CSBG Archive
Friday in the YA Library
Full disclosure: this isn’t really about comics. But it brushes up against them, and also animated cartoons, in a couple of places.
I’ve mentioned this a time or two here before, but in addition to comics and pulp fiction, I’m also very fond of what used to be called “young adult” series adventure novels.
These three series, in particular, I was a big fan of when I was eleven or twelve... and I still dig the Three Investigators, even today.
Today they’ve largely disappeared from the bookstores, though revamped versions of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew are hanging in there. (And there’s an argument to be made that perhaps the Harry Potter or Twilight series of books are the newest incarnation of the genre.)
But the ones I’m talking about had a very specific look and format. They were hardcovers, seven inches tall by five-and-a-half inches wide, no dust jacket, roughly two hundred and forty pages or so… and always with a pulpy cover illustration that promised excitement with a touch of weirdness.
Something about the consistency of the packaging really appealed to my inner OCD collector nerd. I admit it.
Most of these juvenile series books came from one source — the Stratemeyer Syndicate. They packaged Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, the Bobbsey Twins, the Dana Girls, and literally dozens of others — well over a hundred different series, over 1200 books in all, were launched between the company’s start in 1905 and its eventual buyout by Simon and Schuster in 1984.
This juvenile-book publishing juggernaut was the brainchild of a man named Edward Stratemeyer, who started with The Rover Boys in 1899.
Stratemeyer himself, with the series that launched his empire.
Edward Stratemeyer wrote the Rover Boys books himself, under the pseudonym “Arthur Winfield.” The success of the series showed Stratemeyer that there were huge amounts of money to be made from going after the previously-untapped juvenile market, and he founded the Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1905.
The Syndicate operated under very strict guidelines — Stratemeyer came from dime novels, he’d put in a lot of time at the pulp factory Street & Smith before striking out on his own, and he brought most of those iron-fisted editorial techniques with him. In particular, he retained all rights to the books and insisted that writers ghost all Syndicate-owned series titles under a house name like “Franklin W. Dixon” or “Carolyn Keene.”
In later years Stratemeyer’s daughter Harriet took over the business and she refined her father’s editorial style into a rigid formula.
Like her father, Harriet Stratemeyer didn't do much writing, though she authored a few of the Nancy Drew books and revised and updated many of the Hardy Boys novels in the fifties. (Mostly she was taking out the racial slurs.)
Harriet’s formula worked over and over again, and really built the Stratemeyer book-packaging empire. Generally, this is how it went —
* Harriet Stratemeyer plotted and outlined story ideas and assigned them to writers to complete, much as the old pulp editors (and comics editors like Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz, pulp vets themselves) used to do.
* New series were first published in sets of three books called “breeder” sets.
* Chapters and pages should end mid-situation, to increase the reader’s desire to keep reading.
* Characters should not age. (In some of the early series, such as the Rover Boys or Tom Swift, the characters did grow up and occasionally even marry, but sales dropped afterwards, prompting the Syndicate to make a rule that characters never marry or age.)
* Writers surrendered all rights and were paid a flat fee per story.
* All writers signed a contract promising to keep their identity a secret. Books were always published under a house pseudonym.
* Harriet Stratemeyer proofread and revised each manuscript and sent the book to a publisher, usually Grosset and Dunlap.
* Turnaround time was fast; generally just six weeks from conception and a story conference with a writer to the finished product. Deadlines were brutal, which is why the syndicate recruited such a large number of workhorse writers. (Usually guys hungry for work after the collapse of the adventure-pulp magazine markets.)
Probably the biggest success story of the Stratemeyer Syndicate would have to be teen detectives the Hardy Boys.
The Hardys in their original incarnation on the left, and on the right as I encountered them in the late 1960s.
Frank and Joe Hardy, sons of private detective Fenton Hardy, are amateur sleuths who occasionally get embroiled in their father’s cases, often having to rescue Fenton from smugglers or other such criminals. In addition, the young Hardys occasionally stumble into some criminal enterprise while on an innocent camping trip or something. And once in a while their father actually asks them to help out on a case. But until very recently — in the latest incarnation of the series, Undercover Brothers, the boys are operatives of an agency called ATAC — but except for that latest version, Frank and Joe Hardy had no official status, they were just regular kids who accidentally would get involved in an adventure and solve a mystery. (Rather like the way sweet old Jessica Fletcher accidentally stumbled over hundreds of murder victims over the twelve seasons of Murder, She Wrote.)
