N. Scott Momaday 1934-2024

 N. Scott Momaday, poet, novelist, playwright, artist, essayist, scholar and teacher, died in January.  He is best known for his first novel, House Made of Dawn, which won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  His father was Kiowa, as a child he was given a Kiowa name and identified as Kiowa, although he lived among and studied other American Indian peoples.

House Made of Dawn concerns a mixed blood Indian returning from the multiple traumas of World War II to the pueblo, trying to find his place in the modern and traditional worlds.  In telling this journey, Momaday uses both his knowledge of the written literary tradition and the traditional ways and stories of an oral culture. 

With this novel, Momaday revealed and defined a central dilemma of contemporary Native people: how to make a life in the often contradictory "two worlds" of modernity and their traditions.  This would become the model and inspiration for a slightly younger generation of Native writers who burst on the scene in the late 1970s through the early 1990s.  Each in their own way would also employ this dynamic of modern literary approaches and traditional storytelling and beliefs, in part to explore and honor traditional Native cultures and its point of view, particularly towards the natural world. 

  Leslie Marmon Silko is the most obvious heir: her debut novel Ceremony also follows an Indian soldier, this time a Vietnam vet, coping with the difficulties of returning home and finding himself. Others were direct and indirect beneficiaries of Momaday's example and success, including novelists Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, James Welch and Michael Dorris, as well as poets and storytellers Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, Paula Gunn Allen, and many others.

These explorations are multiple: using literary form and traditional content, expanding literary forms to include traditional forms--all sorts of combinations beyond categories to create new stories that honor and expand the old.  The past is never left out, it is (as Faulkner articulated) always present.  The Native tradition is particularly important for its living attitudes towards the natural world and its relationships to human beings and culture.  Those attitudes and beliefs can be adapted and absorbed in our contemporary world--in fact, they must be, if the past and the present and the eternal itself are to have a future.

Momaday was a champion of the Native oral tradition, and he taught the subject for many years at various universities.  But he was also steeped in written literature, particularly American fiction and poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries.  His detailed descriptions of the landscape use literature (including modern) in expressing and interpreting what the indigenous senses observe.   

Momaday believed in the spoken word today as well, and he read several times at the Humboldt State University near me.  I've seen the tape of one such reading and attended another one.  He had a bearing of great dignity, a precise pronunciation and an uninflected voice of great depth and power.

  The reading I attended was in one of the larger venues on campus, with Momaday at a lectern on a stage. He had hardly begun when the power suddenly went out.  He paused, calmed the crowd and continued anyway, so that deep, deliberate voice came out of the semi-darkness with no need for amplification, and with dramatic effect.  

Afterwards he signed my copies of The Names, (A Memoir) and The Man Made of Words, a collection of essays, stories and poems.  The essays touched upon the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Emily Dickinson (he studied her poems for a year, in manuscript), Teilhard de Chardin and Lewis Thomas, Georgia O'Keefe and Jay Silverheels, as well as his grandmother's stories.  He included observations from his travels in Russia and Germany as well as the American West.  

I think my favorite of his books that I've read is his second novel, The Ancient Child.  It uses his lifelong fascination with the legends of Billy the Kid to explore planes of myth of the past and the contemporary world.  It is at once a traditional novel with contemporary and semi-historical characters, a kind of personal anthology and an exploration of storytelling itself.  It has humor, too.  Momaday identified with the bear, saying he had bear power and occasionally turned into a bear.  But there was some Coyote in him, too.

Return of the Hardy Boys

 

Since I first wrote about the original Hardy Boys mysteries six years ago (in the History of My Reading series), there’s been some news.  

The Hardy Boys books began in 1927 with three titles, then three more in 1928 before the series settled down to issuing one title a year.  Last year (2023) the copyrights on these original versions of the first three novels expired.  That means they are in the public domain, and anyone can publish them, no permissions (or author payments) required.  It also means that anyone can alter them or just publish them badly, with mistakes, changes and eliminations.  But they are well published online at Project Gutenberg. They are: The Tower Treasure, The House on the Cliff and The Secret of the Old Mill.

