The Tower Treasure by Franklin W. Dixon (The Hardy Boys: Tower Treasure - Franklin W. Dixon)

Member Name: Lichfield1979

Product:	The Hardy Boys: Tower Treasure - Franklin W. Dixon
Date:	11/09/08 (356 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: 1st book in a great series.

Disadvantages: Won't appeal to everybody.

The Hardy Boys # 1

The Tower Treasure

By Franklin W. Dixon

Frank and Joe Hardy are the sons of famous private detective Fenton Hardy and solve mysteries of their own when they aren't attending Bayport High School, which would be most of the time. It must always be the summer holidays or something. Sixteen-year-old Frank has brown hair and his blonde haired brother Joe is fifteen. Yes I know what you're probably thinking, but wait; I'll explain that in a minute. That's about all the characterisation you get to be honest, although I'll concede it's possible to draw a more detailed biographical sketch if you composite information from all the books in the series. There are some wonderful descriptions of food though, and a nice comedic sequence involving a practical joke and the local police.

We first meet the boys talking to each other whilst riding their motorbikes along the coast. Apparently being heard over the noise of the wind and the engines isn't a problem for them, so I guess they must have loud voices. They quickly become ensconced in a plot involving a robber and some hidden treasure, and are deeply concerned with clearing the name of a friend who gets falsely accused of being up to no good. I wonder how that goes. Meanwhile, their father investigates a mystery of his own, and the boys help him with that too, except, you know, perhaps these two totally unrelated cases have more in common than anybody thinks. I bet I'm the only person who thought of that.

This book was written by Canadian writer Leslie McFarlane in 1927, from an outline by Edward Stratemeyer, and is one of the best-selling children's books of all time. McFarlane would have been around twenty-four years old. It was revised and condensed by Stratemeyer's daughter Harriet Adams in 1959, ostensibly to modernize the text but perhaps also to consolidate the Stratemeyer Syndicate's authorship of The Hardy Boys. McFarlane was originally paid a flat fee of $125 for this work and did not earn any royalties. He led his life in obscurity but never expressed bitterness, knowing full well the nature of the contract he was signing to become the first and most accomplished ghostwriter of The Hardy Boys. Stratemeyer died in 1930 and control passed to his daughters, Adams and Edna Squier.

Because the Stratemeyer Syndicate had already enjoyed success with the Tom Swift series, and went on to employ another ghostwriter, Mildred Wirt Benson, to author the Nancy Drew series under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, it is difficult to argue that The Hardy Boys would not have sold well without McFarlane's participation. Unmistakeably though, he is responsible for the early character and charm of the series as we know it today. Leslie McFarlane wrote the first sixteen volumes between 1927 and 1936 and a handful more sporadically in the mid 1940s. He also authored a few volumes for the Dave Fearless and Dana Girls series. His own more serious literary ambitions never came to fruition, though he did publish crime novels in his own name as well as writing for pulp magazines and television. His hard to get hold of autobiography "The Ghost of the Hardy Boys" published in 1976 is fascinating for fans of the series, although over the years other sources such the Stratemeyer Syndicate's own archives have added to the information available in the public domain. However, the identity of the real Franklin W. Dixon is probably not widely known to fans at the age they first discover the original series and its many sequels.

To have created characters that are still in print after eighty years is a huge achievement, even if McFarlane refused to admit his obvious fondness for his "juvenile" creations during his own lifetime. Before the syndicate editors hacked his work to pieces three decades later, these books contained some fine and loving detail, of which he ought to have been proud. Sadly, it's possible his private aspirations wouldn't allow it. One of his most treasured possessions was said to be a reply he once received to a letter he wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald. After he departed, the volumes in the series became by turns more formulaic, more stereotypical, and more eccentric, as they passed into the hands of lesser writers. Eventually, in my humble opinion, it was Vincent Buranelli and Jim Lawrence, and their editors Andrew Svenson and Lilo Wuenn, and not Harriet Adams, who were responsible for restoring consistency to the series and ensuring it endured through the 1960s and 1970s and into the 1980s, although by then it had become a very different phenomenon to that which The Tower Treasure had started in 1927.

At times, it does appear there were two competing factions competing for primacy over the franchise. In the late 1960s, Adams finally backed away from The Hardy Boys, to concentrate exclusively on the Nancy Drew series, for which she had long since been the primary writer already, after Mildred Wirt Benson parted company with the syndicate in the mid 1950s. Adams died in 1982. Her sister Edna Squier, who had outlined many of the early Nancy Drew volumes and a few of the Hardy Boys stories, whilst Adams originally oversaw The Hardy Boys, had not been involved with the syndicate since the 1940s. Leslie McFarlane died in 1977, thirty years after his last involvement, when his wife had written a volume.