This series, launched in 1927, sold in the millions and continues to be very popular today as the rebooted Hardy Boys: Undercover Brothers. There have been several television series adaptations and even a Saturday morning cartoon from Filmation in 1969.
I never pictured the Hardys in bell bottoms.... truthfully, I always had thought they were pretty square.
The cartoon re-imagined the Hardys as fronting a traveling rock band… each week they’d solve a crime and then do a song. (This was nothing to do with anything from Stratemeyer — the success of Filmation’s Archies mandated that every other cartoon group of crime-solving teens from that studio had to also be in a band.)
The cartoon in turn led to a short-lived comic book series from Gold Key.
Was there ANY property Gold Key didn't license? I think not.
In addition to the comic books, the cartoon also inspired another, very strange, tie-in product — the release of two studio pop albums featuring live actors playing the cartoon characters. (I am pretty sure the young people in the photograph are not the actual musicians on the records, but no one seems to know who any of these folks were.)
I used to think the Brady Kids were the weirdest fictional band ever to put out records, but I stand corrected.
The Hardys returned to comics a few years ago, in a new manga-style series from Papercutz, scripted by Scott Lobdell and drawn by Lea Hernandez and Daniel Bendon.
I'm not really a Hardy Boys fan but I am sort of interested in the Lea Hernandez art... my students would be all over this, probably.
The success of the Hardy Boys prompted Stratemeyer to launch plucky girl detective Nancy Drew in 1930 and she too has been going strong ever since, with millions of books in print and all sorts of tie-in merchandise — not so much with comics or cartoons, but there have been five movies and a couple of live-action TV shows, as well as a dozen or so video/computer games.
Other series followed — The Dana Girls, Biff Brewster, Kay Tracey. I was not aware, until doing some research, how hated these books were by schoolteachers and librarians back in the day. Juvenile series novels, particularly the formula books from Stratemeyer, were considered to cause ‘mental laziness,’ induce a ‘fatal sluggishness,’ and ‘intellectual torpor.’ And no less an authority than the Boy Scouts of America published an article suggesting that reading series novels like the Hardy Boys were “Blowing Out Boys’ Brains.” Seriously. That was the name of the article. Thank God Frederic Wertham or Peggy Charren never got the bit in their teeth about these books or my childhood would have been completely screwed.
Disapproval hardly slowed the factory down, though. At the height of their success in the forties and fifties, there could be as many as a dozen releases in a month. The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, along with lesser lights like Honey Bunch or the X-Bar-X Boys.
As for myself, when I was a kid I read the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift books and enjoyed them well enough, but they were only sporadically good. You couldn’t count on them. (This was, I discovered years later, because dozens of different writers were ghosting them for Stratemeyer, so of course the quality blew hot and cold.)
Anyway, even as a kid my preferences tended more towards the oddball stuff like the Three Investigators or Danny Dunn, and far and away my favorite of any of these series are the “Christopher Cool, TEEN Agent” books. From the moment my nine-year-old self read the advertising copy in the back pages of a Hardy Boys book, I knew this was the series for me:
MEET…
CHRISTOPHER COOL / TEEN AGENT
as he plays the deadliest game of all––international intrigue––in America’s newest exciting spy stories.
Christopher Cool and his Apache Indian roommate, Geronimo Johnson––sophomores at an Ivy League university––combine their campus lives with undercover assignments for a vital arm of U.S. Intelligence: Top-Secret Educational Espionage Network.
Expertly schooled in all the arts of espionage, the two daring TEEN agents work closely with red-haired Spice Carter, a clever coed agent, to thwart enemy spies in trouble spots throughout the world.
The name's Cool... Christopher Cool.
