Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
The earliest books I remember reading were the Hardy Boys series. Then I found out the same author wrote the Nancy Drew books and read those. Now, when I read them again to my kids I can't believe how lame/repetative they are.
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No, that's not entirely true.
Both the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series were published by a publishing house called the "Stratemeyer Syndicate" using "house names" for their "authors" - "Caroline Keene" for Nancy Drew, and "Franklin W. Dixon" for the Hardy Boys.
Edward Stratemeyer (the publisher) and later on, his two daughters, sketched out rough plot outlines for each book, but the actual writing of the books was "farmed out" to a variety of different authors. Most of the early Hardy Boys books were actually written by a chap called Leslie McFarlane, and most of the early Nancy Drew books were written by a woman called Mildred Benson.
The plots are, as you say, very predictable and mechanistic, but I love reading them.
Both series were "re-written" in the 1950s to update them and make them more "politically correct" - the original books had very negative and stereotypical portrayals of black and chinese characters, for example - but were drastically shortened and the plots simplified in the process, it being apparently felt that, by the mid 1950s, teenagers would be put off by 300-page books. Most "fans" consider the "original" versions of the books to be enormously superior to the re-writes. I suspect that it would have been the re-writes that you would have read.