Leslie McFarlane - Ghost of the Hardy Boys: The Writer Behind the Worlds Most Famous Boy Detectives

Published in 2022 by godine

Boston, Massachusetts

Copyright 1976, 2022 by The Estate of Leslie McFarlane

Introduction Copyright 2022 by Marilyn S. Greenwald

all rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For more information, please visit www.godine.com

Cover Art Dan Grissom

library of congress
cataloging-in-publication data

Names: McFarlane, Leslie, 1902-1977, author. Greenwald, Marilyn S., writer of introduction.

Title: Ghost of the Hardy boys : a memoir / Leslie McFarlane ; introduction by Marilyn S. Greenwald.

Description: Boston : Godine, 2022. Reprint. Originally published Methuen Publications. [1976].

Identifiers: lccn 2021052625 (print) | lccn 2021052626 (ebook) | isbn 9781567927177 (hardback) isbn 9781567927184 (ebook)

Subjects: lsch : McFarlane, Leslie, 1902-1977. McFarlane, Leslie, 1902-1977CharactersHardy Boys. Stratemeyer Syndicate. | Authors, Canadian20th centuryBiography. | Detective and mystery storiesAuthorship. Hardy Boys (Fictitious characters) | Young adult fictionAuthorship. | Teenagers in literature. | BoysBooks and reading.

Classification: lcc PR9199.3.M3148 Z46 2022 (print) lcc PR9199.3.M3148 (ebook) ddc 813/.52 [B]dc23/eng/20211117

lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021052625

lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021052626

To Patricia, Norah and Brian,
who grew up with the boys

Ghost of the Hardy Boys was first published in 1976. Leslie McFarlane began working on the memoir in the early 1970s. Working titles he abandoned included How I Became Franklin W. Dixon, The Hardys of Bayport, and The Bayport Boys.

During my thirty years of teaching college, I learned to listen closely to people in their late teens and early twenties talk about their lives, their goals, their views of the world. It always gave me a fresh perspective. I also paid attention to smaller details, such as the way they dressed, their interests in reading, movies, and music, and the language they used. Listening and observing kept me current on popular cultureas I grew older, I felt the students kept me young.

Over the last few years, I noticed a particular word that kept popping up in their vocabulary: meta. Like many other things, language is marked by trends, and this word was new to me. They seemed to use meta as an adjective, but I couldnt grasp the context, so the meaning eluded me. Then one day, during a class I taught about reviewing the arts, a student was critiquing a film wed watched together that took place on a movie set. It was all very meta, she said. In other words, a film within a film.

That instantly clarified it. She was talking about something that was self-referential, such as this filmmaker exploring the making of a film. A story within a story.

When I think of my connection to Leslie McFarlane, I go back to what my student said that day: Its all very meta. In my case, the association with McFarlane was meta squaredor as students might say: meta on steroids.

When I began writing a biography of McFarlane, The Secret of the Hardy Boys, I was a writer writing about a writer. In addition, I was writing about a writer whose children had also become writers. The story within a story had yet another meta dimension: It was a story within a story within a story.

As I conducted my research, I discovered many meta aspects to McFarlanes story. For example, many of the glowing testimonials about the Hardy Boys series and many of the websites dedicated to it were designed and written by adults whose parents loved the books and who had introduced them to reading the series; many had, in turn, bought the books for their own children.

Everywhere I turned, there were stories within storiesit was all very meta. When I began my investigation into McFarlanes life, one of the first places I looked was in his autobiography, Ghost of the Hardy Boys. Again, meta: a writer writing about how he became a newspaper reporter and then the founding ghostwriter of one of the most enduring series in the history of young-adult literature. I had read the Nancy Drew books when I was young, but I never read the Hardy Boys. I assumed the style of both was similar, which wasnt exactly an accurate assumption. I chose to write about McFarlane rather than Mildred Wirt Benson, the original ghostwriter of the Nancy Drew series, even though Benson would seem my more natural subjectlike me, she had an interest in journalism for most of her life and worked on newspapers in Ohio. But I was never drawn to her. Instead, a Washington Post column by the humorist Gene Weingarten led me to McFarlane. Weingartens column described a bout of nostalgia that sent him reaching to the top of an old bookshelf to find the dusty Hardy Boys books he had loved as a boy.

Weingarten began to wonder: Who was Franklin W. Dixon? He quickly learned that Dixon was a pen name and that the real author of the first Hardy Boys books was none other than a young newspaper reporter. After tracking down McFarlanes daughter, Weingarten discovered that the man was a gifted writer who kept decades of diaries describing his life, his career, and his drive to become a successful novelist. Weingarten then discovered Ghost of the Hardy Boys, a book he described as elegant and full of charm and pathos and whimsy. The writing is restrained, the characterizations deep and rich, the humor nuanced.

Thats when I became hopelessly intrigued by Franklin W. Dixon as a flesh-and-blood writer with lofty literary ambitionsand someone who relied on his own raw talent to provide for his growing family in rural northern Ontario. Weingartens mention of McFarlanes diaries was tantalizing to meI could only imagine the tales they would tell.

So I turned to Ghost of the Hardy Boys.

When I began reading McFarlanes memoir, I almost immediately understood why the books were wildly popular: He had a fluid style that was at once humorous, poignant, and extremely readable. Ghost is, as they say, a page-turner. I suspected that McFarlane as a writer was like a great athlete: He made the work look effortless on the surface, but beneath was a perfectionist who had devoted years of discipline and commitment to his craft. It turned out I was right; in Ghost, the reader gets a clue about how much writing meant to McFarlane, and that it was far more than just a paycheckhe openly confesses this, although he couches his love of writing in humor.

Early in the book he describes how he was introduced to the concept of the Hardy Boys and how he came to be the series first ghostwriter. A struggling young newspaper reporter and freelance writer of magazine articles and short stories in his early twenties, McFarlane felt his selection as the first author of a new series of books for young readers came at the perfect timejust as other writing assignments began to dry up and just as he was becoming increasingly worried about money. If given the assignment to write the first three Hardy Boys books, he said, most practical freelance writers would run to their typewriter, start pounding out the first book at breakneck speed, stuff the manuscript into an envelope, mail it, and hope to please their editor.