 The three titles published the next year, in 1928, presumably entered or will enter the public domain some time in 2024. They are: The Missing Chums, Hunting for Hidden Gold and The Shore Road Mystery. They are likely to appear online at some point this year. [UPDATE 3/35: These three are also posted now at Project Gutenberg.]  [FURTHER UPDATE 2025: these and two more public domain titles are also available in paperback from Dover Publications.]

 These are the original Hardy Boys novels, as written by Leslie McFarlane and edited by Edward Stratemeyer. McFarlane wrote 1 through 16, and 22 through 24, while other authors wrote the rest of the original 58, all under the name of Franklin W. Dixon. 

the revisions series

To further complicate matters, these originals were revised and rewritten by other authors in the late 1950s through the 1970s, supposedly to take out offensive stereotypes and update references and language, but often the stories were changed, as well as the writing style.  Many were shortened.  Then the series continued with new stories, in various formats, right up to today.

 Unfortunately the distinction between the originals and revisions is seldom made. For example, the online site The Creative Archive purports to publish the first 58 Hardy Boys novels online, but these are the 1950s-60s revisions, not the originals. 

At the end of this post, I make some comparisons of the originals with the more widely available revisions. Four of these appeared in my post six years ago (in slightly different form), but I’ve added comparisons of two more: #3 The Secret of the Old Mill and #8 The Mystery of Cabin Island, which the unofficial Hardy Boys page calls “probably the most popular story among fans.” 

 On balance, I continue to greatly prefer the McFarlane originals.  I recently chanced upon an article written by Gene Weingarten in 1998 entitled “The Ghost of the Hardy Boys” (included in his collection, The Fiddler in the Subway) that helped clarify my thinking.

 Weingarten, a magazine feature writer and purported humorist, trashes McFarlane’s writing in these books before praising him as a literary artist trapped by financial circumstances into painfully turning out trash, namely the Hardy Boys books. (McFarlane seems to base his quality of writing judgments on the first book he picks up--The Missing Chums, which unfortunately isn't one of the better written.)  This has become a familiar point of view on McFarlane, perhaps the prevalent one. I think it’s at best overly simplistic and on balance, deceptive and wrong.

 

a young McFarlane

It is true that McFarlane (just 25 when his first Hardy Boys books were published) was paid scandalously little to quickly write these novels, based on detailed outlines by Edward Stratemeyer, who invented the Hardy Boys, as well as Nancy Drew and Tom Swift. The author named on the cover, Franklin W. Dixon, did not exist.  There would be many authors as the series went on.  

But are the resulting novels possibly “the worst books ever written,” as Weingarten insists?  Not hardly.  For one thing, Weingarten hadn’t read the later revisions, which are arguably worse.  But even in themselves, the McFarlane versions do not fully merit his critique, especially in style. He says it is “overwrought.”  Apart from questions of taste (and Weingarten is very certain his taste is correct), there is the fact that these books were written for young readers, roughly ages 9 (the age when I started reading them) to 12.  Weingarten provides an example of this overwrought writing: “Frank was electrified with astonishment.”  It’s not a phrase appropriate for adult literary fiction perhaps, but it’s vivid language for young readers—many of whom are quite capable of becoming electrified with astonishment.

 (It’s certainly more creative language that Weingarten uses to introduce this article: “I started working on it with a chip on my shoulder.  I ended it with a lump in my throat.”  Now that’s bad writing--"overwrought" doesn't cover it.)

 Weingarten mocks the conversations conducted while the boys are riding their motorcycles, as if anyone could converse over that noise.  While stretching credulity a bit, these are 1920s motorcycles ridden by teenage boys after all, and not the behemoths of today.  In The Tower Treasure, a specific contrast is drawn between the “putt-putt” of their motorcycles, and the roar of an automobile.  Certainly there is awkwardness and repetition in the writing, but that more or less goes with the genre, and can be part of its charm.

