The Hardy Boys Need No Eulogy

The Millions celebrates the Hardy Boys.

From the story...

Though I must have read 30 or 40 of the original blue-spined books, not one retains a bright spot in my memory. F. W. Dixon tried his best to innovate and add new elements to the tales. He sent his protagonists to exotic ports-of-call—war-torn Central America in The Mark on the Door, Scotland in The Secret Agent on Flight 101, India in The Bombay Boomerang, Africa in The Mysterious Caravan, and the depths of the Yucatan in The Jungle Pyramid. But no matter where the Hardy siblings traveled, I found their adventures invariably lackluster. Though they may have engaged a pre-teenage boy in the late 1960s or early ’70s, they were hopelessly insufficient to leave me any permanent pleasant memories. I would never stay up until one in the morning reading The Mysterious Caravan.

Happily, however, the executives at Simon & Schuster must have realized the dwindling audience for F. W. Dixon’s original series, and with #59 the Hardy Boys entered a new era. The last of the fifties—Night of the Werewolf—launched the brothers onto a more exciting trajectory. The post-58 bunch, written in the late 1970s and early ’80s, satisfied my desire for a more contemporary thrill, and I soon devoured the entire set. The covers presented Frank and Joe in modern coiffure and wardrobe, though they continued to change their features after each adventure (perhaps to avoid recognition by paroled crooks from past episodes): in #63 the boys appear as trim, intellectual sweater-wearers, while in #64 they wear tight short-sleeved shirts, are shaggy-headed with a hint of hair on their slightly exposed chests; still stranger, in #77 they seem to be neat yuppies out on a company picnic (though an out-of-place tiger growls menacingly from a rock behind them). Perhaps Simon & Schuster hoped to appeal to a wide range of white males and changed the Hardys’ appearances to approximate those of their readers. (I myself had a more definite resemblance: the first name of the elder Hardy sibling.)

Despite the variability of the boys’ appearance, their adventures became consistently entertaining.