The Secret of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate (review)

By now it is probably no surprise to anyone interested in children's literature that there never was a Franklin W. Dixon or a Carolyn Keene, those infamous names behind the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mystery series. They were of course the fabrications of Edward Stratemeyer, founder of a fiction-writing syndicate in the early 1900s that used ghostwriters to produce series titles from The Rover Boys to Tom Swift. While a fair amount of biographical attention has been paid to Stratemeyer, and even to Mildred Wirt Benson (the first and most prominent Nancy Drew writer), Marilyn S. Greenwald's excellent new biography The Secret of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate is the first to examine in detail the life of Leslie McFarlane, a freelance writer from Canada who anonymously wrote the first 16 Hardy Boys mysteries, and over twenty in all.

Greenwald's rich biography of this little-known figure in the history of literature for young people describes a prolific and ambitious young writer who always wanted to produce the great Canadian novel, but instead found himself straddled with the business of writing "juveniles," as he called them, to support himself while he sent stories off to prominent magazines (92). At twenty-four, after several years on the newspaper beat, McFarlane answered an ad placed by Stratemeyer seeking experienced freelance writers. Anxious to have the time and freedom that comes from making a living at writing, McFarlane took a job writing Dave Fearless titles, though he was unsatisfied by the demands for stilting dialogue and the constant action. After writing several books, for which he was generally paid a hundred dollars in exchange for confidentiality and loss of rights, McFarlane was close to quitting until Stratemeyer tempted him with a new series about a pair of young detectives and their famous father. Excited about the possibility of starting a series fresh, and promised that the series would focus more on dialogue and narrative, McFarlane would, over the next several years, become Franklin W. Dixon. But, and this is perhaps most disappointing to the legion of young boys who grew up on the series, myself included, McFarlane was always ambivalent about his work with Stratemeyer's syndicate, always on the brink of giving up the work for good, always coming back when he needed the money, and always disappointed that despite writing for newspapers, magazines, radio, and film, it was those "Hardy brats" that would be his most memorable achievement (142).

McFarlane was also a man who respected his audience and refused to write down to them, who took his job seriously, and wrote stories with a degree of sophistication not often seen in serial stories. Greenwald makes the case that the Hardy books are thoroughly invested with complex themes close to McFarlane's heart. His father a respected schoolteacher and principal, McFarlane grew up in the lush Canadian outdoors of Haileybury, Ontario. Well-read as a child, and an avid fan of Charles Dickens, McFarlane would later explore the themes of humble beginnings and the capacity to overcome adversity in the Hardy series, as well as giving his villains—Sarah Flegg, Otto Knapp—particularly Dickensian names. The richness of the outdoors, which he discovered as a young boy while bobsledding, and the active life found there, would also become a recurrent theme in the books. Greenwald consistently paints him as a man who took the simple outlines provided by Stratemeyer and invested the stock characters with humor, complexity, and an ambivalence toward authority inconsistent with the tone of previous Stratemeyer books. "At his own initiative," writes Greenwald, "Les [as she calls him throughout the book] subtly and stealthily transformed some standard stereotypical characters, including three respectable policemen and a kindly maiden aunt, into subversives" (xiii). Among McFarlane's proudest developments was the memorable Aunt Gertrude. When Stratemeyer recommended that McFarlane tone down his portrayal of the bumbling Bayport police, McFarlane turned...