The Summer of Joe and Frank was marked by almost-daily hikes to the public library, where a summer reading program for kids was offering a gummed-back sticker for every completed book. I’ve always had a competitive streak, and figured the way to fill up my stick’em-on page was to tackle the Hardy Boys.
There was certainly a collection of titles. The Tower Treasure was the first book in the series, and when I carried a copy home that summer, it had already been read by generations of young boys. Of course, I didn’t know that. (Just the beginning of things I didn’t know.)
As young sleuths, Joe and Frank Hardy found their way into all the exciting situations a kid could imagine. Their father is the great detective Fenton Hardy, but – as every boy reading the book would have it – the cases are solved by the brothers, who must rescue their dad, more often than not.
More than 70-million copies have been sold, in some two-dozen languages, quite a writing-plume in the cap of Franklin W. Dixon.
Except he didn’t write a single word.
Maybe I was the last one in the world to learn it, but Franklin W. Dixon was a made-up-name created by Edward Stratemeyer, a New Jersey writer and businessman. Mr. Stratemeyer grew up in Elizabethtown, where his father and brothers were successful entrepreneurs. Edward quit their cigar-making business to manufacture stories.
He created a couple of brother-detectives, and then – over the course of his lifetime – hired writers to pen the stories for the Stratemeyer Syndicate, his publishing firm. And he didn’t stop with the boys. Nancy Drew became the fictional counterpart, penned by Carolyn Keene (another name made up by Mr. Stratemeyer).
When his stable was complete, Edward Stratemeyer and his firm had to their credit, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, the Bobbsey Twins, the Rover Twins, and others. All told, the juvenile fiction titles have sold more than 500 million copies, and most are still in print. Stratemeyer alone is said to have written over a thousand books.
At his death in 1930, the reins of the business were turned over to his Wellesley College educated daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who was just as prolific as her father and wrote books under several of the pen-names.
It’s obvious that I would have been the dumb-as-dirt sidekick in the Hardy Boy world. It took me all these years to figure out the Case of the Secret Writers. I can only offer the single true fact that kept me from learning the truth before now.
I didn’t have a clue.
Read’em if you got’em. And if you don’t…
Come visit!
McHuston
Booksellers & Irish Bistro
Rose District
122 South Main St. Broken Arrow OK!