Soon afterward I saw a copy of Mission: Moonfire at a local Fred Meyer and it was relatively easy to wheedle Mom into picking it up for me. (After all, it was a book, not one of those awful comics, plus it sort of looked like the Hardy Boys and Mom knew they were safe.) X Marks The Spy and Department of Danger soon followed, and I was hooked.
The books were clearly inspired by U.N.C.L.E., but author “Jack Lancer” kicked the imagination and spectacle up a notch since he wasn’t hampered by a television special-effects budget. Chris and Geronimo are equipped with more implausible gadgets than even James Bond’s Q could have devised. A particular favorite of mine are the titanium-soled “rocket-hopper” jet shoes, able to blast Chris and Geronimo fifty feet in the air. (These are also handy for braking falls when a bad guy, say, hurls you off the Eiffel Tower, as an evil TOAD agent did to Chris in X Marks The Spy.)
The premise is similar to UNCLE or James Bond, but the Stratemeyer house rules still applied, so things were strictly G-rated. Keep it moving, lots of action but no real violence, and especially, no kissing. (Despite the presence of gorgeous female TEEN agents like the aforementioned Spice Carter or smokin’-hot Asian co-ed Yummi Toyama, no one ever got up to any hanky or panky.)
There were six volumes of the Christopher Cool books. As usual with a Stratemeyer series, the first three were put into wide release almost at the same time, which is why it was easy for me to get hold of X Marks The Spy, Mission: Moonfire, and Department of Danger when I was a kid, and fairly easy for an interested collector to do so today, as well. But it’s taken most of the intervening forty years for me to track down the second three…. well, not in a continuous effort, but it’s been one of those minor bookscouting quests I pick at when Julie and I are on our expeditions. The print run on books four, five and six was much smaller and usually dealers want ridiculously high prices for them.
However, I finally managed it, and it pleases me to report that the second three in the series are as wonderfully delirious and adrenaline-fueled as the first three. Once again, I can’t top the ad copy, so here you go.
Ace of Shadows: When enemy agents try to snatch the secret files of Count Dietrich von Kronstein––who has helped refugees escape from behind the Iron Curtain to the West––the count seeks TEEN’s help. The U.S. intelligence agency dispatches its two most skilled agents, Chris Cool and his Apache pal Geronimo Johnson, to the count’s castle in Bavaria. They arrive in time to witness his funeral! During the services a blowgun dart narrowly misses Chris, but kills a diplomat from the Arab country of Marak.
What happens next catapults Chris and Geronimo into a terrifying race to Marak to East Berlin and back to Bavaria, to prevent an international bargain which could destroy the free world.
The TEEN agents match wits not only with the deadly espionage organization TOAD, but also with the elusive and feared Red spy known as the Ace of Shadows.
Heads You Lose: When the shrunken heads of two CIA agents are delivered to TEEN headquarters, Chris Cool and his Apache Indian fellow agent, Geronimo Johnson, are ordered to Ecuador, to apprehend the sinister donor, a revolutionary known as Cascabel the Rattlesnake. A high practitioner of voodoo, Cascabel has stirred the head-hunting Jivaros into a frenzy––part of his monstrous plan to overthrow the government.
In Quito, Chris and Geronimo are hired by an Argentine playboy, Fernando Rios, to transport medical supplies to the disease-stricken Jivaros. Suspicious of Rios, the TEEN agents risk their lives to ferret out the Argentine’s real motive and at the same time hunt down the satanic Cascabel.
Mysterious pursuers in the jungle, weird pagan rituals, and voodoo curses add up to exciting and gripping adventures in this spy thriller.
Trial By Fury: Tape recordings of kangaroo trials, in which world leaders are condemned to death, speed TEEN agents Chris Cool and his Apache Indian partner, Geronimo Johnson, to Indonesia on a fantastic espionage mission. Their orders: to track down a fanatic Oriental assassin.
Dramatic developments in Djakarta on the island of Java lead Chris and Geronimo on a dangerous island-hopping chase to Komodo Island, inhabited by fierce dragon lizards twelve feet long. The exciting hunt backtracks to Djakarta, then takes the TEEN agents to Holland, and finally to Singapore, where the intrigues of the sinister assassin threaten their lives.
