The Washington Post has an interesting story about the author of the Hardy Boys books, Franklin W. Dixon. The thing is, there was no Franklin W. Dixon.
From the piece...
In one sense, Franklin W. Dixon never existed. Franklin W. Dixon was a "house name," owned by a company called the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which created and published the original Hardy Boys. From 1927 through 1946 each Hardy Boys book was secretly written by a man named Leslie McFarlane.
I found myself, quite literally, chasing a ghost.
I caught up with him on the telephone, in the person of the ghostwriter's daughter, Norah Perez of Youngstown, N.Y. Perez is an accomplished novelist. Her father died in 1977.
Recently, Perez leafed through some old Hardy Boys books. "I was almost shocked," she said with a laugh. "I thought, omigod. They are not great."
So her father was a hack?
"My father," she said, "was a literate, sophisticated, erudite man."
He was?
He loved Dickens, she said. "He was a great Joycean."
He was?
"He corresponded with F. Scott Fitzgerald. He had aspirations to be that kind of writer."
She seemed uncertain where to go with this. Finally:
"He hated the Hardy Boys."
It turns out the story of the Hardy Boys -- call it their Final Chapter -- isn't about the worst writer who ever lived, not by a long shot. It is about a good writer who wrote some bad books, and if you wonder why that happened, as I did, then you are likely not very old and not very wise. Sometimes homely things are done for the best reasons in the world, and thus achieve a beauty of their own.
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