In 1979 the series moved from Grosset & Dunlap to Simon & Schuster, and collectors don't consider the subsequent volumes to be part of the original canon of fifty-eight books, although there was considerable editorial continuity, and Buranelli and Lawrence continued to write most of the manuscripts for a few more years. This perception is gradually beginning to change, particularly after the earliest Wanderer imprints were republished a couple of years back, presented in a more traditional cover format. For the most part the first fifty-eight books were published at a rate of roughly one each year between 1927 and 1979, with the addendum that twelve of the revised texts were effectively new volumes in their own right, that just shared the old titles, and another seven made very substantial alterations indeed. The biggest change after the move from Grosset & Dunlap to Simon & Schuster was that twenty-seven new volumes were produced in the span of little more than five years. These books are commonly referred to as the digests.

The real break came in 1986, when for the first time since 1958, when the project to revise the original volumes was conceived, no new Hardy Boys story was published. The digest series did eventually return, but from 1987 it ran parallel with a new flagship series, The Hardy Boys Casefiles, which was purportedly aimed at a slightly older demographic. The last two digests before the reboot were in many ways the prototype for this change in tone towards more dangerous and cinematic stories, but subsequently the digests regressed to a more childish and less charming incarnation of what they had once been, although they continued to be published at a rate of six a year until the series was discontinued in 2005, seven years after the one hundred and twenty seventh and final casefile had ended the eleven year run of that series. Other spin-offs have had varying degrees of success dating back to the 1980s, notably various adventures featuring both Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. The current successor series to the digests is exploring the use of a first person perspective for the first time, although I haven't read any, and can't comment as to its efficacy. There have been a few different TV adaptations over the years, mostly a long time ago, and most famously starring Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy in the 1970s.

The eras roughly speaking are the McFarlane era from 1927-1945, although John Button wrote five volumes between 1938-1942 and many readers detect an unpleasant shift in tone while McFarlane was away. There then followed an interim period of eight different authors between 1946-1957. Between 1959-1973 these first thirty-eight books were republished in varying states of revision, and some were entirely rewritten, although the volumes from the late fifties in particular were scarcely touched. Concurrently, between 1960-1979, the final twenty books of the original canon were published, and these exist only in their original format. At first there appear to have been two editorial groups with slightly different visions, one led by Harriet Adams, the other steered by the core of writers and editors who consolidated the series in the 1970s, although Andrew Svenson seems to have been the bridge between both. Lilo Wuenn's ongoing editorship then provided continuity for the more prolific phase from 1979-1985, although after Jim Lawrence and Vincent Buranelli stopped penning new volumes this era seems to split in two at roughly the end of 1982.

Just to confuse the hell out of everybody, the British editions published by Armada were given a completely arbitrary numbering system based on little more than what clumps of books they were contractually obliged to give precedence to at the time. So this first story, The Tower Treasure, is number thirty-one in the eyes of many British readers, and could well have carried the copyright designation 1959 and not 1927 in the paperback editions they owned growing up, although there were older hardback printings going back a while.

Although it's often said the canon is fifty-eight books, I'm tempted to say you have to include the thirteen digests that were written by three original series authors. And maybe more that were written by new writers, but during that same period and under the same editorial control. There was even one book supposedly translated from German by a long-standing editor. Even if you go right through to the end of the pre-casefile era, it's not as simple as saying there are eighty-five volumes. The last two are pretty much casefiles in tone, and there are actually two original series volumes that were never published in the UK in paperback, one of which scandalously enough was the Hardy Boys' second ever adventure, and one of the best of the whole series. Furthermore, there are the twelve revisions which are pretty much books in their own right, and another seven which are fairly independent to a lesser extent. There are eight more revisions that are barely changed at all, and eleven more that are somewhat different but mainly only edited for length and a few details here and there.

To give you a quick idea of which version a given copy probably is: the original text of The Tower Treasure had 214 pages and the revised text is 180 pages, although the British edition had the type reset to 160 pages. The original text will have twenty-five chapters and the revised text twenty chapters. The original text is copyright 1927, the revised text 1959.

Looking back now I must admit I find the various iterations the series went through fascinating, although it's a shame that many kids will have grown up not knowing the provenance of the stories they adored, or even that in all likelihood, the books they are familiar with were not even the original prose, and in many cases, not even the original plots either.

I'd say they're perfect for kids who've had a gutful of school reading books. To be sure, The Hardy Boys series has always been roundly criticised by literary purists, and increasingly over time it defied plausibility in a fashion ripe for parody, often as scathing as it was affectionate, but that can never change the fact that the books are great fun, and Leslie MacFarlane has taught several generations of bored young kids, this reviewer included, how to read.

Okay, my initial synopsis was a bit flippant, but as you can tell I really like these books, so I'm going to talk about The Tower Treasure in slightly greater detail now, so watch out for any spoilers if you're that way inclined, although this is an eighty year old kids book, you dig? I might also point out a few differences between the original and revised versions.