Evil Counts in Bavarian castles! Weird pagan rituals! Fanatic Oriental assassins! World leaders kidnapped and condemned to death by Komodo Dragon! Really, can’t you just feel the AWESOME?
I assure you the books are every bit as much fun as they sound. Not quite as goofy as, say, Derek Flint or Austin Powers, but nevertheless written with tongue firmly in cheek, they’re a wonderful way to kill forty-five minutes or so. The second in the series, Mission: Moonfire, is still the best, I think, but any of them are a good time.
The Stratemeyer Syndicate had a strict rule — well, truthfully, as I explained above they had MANY strict rules, but the one I want to mention was that all their authors had to use a house pen name. What I did not know until this week was that “Jack Lancer,” the creator and author of Chris Cool, was in fact a comics guy. He was Jim Lawrence, who — after the Christopher Cool gig failed to take off in 1969 — took over as the writer of the James Bond newspaper strip, currently available in these swell collected volumes from Titan Books.
In fact, not only did Jim Lawrence write the Cool series, but he ghosted a lot of other books for Stratemeyer, as well — including, I found to my delighted astonishment, the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift books that I remember as being “the good ones.” Turns out I wasn’t a fan of the series so much as I was a fan of this particular writer. I don’t think I’ve been this floored since I discovered that most of the series paperback writers I loved in the 1970s were all Ron Goulart.
Sometimes I think it’s a shame that “Christopher Cool, TEEN Agent” didn’t catch on as a series. But then again, maybe not. I love me some Chris Cool, even today, but on the whole, I think I’d rather have the Bond comics. Either way, though, finding out that several of my favorite childhood authors were all actually the same man, Jim Lawrence, is kind of a — dare I say it? — cool fact to discover.
See you next week.
40 Comments
Win Scott Eckert
June 11, 2010 at 3:04 pm
Greg,
I love these, and have a full run of the original Hardy Boys series and most of the Tom Swift, Jr.s.
Not surprisingly, these, along with Nancy Drew, Christopher Cool, and a bunch of others, are all listed in CROSSOVERS; A SECRET CHRONOLOGY OF THE WORLD–many of them linked by the Nancy Drew faux-autobiography CONFESSIONS OF A TEEN SLEUTH (if you haven’t read it yet, check it out, it’s a scream, but done with fondness for the characters).
Best,
-Win
Kolymar
June 11, 2010 at 3:06 pm
I’ve never been a big fan of YA material as I started reading straight adult fiction in my childhood but it’s interesting to learn how it evolved.
Chris Roberson
June 11, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Greg, have you seen M.T. Anderson’s recent series of middle reader novels, “M.T. Anerson’s Thrilling Tales”? Each of the main characters is (in story) the star of a series of middle reader novels, including a girl who is the heroine in a series of R.L. Stine-style horror adventures, and a boy inventor from a seres of Tom Swift style adventures. The whole series is a whole lot of fun, but the reason I mention it is the second installment in the sere is, THE CURSE OF THE LINOLEUM LEDERHOSEN, in which our heroes investigate a mystery at a holiday resort–and quickly discover that all of the other guests are ALSO the stars of book series, including a few VERY familiar young detectives. The series in general, and that novel in particular, are a love letter to the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, et al., and some of the passages about the narrator’s childhood experiences reading those kinds of books are BREATHTAKING.
Bill Reed
June 11, 2010 at 4:18 pm
Holy crap, the Hardy Boys had a fencing story? MUST HAVE THAT ONE
Ahem. Now to properly read the post.
Greg Hatcher
June 11, 2010 at 4:29 pm
Haven’t seen either Win’s recommendation or yours, Chris, but they both sound great. The shopping list is lengthening rapidly.
CBR spotlights Christopher Cool | Mister 8
June 11, 2010 at 4:41 pm
[...] Resources’ Comics Should Be Good blog takes a look at young adult novels today, including a lengthy look at Christopher Cool, a character created by James Bond comic strip writer James [...]
Penny
June 11, 2010 at 4:43 pm
REALLY enjoyed this column. Reading your summaries, I think our town library had one or two Christopher Cool books at one time. They seem vaguely familiar. I’ll have to keep an eye out for them – they sound like fun reads.
