Please Be Good Again

The first books with more words than pictures that I can recall reading as a boy were, of course, those of the Hardy Boys. You may well remember them yourselves, but if you don't, it takes little time to grasp the premise. A pair of boys in their late teens are well on their way to following their famous detective father into the business of solving mysteries. The elder boy Frank was the more thoughtful and levelheaded, while Joe was the impetuous and quick to action younger sibling. They had friends, girlfriends, cars, speedboats and a crime lab- as do most American boys in youth.

My father would read the books to me, stopping periodically to show me the illustrations. While I can't recall the acquisition of the first volumes, I can recall the desperate efforts to find subsequent ones which we had not read, and the attempts to induce my father to read each in turn before bed. It naturally grew more and more difficult a task on both points. I would often see exotic titles from the series for sale at the grocery store, but had little choice but to hope that they would become available at the library. At that time, I knew of no way to obtain books from remote branches in the system. There remain many I have not read.

Even while still a boy, I began to see the pattern which developed from book to book. The exact nature of the crime might change, but the plot surrounding it was more consistent and unlikely to change than the US Constitution. I do hate to spoil the fun for you reading this, but if you are then I imagine you are past ever properly appreciating the books. At any rate, the boys' father Fenton would have some case he was away working on or otherwise could not discuss.

The boys would encounter something odd and begin investigating it, only to find as their father disappeared that the cases were one and the same. In the end, they would all wind up tied to chairs and escaping to unravel the mystery using nothing but their wits. The regularity of the plots was no coincidence, as the books were written according to something like Henry Ford's assembly line process. Countless writers churned out Hardy Boys books according to the above formula, all credited to 'Franklin W. Dixon'.

It has to have been around half my life since I last cracked open a Hardy Boys mystery. There was a close call a number of years ago, when I briefly entertained spending a tidy sum on what might have been a complete set. Somewhat before that I bought a book which was not among the originals, which were dated, but at least did not pathetically attempt to relate to modern youth culture. More recent ones do not have that virtue.

I have in my possession one of those very good originals. It is in fact the third in the series. I picked it up at the library for a quarter and began to read it somewhat trepidatiously. I feared, reasonably I think, that it would fail to hold up, even allowing for my young, inexperienced self of some many years ago. Mostly it does not pay to attempt "going home again". One can never have past experiences again just as they were. This time though, it does not suffer so much in the reoccurrence. That's a blessing.