The Hardy Boys Mysteries, 1927–1979 (review)

Mark Connelly's The Hardy Boys, 1927–1979 is aptly named, for it demonstrates nearly encyclopedic knowledge of the series' plots and recurring themes. Its introduction provides a useful overview of prior scholarship and research on the Hardy Boys as well as on the Stratemeyer Syndicate. There are also delightful details attesting to the books' and characters' continuing significance as "cultural artifacts," such as the following, cited from a 2000 New York Times article: "When the Shelburne Museum in Vermont opened its 1950 House exhibit, Hardy Boys books were featured along with Life magazines, Sinatra recordings, and a Studebaker in the driveway" (6). Connelly is adept at balancing cultural and social history with close attention to the books themselves.

Perhaps most impressive are the voluminous plot summaries (chapters 2–6), arranged chronologically and topically across the decades. Connelly has certainly read the books carefully with a view to chronicling incremental changes and summarizing broad patterns. Intersecting with this textual knowledge is the author's continual eye on the historical moment in which each book or revision was produced. For example, in chapter 5, "Policing the Hardy Boys: The 'Great Purge,'" the author begins with a brilliant overview of post–World War II American society, then discusses the Syndicate's revision of the first twenty-four books to conform to the new age's more egalitarian standards. The accounts of the revised books (including degrees of revision—from simple omission of racist language, as in The House on the Cliff, to radical rewriting of plot and setting, as in Footprints Under the Window [86]) are typically crisp and compelling, only occasionally too long (126, 144); they give us a firm sense of the linguistic and social issues involved in each narrative as well as cumulatively.

At this point, approximately halfway through the volume, the chronological approach ends and a thematic structure takes over, as the chapter titles signal: chapter 7, "Race"; chapter 8, "Class"; chapter 9, "Hardy Girls: Gender in the Hardy Boys"; chapter 10, "Hardy Family Values"; chapter 11, "Law and Order"; chapter 12, "Action, Not Violence," and chapter 13, "Bayport, USA" (the novels' location). Finally, the last two chapters return us to wider cultural significance with chapter 14, "The Hardy Boys on Stage, on Screen, and in Parody," and chapter 15, "Book Wars: The Series Book Under Fire." Although none of these topics breaks entirely new ground and there is no overt thesis governing the book's trajectory, the structure itself is perfect, moving as it does from social generalization, to analytical detail in historical context, to more theoretical comparative analysis, and back to history. When the reader reaches the "Race" chapter, s/he is prepared, with prior textual and contextual information, to assess the accuracy of Connelly's generalizations in these all-too-brief chapters (ranging from seven to thirty-one pages in length).

Highly readable (and definitely applicable to other Stratemeyer series, such as Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins), these thematic chapters do, however, alternate between useful syntheses, such as this one, which follow insightful historical period references and quoted primary text:

McFarlane [ghost writer of the first books] uses an Italian to plant the bomb and a Jew to discover it. Having the dumb Irish cop dutifully pour buckets of water over an old alarm clock completes the ethnic farce.

Though tasteless by twenty-first century standards, the ethnic humor reflected in this scene fits the pattern established in Hollywood films and popular books of the era [the 1920s]. Rocco is excitable. His dialect is pure Chico Marx. But he, like the other ethnic minorities in the book, is not depicted in a sinister or vicious manner.

(106)

and overextended summaries, interesting in themselves but not clearly headed anywhere. This implicitly inductive method can produce impatience in a reader who wants to understand a consecutive argument or expects a more deductive model; in the absence of an overarching thesis, I would like clearer direction. My impatience increases in the short subdivisions that comprise the thematic chapters—for...