I second the recommendation of CONFESSIONS OF A TEEN SLEUTH – funny book.
BTW did you know Frank and Joe Hardy have been re-imagined again? There is now a series starring pre-teen Hardy Boys. Joe is something of a jerk and there’s not a lot of meat to them, but they work as an intro to the characters. I just read the first one with one of my reading groups. From being hated by schoolteachers to becoming required reading – how time changes things.
Omar Karindu, with the power of SUPER-hypocrisy!
June 11, 2010 at 4:46 pm
There was a mercifully short-lived attempt to do ” Hardy Boys stories in, I want to say the very late 1980s or early 1990s. They were called Hardy Boys Case Files, and had the boys working “ripped from the headlines” sensationalist cases for a government agency of some kind. The first in the series had longtime cast member Chet killed off by a car bomb, there was copious gunfire from the Boys themselves, and the one I recall reading had the boys fighting a Jonestown style cult.
Kim
June 11, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Good article. I was pleased to see the references to the Tom Swift series. We are holding a Tom Swift 100th Anniversary Convention in July of this year. Can you believe that there have been 105 books in 5 series in 100 years?
We will have presentations for two days on the history of Tom Swift, including a talk by one author who wrote for two of the Tom Swift series, Robert E. Vardemann. We will also have a talk by the son of James Duncan Lawrence, ghostwriter of many of the Tom Swift Junior books (and the first three Christopher Cool TEEN Agent books!).
The Tom Swift books were hugely influential to many people, including Robert Heinlein, Issac Asimov, Chuck Yeager, Ray Bradbury, Bill Gates, and Steve Wozniak (who has registered for our convention).
Speaking of comics, did you know there was almost a Tom Swift comic? That’s right. Byron Preiss Productions were going to do a Tom Swift 300 comic (by P. Craig Russell) but it was canceled and it was repackaged slightly (changing the name of the character and making other slight alterations) and it was released as Robin 3000.
There were also Better Little Books on Tom Swift 1939 and 1941 (Giant Telescope and then Magnetic Silencer) which are sort of like comics in that every page there is an illustration with a caption.
(The Hardy Boys also had comics based on the Mickey Mouse Club versions from TV, which are quite nice).
It’s not too late to register for our convention if you are going to be in San Diego the weekend before Comic-Con!
Louis Bright-Raven
June 11, 2010 at 5:33 pm
“Today they’ve largely disappeared from the bookstores, though revamped versions of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew are hanging in there.”
Are they revamped? I haven’t looked at them closely, but they seemed like basic reprints of the 50s and 60s books to me at $1- $1.50 stacked ten high at my local bookstore cghains gathering dust. (They have Tom Swift and the Bobsies too, BTW) I find them more often than I do the Papercutz stuff in bookstores.
But I also see the kids not wanting them in favor of the Potter or Lemony Snicket or Animorphs or whatever’s more recent (say the past 10-15 years, tops), because they think the content is ‘too old’. Youth today doesn’t seem to have any appreciation for long standing literary works of any era or genre that isn’t of the ‘now’. And thus the Hardy / Drew books, printed with those 50s /60s cover art – no way. Maybe if they did modern covers to present the old stories?
Roman
June 11, 2010 at 5:44 pm
Whoa, is that Here Come the Hardy Boys album cover an homage to the artwork in Electric Ladyland?
LAZtheinfamous
June 11, 2010 at 6:16 pm
Wow, that’s a weird coincidence. I was just telling my kids about the 3 Investigators. I thought I was the only one who remembered that series!
Greg Hatcher
June 11, 2010 at 6:36 pm
They’re both. I left it out of the column because it’s tedious and not terribly relevant, but it has to do with the lawsuit between Grosset & Dunlap and Stratemeyer a few years ago. As I understand it, G&D gets to reprint the old stuff and Simon & Shuster puts out the new series. “Undercover Brothers” is the revamp and I’m told it sells okay. Not Harry Potter numbers, or even Stratemeyer’s heyday numbers, but not bad.
I’m pretty sure that’s the Undercover Brothers stuff.
