They stayed at home, checked in for dinner every night like other kids. They didn’t go wandering all over the seven seas, pursued by imbecile relatives. Just the everyday doings of everyday lads in everyday surroundings. No cannibals, polar bears or man-eating trees. What a change from Dave Fearless! No man-eating sharks. It was about a robbery in a towered mansion belonging to Hurd Applegate, an eccentric stamp collector. Wholesome American boys never got a hard-on.
None of the knee-pawing, tit-squeezing stuff that was sneaking in to so much popular fiction, to the disgust of all right-thinking people. There was to be no petting, as it was known at the time. It was intimated that relations between the Hardy boys and their girl friends would not go beyond the borders of wholesome friendship and discreet mutual esteem. The other, Callie Shaw, would be tolerated by Frank. One of them, Iola Morton, sister of Chet, would be favorably regarded by Joe. Two girls would also make occasional appearances. They would have three chums: Chet, a chubby farm boy, humorist of the group Biff Hooper, an athletic two-fisted type who could be relied on to balance the scales in the event of a fight and Tony Prito, who would presumably tag along to represent all ethnic minorities. The setting would be a small city called Bayport on Barmet Bay “somewhere on the Atlantic Coast.” The boys would attend Bayport High. In closing, he promised that if the manuscript came up to expectations-which were high-I would be asked to do the next two volumes of the series. He had attached an information sheet for guidance and the plot outline of the initial volume, which would be called The Tower Treasure. This in turn would justify a little higher payment for the manuscript-$125 to be exact. Stratemeyer noted that the books would be clothbound and therefore priced a little higher than paperbacks. (I never did learn what the “W” represented. His sons, Frank and Joe, would therefore be known as…
To lend credibility to their talents, they would be the sons of a professional private investigator, so big in his field that he had become a sleuth of international fame.
What Stratemeyer had in mind was a series of detective stories on the juvenile level, involving two brothers of high school age who would solve such mysteries as came their way. Of course, he had already given them Nat Ridley, but Nat really didn’t solve mysteries he merely blundered into them and, after a given quota of hairbreadth escapes, blundered out again.
It had recently occurred to him, Stratemeyer continued, that the growing boys of America might welcome similar fare. Van Dine was neither an ocean liner nor a living man but the pseudonym of Willard Hungtington Wright, a literary craftsman who wrote sophisticated stories for Mencken’s Smart Set. Van Dine, which were selling in prodigious numbers as I was well aware. Before the week was out a long envelope brought another outline, accompanied by a letter explaining his “other plans.” He had observed, Stratemeyer wrote, that detective stories had become very popular in the world of adult fiction.
It turned out that I could count on Edward Stratemeyer. He could count on Bob Vilett and Captain Broadbeam to haul him to the surface, while Pat Stoodles lent encouragement by bellowing “Heave-ho, bejabers!” I couldn’t count on anyone-except, perhaps, Edward Stratemeyer. It was all very well for Dave Fearless to meet catastrophe with aplomb. This example of calmness in the face of disaster didn’t really help. Excerpted from Ghost of the Hardy Boys: The Writer Behind the World’s Most Famous Boy Detectives, by Leslie McFarlane