Hardy Boys Books and the Scene of Reading

I do not remember myself ever not reading. I do remember, though, the first books I read with an intentionality budded by sheer breath-held interest, books that I requested as birthday and Christmas presents, books that I embraced and which embraced me back, books that bridled my imagination and led it to the pasture of small-town Bayport: the Hardy Boys books. It’s true. The gesso that readied my life-long love of reading, that underlay my forty plus years of studying, teaching, and writing about books, was the intrepid sleuthing adventures of teenaged amateur detectives Frank and Joe Hardy.

What, after all, was there not for a young boy to like? Frank and Joe lived lives canopied by fast-forward action, mystery, and a shuddery, seeping atmosphere of noir. Their dad Fenton did not sell insurance or cars or hardware, did not occupy a nondescript cubicle as a nondescript drone in a nondescript office, did not farm or bake or plumb or excavate. No, he was a professional detective. He unsecreted secrets, unbaffled the baffling, clarified the recondite, explained the inexplicable, penetrated the impenetrable—and best of all, he often sought his sons’ assistance. They had girl friends and frolicked at beach parties and barbeques. They had cool friends, my favorites being roly-poly Chet with his yellow jalopy and buff Biff with his fearsome pugilistic skills always at their service. They went to school but never sat in a classroom. School made no claims on their time: they never had to study, do long division, or memorize all the states and their capitals. They never experienced the distress of bringing home a report card. They had a car, motorcycles, and a boat. They spoke Spanish. They regularly bested adult authority figures. Frank and Joe garmented the collective id of the planet’s prepubescent males with velvety wish fulfillment.

Inevitably, the Hardy Boys books have drawn the lofty disdain of critics. The rasp of literary theory and its critical pieties has zested the Hardy Boys rind. For some, the books are aesthetically moribund: lackluster prose coupled with templated plots conjoined with wholly absent character development. For others, the boys epitomize, as their name suggests, the hardness and hardiness of the militantly gendered male personality, and their stories reinforce the relations of a patriarchal social structure, a world of male struggle for success, a world in which mothers and girl friends appear in supporting roles only. For others, the stories perpetuate racial and ethnic stereotypes or inscribe social class hierarchies. For others, bent on queering the books, the girl friends and fraternal relations mask a homosocial, perhaps even a homoerotic, thematic. For still others, noting the strange ineptitude that seemingly subverts Fenton Hardy’s professional and paternal authority, the books enact a totemic dance around the figure of the vanquished father.

While these criticisms may have merit, I think they are ungenerous because they overlook the value of the books as narratives, as ordered encounters with lives not our own, lives that report experiences not our own and from which we can learn. I passed from my world, with its choices and contingencies and vicissitudes, to the Hardy boys’ world and I experienced it. I saw it, heard it, even felt it. The space between those worlds shrunk with intimacy, and if there was a line of demarcation between them, a border of some kind, I passed over it with the passport of a willing imagination. And then I returned, if not a better person, then certainly a smarter one. David Abram, philosopher and environmental ethicist, observes that the tales told in oral cultures carry “nested in their narratives much of the accumulated knowledge of the culture,” that they convey the “practical knowledge” necessary “in one’s daily actions and interactions,” and that once those narratives were written, they became unchanging and autonomous, losing their grounding in the specific contexts of situation and character that called them forth. I would assert, however, that written narratives can perform the same function Abram ascribes to oral narrative.

Reading the Hardy Boys books, I learned that sibling relations did not need to be as fraught as was my brother Dennis’s and mine. I learned that fathers and sons can share interests and confidences, and that fathers were sometimes fallible. I learned that mothers love without qualification and that spinster aunts are all bark and no bite. I learned that, despite the enshrined cultural narrative that celebrates them, small towns can harbor people with dark intentions, can be cosseted enclaves filled with jeopardy and intrigue. I learned that analytical thought required one to track and trace, decipher heralding signs, and draw conclusions. Most important, perhaps, I learned that no difference need obstruct the stimuli of words on a page and the stimuli of imagination. Those words and I became a conjoined focus, a coming together of the external me reading an arrangement of letters and internal world of the narrative. The subtle and large gestures of a character’s eye or face or body; the gradients of event; the tonal resonance of voice and mood; the depth and dimension, the cavities and densities of place—these were as carnal, as enfleshed, as I was, as alive as I was, their inhalations and exhalations as rhythmic as my own. I made my mark on those stories; they made their mark on me.

I still have those Hardy Boys books, boxed and carefully stored in the basement. I recently pulled out and reread one that I remember being a particular favorite, The House on the Cliff. I expected to be recognized, welcomed, like some prodigal son returning from a far-off country. Instead, it shunned me and sent me away. I was not stirred by the forbiddingly secret caves, was not shaken by the always lurking, drug-smuggling villains, was not pinwheeled by the slipstreaming danger that enveloped the boys seemingly in every chapter. My interest in this book, so foundational in my reading life, was a lost drachma that no amount of light, no amount of careful sweeping, could uncover. I should have known better. The boys and their adventure were carapaced in timelessness, while I had become a creature of time. I was not the same reader. I changed, and suddenly the books that had become transparent in my hands, unmediated media, grew opaque, caused a vague dissatisfaction, seemed somehow monochromatic, limited, a threshold I felt an urging to cross. The very books that had brought me to reading had spurred me to reach beyond them to a relationship with more complex texts. Exactly why, I cannot say. It’s a mystery, one worthy, perhaps, of Frank and Joe.