Penny
June 11, 2010 at 7:13 pm
Nope. The Undercover Brothers line is different from the Case Files series. I remember when the Case Files came out. It was like they were picking up from the last season of the Hardy Boys TV series with Cassidy and Stevenson – girlfriends dying, spies, etc.
Nancy Drew was also given a face lift at the same time – only her new series was the Secret Files and the main focus was on how good she looked in her clothes and how many guys she dated while still keeping Ned on the string. It was a dark time for Nancy fans. I think they published several books where Nancy and the Hardy Boys teamed up and Nancy and Frank semi-dated.
Bill Reed
June 11, 2010 at 7:42 pm
I read Casefiles #1 in one school day. Yeah, I’m young, shut up. Chet didn’t blow up, it was his sister (and Joe’s girlfriend) Iola. I remember it like it was yesterday. I dug the Hardy Boys, though nothing ever topped the very first, “The Tower Treasure,” which rests on the bookshelf behind me as I type this. In my head, I always pictured Chet as a fat kid with spectacles, suspenders, and a beanie. Yes.
I also dug the occasional Tom Swift or Three Investigators book I stumbled across. Never found a Christopher Cool, but they sound really badass.
Bill Reed
June 11, 2010 at 7:46 pm
In fact, those Casefiles were getting edgier just when comics were. I can’t imagine Hardy Boys these days– I bet Joe’s had his arm ripped off, turned to heroin, and suffers from ED. Meanwhile, Frank has gone on a murderous rampage to avenge the rapey death of Chet, or something.
David Serchay
June 11, 2010 at 8:18 pm
Great article. One of the first chapter book series that I enjoyed as a child was another Stratemeyer work, “The Happy Hollisters.”
Scott Harris
June 11, 2010 at 9:08 pm
I was a huge fan of The Three Investigators when I was a kid. Another favorite along these lines that I don’t think you mentioned was Trixie Belden, who combined two classic YA genres by being a teen detective who solved mysteries on a horse farm. I just loved both of those series.
Kim
June 11, 2010 at 9:15 pm
For the Three Investigators, there are two German films (in English) for that series. And they are really good!
Trixie Belden was a great series. I read those and Nancy Drew, along with the Three Investigators.
I only started reading Tom Swift in the last year but my husband is a huge fan, hence the Centennial Convention.
kuru
June 11, 2010 at 9:39 pm
great article really fun i was a tom swift guy myself with a little hardy boys thrown but christopher cool looks like it would have been right up my alley. who did the cover art it looks great 60′s hip.
btw i will not rest till i get ron goulart’ s grouch marx series
which books from the 70s of his did you like the avenger?
Greg Hatcher
June 11, 2010 at 10:47 pm
All of them. The Avenger, the Phantom, the Marvel novels, the Flash Gordon, and all the stuff he did under his own name.
Ah, that’s when Julie and I are going to be on our annual anniversary road trip… I’m afraid it’s already booked. The con does sound like fun though.
PAUL BISHOP
June 11, 2010 at 11:04 pm
Nice post. It’s not often I see information on Christopher Cool. It’s kind of tame now, but I enjoyed them in my early teens.
Nick A.
June 12, 2010 at 12:01 am
Bill, thanks for pointing that out. I read those books when they came out (I think it was the late eighties, not early nineties) and remember Iola’s death well.
It didn’t hurt that every book after it had Joe moping about it, and every other or so had them gallivanting off on a lead that she might be alive.
And all this talk about Ron Goulart makes me want to go back and read the Tek series.
Travis Pelkie
June 12, 2010 at 2:38 am
Wow, this post gave me flashbacks, if for no other reason the Hardy Boys stuff. Probably my dad and his brothers had the books when they were kids in the 60s, and I ended up getting most of them in the 80s. I too remember the Case Files, but didn’t remember any details. I did remember some crossovers with Nancy Drew.
I know there’s a book out within the last few years about Nancy Drew and going into some of the personal lives of the women who wrote the stories (um, well, were they all women who wrote all of the Nancy Drews? I’ll have to find that book at the library).
