In a way, Leslie McFarlane was like a farmer. He produced something important and it grew and grew. He wasn’t paid much for it. Actually, farmers do much better.
Leslie McFarlane was a writer.
A few years ago I thought I’d read a few of the Hardy Boys books that I had read when I was a youngster. I was curious to see if I found them silly or a little far-fetched. It was 55 years ago that I, like most boys my age, enjoyed reading the mystery detective books about Frank and Joe Hardy and their stout farm boy chum, Chet Morton.
The books are published in 20 different languages around the world and more than 70 million copies have been sold. Their adventures have been continuously in print since 1927. The series was an instant success: by mid-1929 over 115,000 books had been sold. Now the books are selling over a million copies a year (the first Hardy Boys book, The Tower Treasure, written in 1927, alone sells over 100,000 copies a year).
I had some of the original books from my public school days –the ones with the brownish-grey covers. But I hadn’t seen the books since my boyhood years as nephews had borrowed them and they were passed on to their kids to read.
The first 20 books –the original ones – have 213 pages. The latter books and the original revised ones have 180 pages.
The books were located. They had been sitting in a basement rec room near Carleton Place, Ont. I thought that was interesting because the man who wrote the first 19 Hardy Boys books was born in Carleton Place, in 1902.
Leslie McFarlane was the first ghost writer of the series. He also wrote the Nancy Drew books. McFarlane was one of four sons of the local school principal in Carleton Place. In 1910 the father accepted the principal position at the Haileybury school and the family moved to northern Ontario.
Young Leslie was a voracious reader and after graduation he took a job as a reporter for the Cobalt Daily Nugget. Soon he moved outside of Sudbury to a cottage on Ramsay Lake to begin his life as a freelance writer. He was a whiz at typing. An American by the name of Edward Stratemeyer, an author and publisher of children’s books was looking for a good writer to ghost write a new series called the Hardy Boys, under the name of Franklin W. Dixon. He was never to reveal to anyone that he wrote the books.
Who would have guessed that the man who wrote detective stories that happened in and around the fictional American city of Bayport, was a Canadian living in the woods near Sudbury?
While the Stratemeyer empire made millions of dollars on the books, McFarlane received between $80 and $125 per book –$80 during the depression years.
McFarlane died in 1977 in Whitby, a year after he officially blew the whistle on Franklin W. Dixon in his witty memoirs, The Ghost of the Hardy Boys.
At the age of 25, Leslie McFarlane banged out The Tower Treasure in a matter of weeks.
When I got some of my old Hardy Boys books back, I was disappointed that The Tower Treasure was not among them. Then a few months later I was browsing through books at a thrift store in Long Beach, California and saw many Hardy Boys book on a bottom shelf. There were a few of the original 1920s books all priced at only one American dollar. I bought three of the old books, including The Tower Treasure. It was interesting reading. I’ve read four of the originals now.
I still don’t know what Chet did on the Morton farm besides working on his brilliant yellow jalopy.
