The Hardy Boys
by Dax Montana on Mar.12, 2009, under General
Anybody read Franklin W. Dixon? When I was a kid I started reading the damned Hardy Boys. I loved old Frank and Joe. I owned every Hardy Boys book in the series…well at the time there were only 58 titles plus the Detective Handbook. Due to money and contracts and “business,” the series was expanded. I just did a little research on the web…holy crap there’s tons of stuff out there. It’s almost cult like.
I had all 58 titles at the time. I kept trying to find the Detective Handbook. I must have waited five years or more for that damned book to finish my collection. I had three shelves on my bedroom wall with all the books, in order. I think I was about fourteen when I finally received that copy of the damned Handbook. My father found a copy in New York City. He sent it to me for my birthday. I hadn’t read a Hardy Boys book in ages, but I cherished that Handbook.
The summer I turned sixteen, lightning struck a tall pine tree in front of the house. A strip of bark about two inches wide was missing from that tree. About two feet off the ground, the lightning found the water spigot to the front of the house. I know this because the bark wasn’t vaporized and a big black scorch mark was left on the bricks of the house around the spigot. Anyway, the roof caught fire and the house burned. We lost everything. I lost the entire collection of Hardy Boy books. They were turned into a charred, wet, mass of wood pulp. Oh well!
Anyway, I got to thinking about those Hardy Boy stories. I bought a couple of books for my son. He doesn’t seem interested. I just saw The Tower Treasure (book 1) on his dresser today. I picked it up and read about five chapters in just a few minutes. I think I’m going to re-collect the whole set and read them all again.
Just Damn!
March 12th, 2009 on 7:20 am
Just Damn…I had every one of ‘em as well…my house burned to the ground as well…they burned as well.
Just Double Damn!!!
March 13th, 2009 on 4:10 am
When I first started reading them there were 51 of them. I also had them all and by the time I moved out of my parent’s house there were 58, as well as the detective handbook. At some point in my teens or twenties they ended up disappearing and I always regretted not having them in my library anymore. The cool part is that couple of Christmases ago my folks apparently had scoured used book stores and maybe eBay and put together the entire collection for me. Hell, some of them were printed in the fifties and sixties. Still have ‘em. That had to be one of the nicest Christmas gifts ever.
March 16th, 2009 on 1:18 pm
I had the set mostly complete, missing just one or two from early in the series, and also quite a few of the paperback “New Hardy Boys” series as well. They all got boxed up and stuck out in the garage when I was 14 or so. I unearthed the box about 6 or 7 years ago, and found that the collective depreadations of rats & roaches had largely confetti-ized most of them.
So, no more Hardy Boys. Just Damn!
March 16th, 2009 on 9:38 pm
Runs pell-mell to his jalopy…