Hi there, everyone. 🙂 I was made aware of the recent popular post on this sub arguing that The Hardy Boys series books have not aged well. As one of the world’s leading Hardy Boys collectors, I couldn’t disagree more, and I hope you’ll read this long post to understand why these and other children’s series books are such treasures in 2023. In many ways, the Hardy Boys are like the Scooby Doo of children’s literature, and there’s definitely a big overlap in the two fandoms.
First, you need to understand that the Hardy Boys were first published in 1927, by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which also produced Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, The Bobbsey Twins, and many others which are mostly long forgotten. The series continued until the early 1960s when it was recognized that the books needed revision to update the plots and verbiage to relevancy in that era. One of the books in particular was extraordinarily inappropriate due to racist language and characterizations.
As a result, the revised, slightly shortened and updated books – now featuring stories involving modern technology, the Space Age, etc – continued the series to 1979 with 58 books in the original hardcover series targeting approximately 4th grade readers. As some people noted, the series has continued in various formats for decades afterwards, notably the Casefiles series which features actual murders and notably more adult themes. (The frequency of knockouts, by the way, is that the books were required to have every chapter end with a cliffhanger.)
There is an argument that Nancy Drew is a more relevant character in 2023 than Frank and Joe Hardy, and I agree – she’s an icon for girls and women everywhere. I’m not qualified to analyze her themes in more depth.
But Tom Swift and the Hardys present several themes extremely valuable to children that persists to the present day:
1) Optimism about the future, and a desire to constantly learn new things;
2) A strong sense of justice – a certainty that wrongdoers should be punished and the importance of equality of all under the law;
3) Using logic and critical thinking for yourself to solve problems;
4) The importance of treating everyone with kindness no matter where you go;
5) A firm belief in the impartality and truth of science and the ability of innovation to solve problems and lift up humanity;
6) Most important to me personally – a window into other interests that a child may not yet have discovered.
I discovered the Hardy Boys in 1993 when my mother brought home #43, The Mystery of the Aztec Warrior in response to my interest at the time in Mesoamerican history. I was 8 at the time, very much the target audience for the books, and devoured the rest of the series. I’ve now collected them for 30 years, and I would have never developed such an interest in history, geography, and international affairs without the Hardy Boys.
Even in 2023, with the Internet at our fingertips, these books present a child with a wide ranging introduction to an incredible array of places and topics, because that’s what these kinds of series books do – there’s a theme for the book, usually a topic of scientific interest (Tom Swift) or a hobby or area of historical interest (the Hardy Boys) with a mystery surrounding it and very often the books are set in far-flung locales that prompts one to want to learn more about it and visit it someday. The Hardy Boys travel all over North, Central, and South America, the Caribbean, parts of Europe, North Africa, and even as far as Australia and Hong Kong in the original series, solving mysteries and meeting a wide array of people. (Notice again the similarity with Scooby Doo.)
The books have endured for almost 100 years as best sellers – we’re coming up on the anniversary – and it’s in large part because series books are like a sitcom. It’s a timeless, insulated environment where you can enjoy the story and thrill of adventure and rest assured that all will be made right in the end, with the underlying themes I described above.
It might surprise some of you to learn that even though you might perceive the Hardy Boys as old-fashioned, there were active, reactionary attempts to remove them from school libraries in the 1950s and 60s as ‘junk’ and full of ideas that children shouldn’t be exposed to, especially once the revised editions were released. They were progressive children’s literature for their age, and I would argue that considering how toned down and generic a lot of verbiage is in more modern children’s books, some of the older words and phrasing found in series books is actually invaluable to increasing a child’s vocabulary – i was better prepared to read Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Salinger after reading the Hardy Boys.
Series books have changed and evolved and part of the timelessness of the Hardy Boys series is that the characters are rebooted in a new series on a semi regular basis, again much like Scooby Doo, with new and updated stories but still a comforting mystery sitcom with familiar themes and outcomes. They make kids want to read the next story, and the next, and fostering a love of reading may be the greatest influence the Hardy Boys had on me and many others overall.
For these and so many other reasons, I can’t express enough my hope that those of you reading this will think back to the joy the books gave you as a child and consider introducing your own children to them. I already have.
If you have any questions about this topic, I’m happy to try to answer.
by LordTetravus