Meador Manor

When I was in elementary school, I enjoyed collecting and reading the Hardy Boys mysteries. I accumulated the “picture cover” versions, and by the early 1970s there were over 50, with a new volume released each year. I remember my excitement when #52, The Shattered Helmet, debuted in 1973, and how the annual treat had lost its appeal for me by 1979 when #58, The Sting of the Scorpion, appeared.

That one turned out to be the last of the books put out by Grosset & Dunlap, which had published the series since 1927. Harriet Adams, who with her sister inherited in 1930 the Stratemeyer Syndicate that crafted the Hardy Boys and many other series books, shifted later volumes to Simon & Schuster. So the Grosset & Dunlap era ended as I became a teenager and after I had aged out of enjoying the series. By then, I had figured out that its supposed author, Franklin W. Dixon, did not exist.

My suspicions had been aroused when I had noticed that the little library room at our church had on its shelves two old editions of #8 The Mystery of Cabin Island and #27 The Secret of Skull Mountain. Instead of blue spines and picture covers, they had plain brown bindings. The interior illustrations were different, including orange endpapers of a single scene, rather than the white multi-scene ones I was used to. I now know that those versions originally had illustrated book jackets.

My curiosity was amplified when I realized they were about 210 pages, rather than 178. I began skimming one of them and quickly realized that it wasn’t the same story I had at home. Nonplussed, I checked them out and explored their alternate unreality. While the books I owned had copyright dates no earlier than 1959, the books from the church library were late 1940s editions of books that had been written in 1929 and 1948.

I liked the older versions better, even if they were quite dated in places. They were moodier with more descriptions and slower paced, they had jalopies with running boards and rumble seats, although sadly they were burdened with some repugnant ethnic stereotypes and dialects.

I was highly skeptical that a guy still publishing new books in the mid-1970s had been writing them since the 1920s, let alone revising his own work so heavily. So Franklin W. Dixon must be a pen name for various authors, and clearly some of them wrote under fewer constraints in the days of yore. In fact, the original 58 Hardy Boys and their revisions had over 20 different ghostwriters.

I now know that the 1929 version of The Secret of Cabin Island was written by Leslie McFarlane, who wrote 19 of the books, while the copy I owned was a 1966 revision by Andrew Svenson. The 1948 version of The Secret of Skull Mountain was based on an original version by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, which was rejected by the publisher. Grosset & Dunlap brought in George Waller, Jr. to rewrite it, and that was his only contribution to the series. However, the edition on my bedroom bookshelf was a third version from 1966 by David Grambs. If you want to delve into various details, hardyboys.us is a great reference on that series.

After discovering there were older versions, I rifled through the collection of an aunt to see if any of her books were original versions and found the 1946 version of #25 The Secret Panel. It had different cover art than the 1969 rewrite I had at home. It turns out that the original version was actually written by Harriet Adams, who had taken over the business in 1942 when her sister got married. Harriet claimed for years that she wrote all of the Nancy Drew books, but legal proceedings in 1980 revealed that Mildred Wirt Benson actually wrote 23 of the first 30 Nancy Drew books, and the first 32 books had six other ghostwriters, although Harriet did write over two dozen of the first 56 Nancy Drews, and she provided outlines for and edited and revised many of the syndicate’s other books.

I didn’t have the resources back then to track down additional original versions of the Hardy Boys, and our public libraries didn’t stock the various series, which were considered unworthy. Once I exhausted all of the available Hardy Boys books, my aunt suggested I try her similar series, which were also Stratemeyer Syndicate products. I was willing to read Nancy Drew and the Dana Girls mysteries, but I passed on Cherry Ames, Student Nurse and the Bobbsey Twins books.

I noticed how Carolyn Keene was credited with both Nancy Drew and the Dana Girls, but I reckoned she was a fake just like Dixon. Decades later I learned that Leslie McFarlane not only wrote most of the early Hardy Boys, but also Dana Girls #1 through #4, and that series was then taken over by Nancy Drew author Mildred Wirt Benson for #5 through #16. I gleaned those truths at series-books.com, which delves into dozens of series, focusing more on the series targeting girls but also covering a few series meant to appeal to boys.

My aunt also had a collection of Trixie Belden books, which were a breath of fresh air in comparison to the formulaic Stratemeyer Syndicate series. The first six Belden books were written by Julie Campbell Tatham, offering more characterization and serialization, although after that they had ghostwriters using the collective pseudonym of Kathryn Kenny, and they became more episodic with quirky variations.

My favorite children’s series, which I discovered in the library at my junior high school, was Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, which boasted consistent high quality under original author Robert Arthur, with more variation after his death when a handful of other writers took over. Unimpeded by the formulaic plot outlines, deadlines, and low pay that crippled the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s ghostwriters, Arthur’s works were far more creative with stronger characterization.