And Nancy Drew has been adapted to manga-esque-ness by Papercutz as well. I think both ND and HB are up to about the 20th book. I think Fabian Nicieza writes Nancy Drew. They are both entertaining enough. I get them out from a local library.
I’ll have to see if my Hardy Boys books are at the house or in storage.
I’m not sure if G&D are connected to Penguin publishing, but there’s a Penguin warehouse in my area (Binghamton NY) and they do annual book sales, and I believe that the old Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books are available for sale.
mrjayberry
June 12, 2010 at 3:29 am
Man I remember how happy I was the day I found out the name of the Three Invesitgators series, I had fond memories of lazy summer days reading them when I was a kid and it was awesome to have something to look for at all the thrift stores.
I hope this article is a godsend for a Christopher Cool fan from way back to rekindle a nostalgic love.
ap0k
June 12, 2010 at 5:45 am
Man, I had every one of those blue-spined hard cover Hardy Boy books when I was a kid. They REALLY solidifed my love of reading, and I always remember fondly many nights my dad coming into my bedroom at midnight telling me to “Put the book down, turn the )@(! flashlight off and go to bed already! It’ll be there tomorrow.” When I got older (14ish), I donated my entire collection (and I think I literally had them all) to the local library…and, not to sound like an @$$, but I still regret it to this day.
Thanks for the fun memories!
John J
June 12, 2010 at 6:43 am
What, no mention of Chip Hilton, the three-sport high school star? That was another series we read in grade school. We even reached a point where we had traded all the Hardy boys books between the guys and made the move to lend the Hardys to the girls in class for their Nancy Drew books.
I picked up a couple of the original (1910?) Tom Swift run on eBay a few years ago after I found a list of the titles but the racist supporting character put me off purchasing any more.
Edo Bosnar
June 12, 2010 at 9:44 am
Can’t believe there’s over 20 comments, and nobody snarked about “Yummi Toyama” – perfect name for a porn star, or an Austin Powers girl… Anyway, based on your description alone, if I ever come across any of those Christopher Cool books I’lll snap them up without even thinking about it.
I never really got into the YA series much – the Hardy Boys especially were ruined for me by that live action series that was shown with reruns of the Micky Mouse Club (I thought it was pretty lame), and the 70s series with Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson didn’t help much in that regard. Even so, I did read a few of the Tom Swift books, and quite a few of the Danny Dunn books, which I remember enjoying quite a bit. However, by the 3rd/4th grade, the Conan and Tarzan comics led me to the actual books on which they were based, and after that the YA fiction just wasn’t “mature” enough…
Bill Reed
June 12, 2010 at 9:55 am
Those old Hardys are just lovely objects. The binding, the typeface, the smell… probably like concentrated nostalgia for me now.
Kim
June 12, 2010 at 10:16 am
John J
“I picked up a couple of the original (1910?) Tom Swift run on eBay a few years ago after I found a list of the titles but the racist supporting character put me off purchasing any more.”
I’m not going to excuse the Tom Swift books, but I will point out that for 1910, the character wouldn’t have seemed racist. Rad is a old man who was a slave as a child. He has a strong accent, is superstitious, and until he is taught late in life (presumably) we know he can’t read. He uses terms like “massa’” to refer to Tom and his father. Not surprising for the time but feels pretty strange/wrong to us.
By today’s standards this (plus some attitudes towards the natives of various countries–particularly in Captivity and Ice Caves but in several others too) can be tough to swallow.
However, the stories have a lot to offer despite these minor flaws (and in their time these attitudes wouldn’t have stood out at all!). You can’t ignore our past racist history. It’s there, including in many books written at the time (Tom Swift is just one of them).
If you couldn’t handle the original Tom Swifts I suggest reading Tom Swift Junior or one of the later series. You may find the adventure you are looking for there.
Tom Swift: 100 Years of Making Science and Invention Cool http://www.tomswiftenterprises.com
Mary Warner
June 12, 2010 at 11:53 am
My brother had three Hardy Boys books, one of which was The Secret Of The Caves pictured above. And I had one Nancy Drew book. I read them all at some point, but I never got into them much. I guess they just weren’t the right ones. I couldn’t get interested in the TV show either.
