The heroes never smoke, drink, or discover the joys of sex. The crimes committed are wicked but not gruesome Frank and Joe can fight the villains with their fists, they never shoot or stab them. Of criminals, yet remains a fundamentally safe community. Unlike Chandler's sinister Los Angeles, the Hardys' milieu had to be "exciting but clean," as dictated by Stratemeyer. (The books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.) The Hardy Boys, as Billman observed, provided "the novel lure of the detective mystery with the earlier adventure tale tradition," a combination that accounted for their wide appeal both at home and abroad. What Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler did for mature audiences, "Franklin W. Scholar Carol Billman, calling the Hardys "soft-boiled" detectives, notes that they were launched in the same period that saw the increasing growth of adult detective fiction.
#SLAPDASH KID CARTOON SERIES#
The major factor in the Hardy Boys' success, however, was the ingredient that Stratemeyer had believed would make the series unique: its adaptation of the mystery genre for a pre-teen audience. They could fix anything, could pilot any type of vehicle, and kept abreast of whatever technological innovations were available at the time-from short-wave radios in the 1940s to voice-printing techniques in the 1970s. The books also offered their readers the vicarious thrill of gadgetry the Hardys had a laboratory where they used microscopes, fingerprinting kits and other tools of the trade to analyze clues. Early volumes mostly kept them in or near their hometown of Bayport, a fictional city on the Eastern seaboard, but as the years passed their travels increasingly took them to foreign countries. On motorcycles, in their boat the Sleuth, in planes, trains and automobiles, the Hardys could go anywhere their cases led them. Like Stratemeyer's earlier brother-protagonists, the Rover Boys, Joe and Frank Hardy traveled in a pack of three, with their chum Chet Morton (other friends appeared frequently, too) and enjoyed unfettered mobility. The popular Hardy formula drew much inspiration from preceding series. Despite the truth of these observations, children embraced the books and made them bestsellers. Even before the birth of the Hardys, products of the Stratemeyer Syndicate were shunned by librarians and teachers for their sensationalism, flatly formulaic structure and minimal literary value. By then the series was well established and well loved, and easily survived the transition to different (and often less able) writers.Įducators, however, were not fans of the books, and mounted a strong opposition. Dixon, McFarlane continued as the Hardys' primary ghost for twenty years before retiring. It was still hack work, no doubt, but did the new series have to be all that hack? There was, after all, the chance to contribute a little style… I opted for Quality." Under the pseudonym Franklin W. "It seemed to me that the Hardy boys deserved something better than the slapdash treatment had been getting. As McFarlane later explained in his autobiography, Ghost of the Hardy Boys, he welcomed the opportunity to originate a series, rather than merely add to a pre-existing one. Stratemeyer tapped one of his ghostwriters, Leslie McFarlane, to launch the series. Expressing the belief that "detective stories are as interesting to boys as grown folks," he outlined a series of adventures that would center on two teenage brothers, whose "work as amateur detectives would furnish plenty of incident, exciting but clean." With those few words, Stratemeyer set the tone that would propel the Hardy Boys from a humble idea to a national phenomenon, encompassing multiple forms of popular media. The Hardys' influence on juvenile fiction and television has been pervasive, while their unequaled longevity has made them icons of nostalgia A product of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the company that produced Tom Swift and the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys first took shape when Edward Stratemeyer pitched the series to his publishers at Grosset & Dunlap in 1926.
The Hardy Boys Mystery Stories debuted in 1927 as the first series of mysteries written for children, and eventually became the longest-enduring series of boys' fiction in American history.
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