Month: June 2011

The first real book I ever read, from cover to cover, all by myself, was a Hardy Boys mystery. It was my mom’s, and it was one of the old, original tweed volumes. I was hooked. On reading, and on mysteries, and on the Hardy Boys. I read them all. A few I bought new, in the 70s, and others I picked up at thrift stores, flea markets, and yard sales. When I could get my hands on an old version, it made me happy, because I realized early on that the newer editions had been heavily edited. Some, in fact, had morphed into entirely different stories.

I lost all those books when I was in high school, in one of our many moves. They were put into storage and never retrieved. I figured I’d outgrown them anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal to me until years later, when I started to miss my old childhood books. I’ve picked up a bunch of them at yard sales and thrift stores over time, and even a few of the old Hardy Boys books. I recently got serious about hunting them down and have been ordering a couple at a time online.

And, of course, I’ve been reading them. Some of the stories I only recall from the mangled 1970s re-issues, so meeting them in their original form has been a revelation. Frank and Joe are only 15 and 16 years old, not 17 and 18. Just babies! And they carry guns! Aunt Gertrude is a vile old woman, not the cranky curmudgeon that everyone secretly adores (or at least that’s my recollection from the re-issues). The police are thoroughly incompetent and unlikeable. The racism is shocking in its overtness, and it’s easy to tell the bad guys because they’re unkempt or have shifty eyes. There’s a lot to criticize, but there are also a lot of happy memories connected with reading them when I was little.

I’ve got about 1/3 of the original 58 books and will be adding to the stack. When I’m finished, I’ll move on to Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and Ginny Gordon.