 The elaborate language, not uncommon when these books were written, has a painless educational value for young readers in expanding their vocabularies.  As for the overuse of adverbs, it’s worth noting that  Stratemeyer had the final edit, and at least one of his other book series is well known for characteristic proliferation of adverbs—so much so that they inspired a specific type of joke: the “Tom Swifties.”  He may well have inserted some adverbs into the Hardy Boys books himself. 

Even so, the book are decently written, ascending to some fine writing.  At the beginning of The House on the Cliff, set in summer, McFarlane refers to the “torrid warmth” of the city.  The cliché is “torrid heat,” but his choice is more poetic, the double-r sound in “torrid” matching the “rmth” sound in “warmth.”

 The Mystery of Cabin Island opens with a page describing the winter landscape in clear physical language and measured sentences that remind me of Hemingway.  Nor was I surprised by Weingarten’s revelation that McFarlane was a devotee of Dickens—I got that from his books—especially the characters and set pieces that tended to be edited out of the revisions.

 It is this language, as well as the period details, that charm many readers today.  Although Weingarten quotes McFarlane’s granddaughter saying he hated these books (and his children are quoted elsewhere saying similar things), McFarlane is also directly quoted referring to his Hardys with some pride, saying that instead of the slapdash style of other boys books, “I opted for quality.”

  By and large, the revisions I've read did not.  In addition to changing plots and characters, with some bewildering story choices and careless writing, there were changes particular to reflect the J. Edgar Hoover 1950s obsessions with subversion, expressed in altered plots and an end to the skepticism of authority figures in the originals, especially local police.   Says the Hardy BoysUnofficial Homepage: “The quality of the revised stories is generally so far below that of the originals that it can only be considered an act of literary vandalism.”

There's no question that some of the writing and vocabulary as well as the action in the originals reflect an earlier time.  But that was true when I first read them as a boy in the mid-1950s, and I was charmed anyway.  The fact that there weren't roadsters and touring cars anymore, or chums, even added to the appeal: the charm of the exotic.  Reading them as an adult, I see them not as exotic but true to their time, in the modesty of the stories, their pace and organic quality, as well as evidences of a bygone era.  And so I remain charmed. 

Here are my comparisons:

 The Tower Treasure (#1)

The original version of this first novel in the series begins with exposition, while the revised starts with an action scene. This appears to be one item of the brief for the revisions--hook the reader with action. This time it works; in others I read the action is absurd by the standards set in the original series--of realism, especially of the Hardy Boys as normal or at least believable boys.

 Another item in the brief was to shorten the books to the same length of 180 pages. So what took two chapters and 17 pages in the original is reduced to one chapter and 8 pages in the revised.

 Some arcane language in the original is a bit disruptive, though funny, cf. "I'm going to ask these chaps if they saw him pass." But the revision goes further than updating words and eliding the story--it unaccountably adds incidents and characters, to no better effect than the originals. Plus it doesn't actually eliminate all ethnic stereotypes--just the ones people were more sensitive to in 1959.

 It isn't long before the losses become obvious. The original has a comic set piece involving a group of farmers; the human comedy is entirely lost in the revision, as is the pretty realistic dialogue in the scene. Similarly a scene involving the small town police chief and his detective is derisively funny. That such scenes reminded me of Dickens is reinforced a few pages later by a reference to a character habitually carrying Dickens' novels (naming three.) The original also throws in a sly Shakespeare reference, a phrase from Hamlet.

 But the loss of a certain literary quality is more telling in a line Fenton Hardy says to his sons on page 76 of the original, when he tells them they can help "by keeping your eyes and ears open, and by using your wits. That's all there is to detective work."

Later when the boys solve the mystery that has puzzled everyone (including their father), they conclude that "The main thing is that we've proved to dad that we know how to keep our eyes and ears open." (209)  The symmetry of these lines more than anything else starts off this series of books. They are entirely absent from the revision.

