Ghost of the Hardy Boys - Leslie McFarlane

When I was a kid, my older brother owned a book called THE SHORT-WAVE MYSTERY. Although I never really discussed the matter with him, I assume he had the book because he was a ham radio operator and was interested in all things connected to short-wave radio. I wasn’t interested in short-wave radio (I tried for a while to learn Morse code but was an abysmal failure at it), but the book had the word “Mystery” in the title and promised action and adventure, so I read it.

That was my introduction to the Hardy Boys.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book and quickly realized there were dozens more entries in the series to be found on the shelves of the school library, as well as in the local public library. I read them all and enjoyed them and bought some of the new volumes coming out then with their bright blue covers. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I didn’t like the new ones nearly as much as the older ones. Even the ones that were supposed to be older, some of the first in the series, in fact, were missing something, and a close reading of the copyright page told me what it was. These were rewritten books, not the originals at all. Not fair! I wanted the real thing. I wanted the chums and the roadsters. Even at that relatively early age, my tastes in fiction already tended toward the older stuff. So I refused to read the rewritten versions and sought out the originals, although I grudgingly read the new ones currently being written in the mid-Sixties. All this made me pretty sure that the author, Franklin W. Dixon, maybe wasn’t a real guy. I already had a tenuous grasp on the concepts of pseudonyms and house-names. But I never really wondered who the actual author was.

By the Seventies, it began to be generally known that the author of those early Hardy Boys books was a man named Leslie McFarlane. He even wrote a memoir about those days called GHOST OF THE HARDY BOYS. I had a copy of that original edition, published in 1976, but never got around to reading it before it was lost in the Fire of ’08. I thought about replacing it from time to time and checked to see what used copies were going for on-line, but they were all more than I wanted to pay. Then I discovered that it was reprinted earlier this year, and that edition was much more affordable. So I got a copy and finally read GHOST OF THE HARDY BOYS.

It’s a wonderful book. McFarlane’s style is fast and funny and very readable, which is no surprise considering how I devoured those Hardy Boys books he wrote. He starts with a little personal background and then launches right into the tale of how he started working for the Edward Stratemeyer Syndicate in the first place and eventually got the assignment of launching the Hardy Boys series. The middle section of the book does sag a little as McFarlane flashes back to his childhood and adolescence and tells us probably more than we need to know about the little town in Canada where he grew up, but it’s still pretty interesting because he was a good writer and does a fine job of recapturing that time and place.

Then he finishes strong with more chapters on the Hardy Boys and the rest of his career. There are plenty of insightful comments about the life of a writer, especially the life of a writer who spends a lot of his career turning out popular fiction under other names. I had to nod in agreement with him a lot of times, especially when he talks about how, if you’re going to take the money to do a job, you ought to do the best job you can. I get really annoyed when I read a house-name book and can tell that the writer thinks he’s slumming and can just slap something out. The limits of my talent may keep from accomplishing what I’m trying to do at times, but I’m still going to try.

I’m wandering off into the weeds here when what I really want to do is tell you how much I enjoyed GHOST OF THE HARDY BOYS. If you’re a fan of that series or just like to read about writers, I give it a very high recommendation and I’m glad it’s back in print.

By the way, my brother had another book I read that had an influence on me, an edition of THE LONE RANGER by Fran Striker (although we know now it was actually written by and first published under the author’s real name, Gaylord Dubois). But that’s a whole other story. 

Forgotten Books: Rescued in the Clouds, or Ted Scott, Hero of the Air - Franklin W. Dixon (Frank Duffield)

A couple of weeks ago there was some discussion in the comments on one of the posts about the Hardy Boys series. I remembered that while I don’t have any of the original Hardy Boys books on hand (or any of the newer ones, either, for that matter), I do have several books in another series by “Franklin W. Dixon”, so I decided to read one of them.


The Ted Scott Flying Stories were launched about the same time as the Hardy Boys, and according to what I’ve read on the Internet, Ted Scott, dashing young aviator, was even more popular than Frank and Joe for a while, with the books about him outselling the Hardy Boys novels. Ted Scott is a pretty blatant fictionalization of Charles Lindbergh, to whom the books are rather brazenly dedicated, along with a number of other early aviators. The first book in the series, OVER THE OCEAN TO PARIS, has plucky young flier Ted Scott becoming the first man to fly the Atlantic and becoming America’s hero in the process. I don’t have that one, but I do have RESCUED IN THE CLOUDS, the second book in the series, and it picks up with Ted returning to a hero’s welcome in his Midwestern home town, only to run afoul of some old enemies.


The plot of this novel really meanders around, as Ted has a series of adventures centered around flying. He stops a train from crashing off a bridge that’s collapsed. He organizes an air show to raise money to build a hospital. He locates a witness against the con man who swindled his elderly foster parents out of a fortune. He rescues flood victims, performs a daring mid-air rescue of two men from a burning plane, and even (attention Bill Crider!) fights alligators. But no matter what the odds against him, Ted Scott never gives up and fights on with a smile on his face, because Ted Scott is nothing if not stalwart.


The writing in this book is really old-fashioned, not surprising since it was published in 1927. It’s hokey, melodramatic, and driven by incredible coincidences. And yet RESCUED IN THE CLOUDS has its moments. Some of the flying scenes, if put on film, would make spectacular stunts. There are also some nice satiric bits about the commercialization of heroes and how everybody but Ted Scott tries to cash in on his fame. According to one website, the actual author of these books was someone named Frank Duffield, whose only other publications seem to be in the field of non-fiction about coin collecting. He certainly wasn’t a polished writer, but as I said above, at times there’s some decent yarn-spinning in this book. As far as I know, Duffield didn’t write any of the Hardy Boys books as Franklin W. Dixon, but he may have done other boys’ series work for Edward Stratemeyer.


While most readers today probably wouldn’t make it very far in a book like this, those old boys’ series novels are, in their own way, historical documents. This one gives what’s probably a pretty accurate picture of the adulation that greeted Charles Lindbergh on his return to the States. And as creaky as it may be, it has a certain charm to it. I may never read another Ted Scott Flying Story, but I have to admit, I’m a little curious about what happens in the next one, OVER THE ROCKIES WITH THE AIR MAIL, OR TED SCOTT LOST IN THE WILDERNESS. Gee whillikers, I wonder if good old Ted will survive?