The series began in 1964 and Arthur produced ten entries before his death in 1969. The primitive card catalog at my junior high didn’t have series cards, and the later series entries were shelved according to the various author names: William Arden, Nick West, M.V. Carey, etc. So it took some minor sleuthing of my own to track them down across the library. The internet now tells me that William Arden was actually Dennis Lynds, Nick West was Kin Platt, and M.V. Carey was Mary Virginia Carey. In Mary’s case, the publishers worried that a book explicitly written by a woman might deter young male readers, so they used her initials, much as Dorothy Catherine Fontana, one of the best writers of Star Trek, wrote as D.C. Fontana due to sexism in television production.

After Alfred Hitchcock died in 1980, the series substituted a fictitious Hector Sebastian for the investigators to interact with or to introduce the stories, and in 1984-1985 the first thirty books were reportedly revised to replace Hitchcock with Sebastian or, for the first book, a Reginald Clarke. The original series went out of print in 1987, with Random House revamping it with older characters and more action in 1989, but legal issues halted that revival in 1990. Interestingly, the series was very popular in Germany and spawned hundreds of additional titles, radio dramas, and several movies in Deutsch.

Judy Bolton

Recently I re-read the first of the Nancy Drew mysteries, The Secret of the Old Clock, which entered the public domain this year. The internet picked up on that once I posted about it in my blog and Facebook started surfacing posts about old Grosset & Dunlap children’s series. One post caught my eye: it showed the covers of the first eight Judy Bolton books.

Judy Bolton? I knew about Judy Barton from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but I’d never heard of Judy Bolton. A quick internet search revealed it was yet another Grosset & Dunlap series, but with olive green spines for its picture cover editions rather than Nancy Drew yellow, Hardy Boys blue, or Dana Girls beige, and a different shade of green than had been used for Cherry Ames. The Bolton books were attributed to Margaret Sutton. I was curious as to who might have actually written them. Did the ghostwriters include Benson, McFarlane, or others?

I was surprised to read that Margaret Sutton was a real person, albeit born as Rachel Beebe, who had married a Sutton and perhaps legally changed her first name to Margaret after her books became popular to better secure her rights. She wrote the entire series from 1932 to 1967, and despite it being published by Grosset & Dunlap, it was not a Stratemeyer Syndicate product.

Sutton’s books did not conform to the syndicate’s norms after she successfully fought the publisher’s editors over having her Judy Bolton character age from a 15-year-old girl in the first book to a married woman in her early 20s by the end of the series, while most Stratemeyer characters barely aged at all. Judy Bolton visibly grew up, graduated from high school, worked as a secretary, and by book 11 was engaged to one of the two guys interested in her in the earlier volumes. They were married in book #17, and Judy continued to have adventures while married to her FBI agent husband, although the editors never agreed to Sutton’s desire for Judy to have children. Sutton did manage to have the young couple take in a little girl for a few volumes. She set the stories in her home state of Pennsylvania, without naming it explicitly, and drew upon various personal experiences for inspiration.

About four or five million of the 38 Judy Bolton adventures were sold over the decades, with admirers praising the books’ continuity and character growth compared to the Stratemeyer Syndicate offerings. However, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were always big sellers, and Sutton was convinced that the syndicate pressured Grosset & Dunlap into eventually dropping non-syndicate series.

Since I had just re-read the first of the Nancy Drews, I decided to read the first of the Judy Bolton books for a comparison. However, The Vanishing Shadow won’t enter the public domain until 2028, and I wasn’t willing to fork over $12 or more for a used copy on Amazon or AbeBooks. So I borrowed an online copy on the Internet Archive.

Oh dear. I recognize there are Judy Bolton fans out there, and at least one of her daughters is still alive and hosting an annual fan event in Pennsylvania. More power to them, but I was anything but impressed.

The book began in 1930 as a manuscript entitled Melissa of Dry Brook Hollow or The Great Roulsville Flood. Sutton had drawn inspiration from the catastrophic failure of a concrete dam in Austin, Pennsylvania in 1911. That dam was commissioned by a paper mill and designed to be 30 feet thick, but it was built only 20 feet thick and lacking an underground slab to prevent soil seepage. Water seeped under it, the dam developed large cracks, which were falsely attributed to drying concrete, and a week of rainstorms led to its failure less than two years after its completion.

Dozens of people were killed and property damage amounted to ten million dollars. The madam of the town’s brothel saw the failure coming and warned the town. Sutton would put a flawed dam and a paper mill in her story, but she would have Judy’s cowardly brother be the one warning the townsfolk.