The revision has the good sense to keep the subplot of the father of one of the Hardy Boys' school friends who is unjustly accused of a crime (a similar situation will be repeated in a subsequent book), even keeping most of the dialogue. But for every arcane line the revision eliminates ("Brace up, old chap") it seems to lose one of delicate feeling or meaning: "Frank and Joe, their hearts too full for utterance, withdrew softly from the room." (68)

 This being the first novel, it has the first instances of official police incompetence, and Fenton Hardy's disdain for the local police. In the revision this is gone, though the comic futility of the chief and his detective Snuff is replaced by a comic and less convincing Snuff, now an aspiring private detective lost in self-importance, ambition and incompetence.

 The climactic scene in the revision suddenly adds a character to increase threat and action (the 1950s Disney teleplay has its own version of this character though he appears early, and interestingly represents a seemingly friendly but ultimately untrustworthy and violent adult) but it adds little to the scene. The ending of the original is longer and more satisfying.

  #2 The House on the Cliff 

The original story begins with the Hardy Boys and their pals (or "chums") escaping summer heat with a motorcycle ride,which leads them to a remote abandoned house, reputed to be haunted.  They do hear eerie sounds inside (which later turn out to have been staged to scare them away.) As they are leaving, Frank and Joe Hardy discover tools were stolen from their motorcycles. They later witness an attempted murder on a boat and rescue the victim, but he soon disappears.  This begins another strand of the mystery.

 The revised version begins with Fenton Hardy letting the boys in on a case in progress. This is another odd trend in the revisions: the boys are less independent.

The original story involves Fenton Hardy kidnapped by drug smugglers, with the boys putting together the pieces of the puzzle involving the "haunted" house on the cliff and hidden tunnels. They rescue their father, though they are almost immediately captured. There's a lot of action, including fist fights but they are believable. Some believe this is the best written novel in the series. The revision has some sloppy writing and makes inexplicable changes in scenes but basically follows the same story.

#3 The Secret of the Old Mill

This is one of the three originals that entered the public domain in 2023.  I read it online at Project Gutenberg.  It begins quickly with an incident that defines the mystery: while waiting at the train station for their father to arrive, the Hardy Boys are approached by an affable stranger with a convincing story why he needs to quickly change his five dollar bill, which they do, only to find that it's counterfeit.  When their father, detective Fenton Hardy arrives it turns out he is working on a counterfeit case.  The boys are embarrassed by being "stung," but eager to help solve the mystery,.

   A gently comic piece follows in which the boys are kidded by their high school friends for falling for the swindle--these glimpses of their regular lives are something the originals do well.  The Hardys are grounded in family, community and school-- though today's students might be surprised that their studies include Latin grammar and reading Virgil in the original.   Still, the emphasis of the story is on action and solving the mystery.

 After the Hardy's learn of another victim, there is another set piece of a high-spirited outing where the Hardys and their friends learned that an old mill has been revived by new tenants, though they aren't taking grain from local farms to grind.  Instead they've kept people away because they say they are working on a new breakfast cereal formula they must keep secret.  While there, the Hardys also rescue a boy from drowning, and he becomes important later in the story.  In due course they discover that the old mill is the center of the counterfeit operation that covers several states, and where the phony bills are made.  There's also action on the water, as the Hardy Boys get their new speedboat, the Sleuth.

In the revised version, it is their high school friend Chet who is victimized with a counterfeit $20 bill, discarding the opportunity to show the boys' generosity as well as their youthful naivete, as well as losing their personal motive to crack the mystery.  The revised version turns the old mill into the site of an electronics firm, doing something undefined that has to do with guided missiles.  Eventually Fenton Hardy is investigating sabotage at the electronics firm, where the counterfeit ring is a sideline by some of the employees who use the old mill itself as an entrance to a secret room where they print the fake money.  It's needlessly complicated and less credible, but it's also typical of the revisions in that it tries to make the stakes more dramatic and important, using a Cold War theme.  Small town life and small time crimes aren't good enough anymore, though it does reflect that, for example, there are probably fewer farmers around mid-20th century Bayport.