Rob Schmidt
June 12, 2010 at 1:01 pm
I never read the Christopher Cool books, but I saw the ad copy and was intrigued. “Christopher Cool/Teen Agent” is basically the perfect title. It’s self-explanatory and makes you want to read it.
Layne
June 12, 2010 at 4:16 pm
I read a lot of the original Nancy Drews* but very few Hardy Boys, until the Case Files series came along – the stories were pretty badass for the time, and there was a mysterious CIA handler named Mr. Grey whom I idolized way more than the Boys. Still, The Three Investigators, who also got a regrettable late-eighties/early nineties revamp, are still tops in my book – I need to retrieve my 1st printings from my parents’ basement before they either go moldy or mom chucks them. They’re in pretty rough, library discarded shape, so there’s no resale value, but I just loved those books so much. Danny Dunn and The Bobbsey Twins** are fondly remembered, too.
*I had an older sister, okay?
**I can’t really blame that one on my sister.
Eric F
June 12, 2010 at 8:23 pm
I loved the Three Investigators as a kid, and I’d hardly call the revamp (really more of an aging up) regrettable. I actually remember more of the Crimebusters series than the originals. I liked Encyclopedia Brown, too.
But the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were considered your parents’ stuff already when I was a kid in the mid-to-late-80s. I actually remember being offended when someone asked me if I liked them because they were so uncool. It wasn’t even a random question since I read detective stuff all the time as a kid. I have to wonder if the sales on them doesn’t consist entirely of grandparents and parents saying, “I liked them when I was a kid,” and picking them up for kids who’ll just get rid of them at next garage sale.
John Trumbull
June 12, 2010 at 10:21 pm
I remember some of these series. I read quite a few Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown & Danny Dunn books as a kid in the last 70s-early 80s.
John Trumbull
June 12, 2010 at 10:22 pm
LATE 70s-Early 80s, I mean. Why do my typos never become obvious to me until after I post?
John
June 12, 2010 at 10:53 pm
And no less an authority than the Boy Scouts of America published an article suggesting that reading series novels like the Hardy Boys were “Blowing Out Boys’ Brains.”
An odd thing for them to say. Percy Keese Fitzhugh wrote at least four series–Tom Slade, Roy Blakeley, Pee Wee Harris, and Westy Martin–that were officially approved by the BSA.
Still, The Three Investigators, who also got a regrettable late-eighties/early nineties revamp, are still tops in my book
I totally agree. I still remember buying my first one, a paperback edition of The Secret of Terror Castle, at a school book fair when I was in third grade. The Three Investigators actually went through two revamps. In the Crimebusters series, Jupiter, Pete, and Bob were high school, and the books had more of a contemporary feel to them. They were OK, but nothing special. The other, earlier revamp came after Alfred Hitchcock died, and the publisher decided they needed to revise the books to remove any mention of Hitchcock. In the first book, that required them to create another portly British director to take over Hitchcock’s relatively major role; subsequent books, where Hitchcock only appeared in the introduction to the book and at the end when the boys summed up the case for him, they substituted in the mystery novelist character introduced in the first post-Hitchcock novel to take Hitchcock’s role as their patron. The books were largely the same other than for swapping one character for another, but to my way of thinking it was disrespectful to write Hitchcock out of the series.
Tom
June 13, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Really neat stuff here, Greg. I never read the Hardy Boys, but Encyclopedia Brown, I think, falls right into the category you talk about here.
Also, you mention Harry Potter and Twilight being a continuation of this genre, but my question is, what about the Star Wars: Young Jedi Knights series? My library has RACKS of those in small paperback form.
Kim
June 13, 2010 at 9:03 pm
I asked Stan Lee, through Twitter, if he remembered Tom Swift and today his tweet is all about how he remembers Tom Swift. Kinda Cool!
Michelle Smith
June 14, 2010 at 12:48 pm
Oh man, I loved the Three Investigators series as a kid. I read every one our school library had. I still remember how the lead teen won free limo service for 24 hours and successfully argued that this didn’t mean one simple calendar day but a total of 24 hours spread out over as many days as he could make it last.