To satisfy the editors, Sutton changed her heroine’s name from Melissa to Judy and added a silly episode with the criminals abducting and imprisoning Judy until she promises not to talk about them. That subsequently makes Judy seem rather irresponsible in not adequately warning others of the danger represented by the dam, although it could illustrate a youngster still in an early stage of moral development.

There were other weird issues, such as Judy receiving anonymously a bunch of tickets to a spelling bee and dance. It is unclear why she would need to still pay for one or more of them at that point, why they would be sent anonymously, and did spelling bees often have associated dances back in the day?

At one point, she destroys a makeshift dam to restore water to Dry Brook, only to later find that will increase the pressure on the substandard concrete dam. The plot sets things up for her and some new friends to try to redirect the brook, but they fail to act before a rainstorm dooms the town.

A little cat is introduced and then lost in a side plot that contributes little to the tale. Later revisions of the book reportedly addressed those various shortcomings, but the lapses show how inexperienced Sutton was. In an interview in 1984, she was asked if she had a favorite Judy Bolton book. She replied: “I don’t have a favorite. There are some that I know aren’t quite as good as others. For instance, The Vanishing Shadow wasn’t quite as well written because I didn’t know about viewpoint; I’d never studied writing, and I’d shifted over the viewpoint quite frequently in that book.”

While Nancy Drew had a kind and supportive father who assisted her adventures, in this first outing Judy’s grandparents are off-putting and her parents almost entirely sidelined. Judy herself is often unpleasant and unlikable. She is mean to her timid brother, who is an annoying coward who undergoes some character growth only to have it undermined in a lengthy and tedious exchange with reporters about his townspeople-saving exploit.

The criminals’ motivations are confused, with a bizarre twist in which (spoiler alert) the smartly dressed guy with a sporty roadster that many girls in town want to ride with is revealed to be wearing a wig, pink nail polish, rouge, and penciled eyebrows to disguise his normally bald and ghostly pale appearance. Why he is spotted at one point riding a bicycle without his disguise is never properly explained, merely serving as a spooky interlude.

Some fans recommend trying out a much later book in the series, but that goes against the continuing character growth and chronological storylines that are the strengths of the series. While I disliked it, The Vanishing Shadow is still a better read than some of the many series books I read in my youth. Sutton did far better with it than poor Dr. John Button did in the abysmal original version of Hardy Boys #19 The Disappearing Floor. Button haplessly followed a bizarre 10-page plot outline by Edna Stratemeyer Squier, who shortly thereafter left the syndicate in the hands of sister Harriet, who had James D. Lawrence write a completely new version in 1964.

My own preferences are Three Investigators > Trixie Belden > Hardy Boys > Nancy Drew > Dana Girls, emphasizing the early original books in each series over their uneven later additions and revisions. If I read more of Judy Bolton, I suspect she would land somewhere below Belden, but I’ve no incentive to confirm that. When I need an easy escape, I’d much rather read adult light fare by Mary Stewart or Edith Pargeter.

I recently finished listening to the 40 hour Audible version of Battle Cry of Freedom, a Civil War history. I’d been inspired to listen to it after finishing Erik Larson’s compelling The Demon of Unrest, which covered the attack on Fort Sumter. The second book was far more comprehensive, but also much drier. So I was ready for something different yet familiar as I thumbed through the purchases I’d made for my Audible library.

I considered starting David McCullough’s John Adams or Truman, but those are 30 and 54 hours long, respectively, and I wasn’t ready for such a long commitment to a nonfiction work.

I also have James Michener’s Hawaii, which is historical fiction. I remember reading a two-part condensation of his report on Kent State in the March and April 1971 issues of Reader’s Digest. Mind you, I wasn’t reading those at age four. Rather, in junior high I acquired a collection of Reader’s Digests dating back to the 1930s from a friend of my father’s, a man who had purchased a lifetime subscription during the Great Depression. I would sometimes grab one to get a slice of life from the past, although I finally got rid of the magazines as they were infested with silverfish. Anyway, I also rejected starting Hawaii, since it runs 52 hours.

That led me to consider a Mary Roberts Rinehart mystery, but I’ve consumed a dozen of them over the past six years, and I couldn’t remember if I’d already listened to The Great Mistake or not, and my Audible library didn’t show it as finished, so I started that.

I didn’t recognize the first chapters, and by the time it was ringing a bell, I was so far along, and realized I didn’t remember whodunnit, that it became the first Rinehart re-listen for me.

Later, checking my blog posts, I saw that in my 2024 end-of-year book review summary, I wrote: “I listened to Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Great Mistake from 1940, but it was far less memorable than her mysteries The After House of 1914, The Window at the White Cat of 1910, or her comedic Where There’s a Will in 1912.”