The revision includes some scenes from the original, though in different places in the story, often where they seem less organic.  The scene when the boys first see their boat is so much better in the original.  The new themes in the story and the shuffled and missing scenes suggest why the Unofficial Hardy Boys site calls this version "Drastically Altered" from the original.  Yet it isn't the worst of the revisions I've read.  At least it is carefully plotted (with the bad guys helpfully explaining everything just before they are caught.)    

#6    The Shore Road Mystery

The HBUHP calls the revision "completely different" but it basically reassembles elements of the original plot in a less coherent way.

 The original is more vivid in its scene-setting, and is pretty good at the effect on the town as a series of car thefts continue without a clue. There a nice school scene that's a kind of interlude. Scenes of the Boys in the caves where the thieves have hidden the cars are exciting, even if their handling of "revolvers" comes out of nowhere. The revision again starts with a big action scene--the Hardys have more technology now, like police radios on their motorcycles--but the plot seems more contrived.

In both stories, it's a school friend who is unjustly arrested for the thefts, but the revision adds a buried treasure mystery for some reason. Also the thieves aren't just stealing cars but smuggling in "foreign" arms for "subversives" in the US. Hello, 1950s!

 In the original, the Hardy Boys solve the mystery, and catch the bad guys in the act. But in the revision, they gets their butts saved by Dad, who incidentally has "an iron fist." What's up with that? as the Hardys wouldn't say. Also the revision suggests that the Boys' hometown of Bayport is in New England, which is contradicted by several of the originals.  They imply and finally say that Bayport is south of New York City.

 #8 The Mystery of Cabin Island

In summer (as we’ve seen in previous stories) the Hardy Boys and their chums run motorboats in Barmet Bay as well as ride motorcycles, go on picnics and engage in other warm weather activities.  What do they do in the winter?  In this original the answer is: ice-boats. 

Ice boats in this case are homemade skiffs on skis propelled by wind in sails to skate across the frozen area of the bay.  They can go very fast (the record for contemporary professional ice boats is well over 100 mph.) These craft were in fact becoming popular in North America in the 1920s.  A Saturday Evening Post Americana cover in early 1928 shows boys in their homemade ice boat, which may well have inspired this aspect of this 1929 story.  (Most ice boats ran on lakes and rivers, so an ocean bay south of New York might be a stretch.)

 Introduced by some of the best descriptive writing I’ve read in the series so far, the Hardys and friends take their ice boat to search for a place to go winter camping, and so they explore the small and solitary Cabin Island, but a strange man angrily orders them away.  They know the island and its cabin are owned by wealthy Mr. Jefferson, and so are surprised to find a note from him upon their return home, asking them to visit.  When they do they see the angry man leaving.  From Mr. Jefferson they learn the angry man is named Hanleigh, and is badgering him to sell him the island, but he won’t. The elderly Mr. Jefferson is all smiles—he thanks them for finding his stolen car (in #6 The Shore Road Mystery), rewards them, and agrees to allow them the use of his cabin on the island for their winter outing. 

The trip is to begin before Christmas so there is a lovely family scene in which the Hardys celebrate the holiday early so the boys will have both the traditional feast and presents, and their outing.  Back on the island they watch Hanleigh in the cabin, measuring the fireplace.  He threatens them again but they have the key and he is the trespasser, so he leaves. But they have the start of their mystery: why was he measuring the fireplace?  Why is his so fierce about the island?

 Eventually the boys learn of Mr. Jefferson’s missing collection of priceless stamps, and find a notebook kept by the man suspected of stealing the stamps (it’s the only instance I’ve run across of an actual date: 1917, which the Boys observe was 11 years before.) The notebook contains a coded message, and the mystery goes on from there, with a dramatic climax.

