 50th anniversary in 1977, Harriet Adams switched publishers for the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, as well as other series, to Simon & Schuster. Grosset & Dunlap filed suit against the Syndicate and Simon & Schuster, citing "breach of contract, copyright infringement, and unfair competition" and requesting $300 million in damages.The outcome of the case turned largely on the question of who had written the Nancy Drew series. Adams filed a countersuit, claiming that, as author of the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, she retained the rights to her work. Although Adams wrote many Nancy Drew titles after 1953 and edited others, she claimed to have authored all the early titles. In fact, she had rewritten the older titles but was not the original author. When Mildred Benson, the author of the early Nancy Drew volumes, testified about her work for the Syndicate, Benson's role in writing the manuscripts of early titles was revealed in court with extensive documentation, contradicting Adams' claims to authorship. The court ruled that Grosset had the rights to publish the original series of both Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys as they were in print in 1980, but did not own characters or trademarks. Furthermore, any new publishers chosen by Adams were within their rights to print new titles.