Well, I guess that helps explain why I could re-listen to it only a couple of years later. I’d been walking 1.5 to 2 hours almost every morning, leaving the house early since August and September had been miserably hot. Yeah, I know, I live in a town with an economy based on fossil fuels, so we’re all just part of the problem.

Anyway, my walking routine could get me through the book in a week or less. I kept on with it, and meanwhile finished reading the superb Lessons in Chemistry on my Kindle, which was published in 2022 and thus much more modern in tone than Rinehart, even though its fictional events took place in the early 1960s.

If I’m listening to fiction, I like to be reading non-fiction, and vice versa. So I looked for something non-fiction on my Kindle or, better yet, a physical book since it was too @#$% hot to go anywhere, and thus I didn’t mind something bulky.

My eyes wandered to the stack of books beside my recliner and spotted one that arrived a couple of months ago. Over 7″ wide, over 10″ long, and almost 1.5″ thick, weighing in at over 2.5 pounds, it was Trek Star: The Geek Life of Doug Drexler – How Star Trek’s Legendary Designer Made All His Idiotic Adolescent Dreams Come True. I love Drexler, and in late 2025 I had backed a documentary about him on Kickstarter. My autographed Blu-Ray might arrive in a few months, so it was a good time to read the book.

It was a fun read, and admittedly, the Rinehart book was a good listen the second time around. I’m not really into the whodunit puzzles of most classic mysteries, spending little mental energy trying to figure out a solution, but instead relaxing in the atmosphere and enjoying them more as procedurals and escapist adventures.

Listening to it again had me spending more time trying to remember the eventual solution, with only dim recollections of late revelations. Surprisingly, that actually enhanced the book for me, but not enough that I plan to go back and listen again to any more Rineharts. There are so many other novel experiences, pun intended, that await in Audible, Kindle, and physical book formats.

After my Rinehart re-listen snafu, I made amends by making my next Audible listen Richard Osman’s fourth entry in his Thursday Murder Club series: The Last Devil to Die from 2023. It was also quite fun, while also, as that series often does, leaving me deeply moved. It focuses on four pensioners with deep characterizations. Over the previous books we’ve seen the worsening Alzheimer’s of one character’s husband, and that became a central emotional focus for this outing. I was crying as I walked along the Pathfinder Parkway, listening to the couple bravely confronting their dilemma, and I appreciated how Osman allowed that tragedy to realistically cripple the capacity of one of the main characters. The continuity in his series, where old foes can linger on and events leave lasting scars, is one of its strengths.

That leaves one more in the Thursday Murder Club series to go in my Audible library, and Osman is now alternating publishing entries in the series with ones from his new We Solve Murders series. I’ve already got the first one of that newer series in my Audible library, and the second was just released.

While finishing The Last Devil to Die, I completed Trek Star and on a whim opted for a rather odd re-read. I’ve been paying attention to what enters the public domain each year, and I recalled that the first four of the Nancy Drew books from 1930 are now free and would likely be available at Project Gutenberg. I read all of them decades ago, back when a spinster aunt loaned me her old mysteries to keep me busy. Having consumed all of the Hardy Boys and Three Investigators I could find, she set me onto Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and the Dana Girls.

I downloaded The Secret of the Old Clock, which was as thin as I remembered it. My favorites of the Nancy Drew books were Benson’s penultimate work in the series, The Clue in the Crumbling Wall, which will become public domain in 2041, and The Crooked Banister, which included a robot programmed with a cassette tape, but it won’t be public domain until 2067.

The re-read reminded me that Nancy’s first “chum” was Helen Corning; her athletic female friend George and the “pudgy” Bess Marvin, a counterpart to the Hardy Boys’ Chet Morton, did not appear until the fifth book.

While I appreciate that ghostwriter Mildred Wirt Benson, who wrote 23 of the first 30 books, gave Nancy more agency and capability than the norm a century ago, the books were already so dated by the late 1950s that they were gradually revised. Ethnic stereotypes and offensive slang that afflicted many of the Stratemeyer Syndicate‘s series were addressed, such as the drunk black caretaker character in the first book, with his heavily stereotyped black English vernacular. Technology and social norms were updated, although sadly Nancy lost some of her agency and spunk, and, as so often happens, the books were made cheaper by shortening them.

I might or might not re-read any more of the “starter set” of Nancy Drews, given that I still have a slew of adult Mary Stewart, Edith Pargeter, and Louise Penny books that would be fresh for me. As for novel children’s books, a few months ago I read the first of four Carson Street Detective Agency or “Neil and Swede” books by Keith Robertson. Those are all out of print, but they are all available for online borrowing via scans in the Internet Archive.

Happy reading!