 In the revision, Mr. Jefferson’s reward (communicated to them offstage) is permission to camp on Cabin Island, and the promise of a new mystery.  When they meet him at his house he asks them to search for his missing grandson, who disappeared around the time that his collection of commemorative medals was stolen. (Why the switch from stamps remains a mystery.)  As usual, the incidents crowd together while scenes of ordinary life are dropped or shortened, like the Christmas scene.  

Adults (Fenton Hardy and Mr. Jefferson) are also present in the action more often. Both versions involve two minor villains—in the original they are young men, but in the revision they are high school dropouts who hang around the school and make trouble.  “Juvenile delinquency” was a catchword of the 1950s.  The Hardy Boys page classifies the revision as "Altered."

A side note: my copy of the original and of the revision both have the same cover image, and both have a "picture cover," rather than a jacket. My original is evidently part of the reprint series issued in 1962 (and my book apparently was a Christmas gift in 1963, though not to me) and it appears to be the same typeface as the original editions. It also has the same brown flyleaf illustrations as the original brown hardbacks that I remember so well from the public library.  

#10 What Happened At Midnight 

This is my favorite of the originals I've read as an adult, but I don't think that's entirely why I'm contemptuous of the revision, which HBUHP calls "drastically altered."

 The original is well-paced and balanced, as each increment of the mystery is pursued with activity, such as the Boys trip to New York City. But most of all, it has a real sense of high school boys doing the investigating, their normal life integrated with the mystery.

 It's also a great 1930s story, starting with the opening scene at Bayport's newest innovation, the Automat. Joe is kidnapped, Frank and his chums find him, but that's just the beginning. The brothers impulsively follow a suspect on the train to New York, lose their money to a pickpocket, sleep on park benches safely, prepare to hitchhike back to Bayport and earn a meal by washing dishes at a diner. (The diner owner is right out of a movie by Frank Capra or Preston Sturges.) They get a key clue overhearing a hotel switchboard operator, and learn of the existence of the collect call!

 As obsolete and therefore nostalgic as all this seems now, none of it was so arcane in the 1950s when I might have first read this book. The telephone system was basically the same, and I remember going to an automat restaurant in Manhattan in the 1960s.

 But the revision dumps pretty much all of it anyway. (Though I thought for sure the revision would drop a key scene of the boys in a biplane that loses power- they have parachutes and go out on a wing to bail out. But the revision makes the plane an antique reconstruction, and the scene happens in a different part of the story.) 

Bayport, by the way, in this novel is explicitly said to be located about 200 miles south of New York City, which suggests New Jersey.

 The mystery is solved through a combination of legwork, deduction, serendipity and coincidence. (Which fulfills Fenton Hardy's definition of a detective as someone who basically pays attention.) Some may object to the coincidences, such as the clues supplied by the clueless Aunt Gertrude. But it sure makes for a good story that keeps moving forward.

A coincidence puts the Boys in touch with a couple of FBI agents, and so the big finish is more believable with the adult agents doing the shooting and fighting during the capture, though Frank manages to chase and wrestle down the ringleader of the diamond thieves gang. (The Boys relationship with the local police is also better than in previous originals.)

 Other elements of the story are kept, but there are inexplicable changes. This time the gang is stealing diamonds and "electronics." (What kind of electronics? Why are they valuable? It doesn't say.) Again another needless and basically useless if not confusing plot element is added, a secret invention.

 The revision begins with a completely outlandish fight between the brothers and adult thieves. In general, the revision is haphazard and careless--literally in the sense that it seems to be written by someone who doesn't care. For dialogue that sounds somewhat formal, it substitutes dialogue that sounds entirely wooden. As for updating arcane expressions etc., the revision actually has one of the boys say "Gadzooks!"--a word from the 17th century that barely made it into the 19th.