That rather implausible conversation on the motorbikes seems overly keen to set up that Fenton Hardy is a really big deal as a private investigator and that this confers some sort of status and talent on his sons. I guess we're in Prohibition era America here, so I can kind of buy that, even if it seems a bit contrived and heavy handed, the way they're just telling each other what they already know, and in a way that sounds conceited if you ask me. But it's not like there's a first person voiceover to establish the narrative stuff, so it is what it is, descriptive passages and corny dialogue. There does at least seem to be a hint of uncertainty whether they can be detectives like their dad, although elsewhere in the book it's laboured a bit too much that they could probably become doctors and lawyers if they want to. But I guess you need your heroes to be pretty special in this type of faire.

Oh the first page also says that they live in Bayport, a town of about fifty thousand people. It pretends to tell you where Bayport is, but if you ever look for it on a map of the Atlantic coast, you're going to be disappointed, believe me. Nobody on the entire internet has an earthly clue what state it's in, although that doesn't stop them playing the Hardy Boys drinking game and trying to figure out the big mystery.

Anyway, they're running some kind of errand for their father, when the whole plot kicks off, and I'm not going through it blow by blow, except to say that they nearly get run over by a speeding motorist, who turns out to be wearing a disguise on account of having just robbed the Applegate mansion down the road. All this keeps them busy for a while, because they want to prove their friend Perry's dad, who is the caretaker at the mansion, had nothing to do with the robbery. Later in the book, in the original text at least, there's actually some socially conscious stuff about how much of a struggle it is for that family trying to make ends meet, but of course, we all know they're innocent, that's never in doubt in this universe. It's all about the Hardy Boys solving the mystery and catching the bad guys. The car of their best friend, Chet Morton, gets stolen after another robbery, and so that keeps them busy and invested too. They also have a battle of wits with some bumbling police officers, Con Riley and Oscar Smuff, who aren't much competition for our boys, and Chief Collig knows it, but he's perhaps a bit jealous of their dad. The presentation of the local police seems to change a bit in later books.

Their mother, Laura, never really gets much time in these stories. Later, McFarlane introduced the wonderful character of Aunt Gertrude, but that's for the future. Frank and Joe have got girlfriends, Callie and Iola, but I think they just hold hands, and maybe even see other people too. In any case, Chet doesn't seem overly concerned about what Joe gets up to with his sister, although he's a jovial and rotund good sort, who everybody makes fun of a bit too much. Actually, Chet seems to be the sort of loyal friend everybody should have, although increasingly, he would be portrayed in every book as having some insanely unlikely new hobby, which just happened to accommodate shoehorning in lashings of plot development, when we weren't busy laughing at him. We also meet some other friends, Biff, Tony, Phil and Jerry, but it's all about Chet, really. Chet's a great character. Just don't ask me to tell you too much about him. There was one late book that rather daringly allowed him to go off on a kind of internal reverie about how much Bayport had changed over the years, but I don't think we should really consider that canon. Meta-narrative in the Hardy Boys is a bit more than I can cope with.

Okay, this review is pretty long already, so I'm going to wrap it up. I might review some of the other books in the series and go into more depth about the story and the characters and the prose, but I think for this first book the important thing is to have given an overview of the history of The Hardy Boys and Leslie McFarlane. Suffice it to say, the denouement of The Tower Treasure involves spectacular coincidence, an old abandoned water tower, and Frank's preternatural powers of deduction. Before that though there are some nice twists and turns, as well as some nice portraits of the people the brothers come across, and not everything always goes the Hardys' way. The original text is to be preferred, because it has more flavour to it, and some nice descriptive passages are omitted for space in the revision. The minor changes to the plot are nothing to get excited about. It's a decent start to the series, but not one of the very best. The second volume is right up there though. I might come back and add more to this once I've figured out how I want to review the other books in the series, which I've been meaning to re-read for nostalgia purposes. I seem to remember they only take me about twenty minutes to read quickly, although obviously they'll keep kids busy for a few hours.

When Matthew McConaughey's Wooderson delivered the immortal and classically skeevy line, from that far more naturalistic depiction of the teenage years, Dazed and Confused, and said "that's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older and they stay the same age," he could easily have been talking far more innocently about Nancy Drew, and The Hardy Boys. One dreads to think what the long rumoured Tom Cruise and Ben Stiller adaptation The Hardy Men would do with the property if it ever sees the light of day. Since these books are quite dated by now, youngsters today might enjoy the books from the 1980s most of all, but my own memory is finding something to enjoy in each of the different eras, whether Joe and Frank are fifteen and sixteen, and gradually growing up in the interwar years, or seventeen and eighteen, and perpetually frozen in time, as the world around them changes with each successive generation.

Summary: The first Hardy Boys mystery story.