Reviewed in The Charlotte Observer

Real author of Hardy Boys tales wrote in anonymity for 20 years

Childhood is full of disillusionment. For many children, learning about the nonexistence of the Easter bunny or discovering that fathers don’t always know what's best are hard truths to accept.

For children who love the books about the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, there’s another hard truth that they often discover. The authors listed on the spines of these books are not real people.

Laura Lee Hope, the supposed author of the Bobbsey Twins books, Carolyn Keene, credited with writing the Nancy Drew series, and Franklin W. Dixon, whose name appears on the covers of the Hardy Boys books, are all pseudonyms created by Edward Stratemeyer, founder of a “fiction factory” known as the Stratemeyer Syndicate.

In her absorbing, accessible and well-researched book “The Secret of the Hardy Boys,” Marilyn S. Greenwald not only covers the life of the man who wrote many of the original Hardy Boys books, but also sheds light on the Stratemeyer Syndicate.

The first half of the book focuses on the relationship between Leslie McFarlane and Edward Stratemeyer. When the two met in the mid-1920s, McFarlane was a young Canadian journalist looking for freelance work. Stratemeyer was the successful creator of numerous series books, including the Rover Boys series and the Tom Swift series.

Initially, Stratemeyer wrote each volume, but he eventually had too many series to do that. So he hired freelancers. He provided formulas and plot lines and paid a flat fee for each book they completed. He required all to use pseudonyms, and he had them sign agreements that they would not divulge their real identities.

Stratemeyer often found his ghostwriters by running magazine ads, and such an ad prompted McFarlane to write to Stratemeyer in 1926. Stratemeyer tried out McFarlane on a series about a young diver named Dave Fearless. Pleased, Stratemeyer hired McFarlane to write the first volumes of a new series featuring two brothers known as the Hardy Boys. The first volume, “The Tower Treasure,” came out in 1927. McFarlane went on to write 21 Hardy Boys volumes, the last of which appeared in 1947.

In the second half of her biography, Greenwald covers McFarlane’s life after he stopped writing for the Stratemeyer Syndicate. During the 1950s and ’60s, he wrote and directed documentaries for Canadian film and TV production companies. Greenwald shows how McFarlane’s ability to work closely with Stratemeyer helped him succeed at the collaborative work of films and TV.

Since McFarlane’s death in 1977, his contributions to the film and television industry have largely been forgotten. But as Greenwald makes clear, his contributions to the Hardy Boys series are remembered with affection by countless adults and still read with pleasure by countless children.

The Charlotte Observer
August 20, 2004