 Finally, let me point out something else that's apparently obsolete. Especially in the originals, I did not find a typo or a grammatical error. These boys books, written quickly and expected to be read by teenagers or younger, and then to disappear, are immaculately edited, copyedited and proofread. So 20th century, right?

The Archer City Kid

On the last Friday night of March, when I got up from my computer my glance fell on a bookshelf as I passed, and fixed for a moment on one slim book: Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen by Larry McMurtry.  I reflected for a second that it was the book that got me started on my “History of My Reading” series here, the only successful format I’ve found for any sort of autobiographical exploration.  I’ve been researching and writing it for several years now, with 45 entries, and I haven’t gotten past 1969.

 Then I took the ipad off the kitchen counter and into my den/library/mancave to do the New York Times Spelling Bee.  Scrolling down the news to it I saw Larry McMurtry’s obituary.  He’d died the day before.

 McMurtry had been publishing novels for a decade before I was aware of his work.  But he certainly started with a bang—his first novel Horseman, Pass By was immediately made into Hud, a classic Paul Newman movie.  His next two novels were also made into movies, though The Last Picture Show didn’t hit screens until 1971.

 I probably was first aware of his name in connection with that film, though I have no memory of either reading the novel or seeing the entire movie. But I probably did, at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, MA, when its director and co-star came to town a few years later.  McMurtry’s luck with selling stories to the movies had its downside, not so much from the flops as from the successes, particularly the iconic Lonesome Dove miniseries and the Terms of Endearment feature, which will overshadow the books at least until they become more readily available than the movies, and people who remember the movies die out. 

My first clear memory of his name is also from the early 70s, when I saw it on the cover of a novel titled All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers.  The title pissed me off, because it was too close to a title I’d intended to use: Friends And Other Strangers, which admittedly I’d stolen from a Bob Dylan song (and who knows who that famous packrat stole it from.)  I think I was mostly pissed off because I hadn’t written the book yet that the title would go on, and this guy McMurtry had.

  I was resentful enough that I refused to read the book.  Then one subsequent Sunday afternoon, visiting a young woman I’d recently met, I saw the paperback of this novel lying on a coffee table, at almost the precise moment that I realized I was never going to see this woman again.  Somehow I took that as a sign that the whole point of this non-relationship was to point me back to this book.

 So I bought it, I read it, I loved it, and read it again. I liked the character of young Danny Deck and the laconic yet precise, sometimes passionate and often bewildered first person voice of the narrative.  It was a book of its time and a book of my 20s. 

 Then shortly after his novel Terms of Endearment was published, I met McMurtry in Washington.  By then I was editing an alternative weekly, Washington Newsworks, and our publisher was the sister of a McMurtry lady friend, and possibly a partner in his Washington bookstore.  So when I went to a public talk McMurtry gave, I had an introduction.

 I don’t remember anything about meeting him after the talk, except that it was brief.  I was mostly interested in getting him to write something for the paper.  What I chiefly remember is my impression of his talk.  I was astounded at his voice: indolent, insolent and insinuating, or in a word, Texan.  Of course I knew he was Texan, and that the Danny Deck novel was set in contemporary Texas.  But when I read that dialogue, I didn’t hear Texas voices in my head.  That remained true for his novels set in contemporary times that I read later.  Some essays published after his death fixated on the resonance of Texas cities and scenes in his novels.  To me all of that was irrelevant.  (In my own defense, I’ll point out that none of the major characters in the movie version of Terms of Endearment sound particularly Texan, and the words sound just fine.)

 Probably my period of sustained attention to McMurtry’s novels was in the late 70s and early 1980s—the pre-Lonesome Dove 80s.  This was the period of Somebody’s Darling (a novel about Hollywood he later denigrated), Cadillac Jack and The Desert Rose (the novel set in Las Vegas that years later he called his favorite.)  I read these, while re-reading All My Friends... and Terms of Endearment, which by then was a hit movie with Jack Nicholson and Shirley McLaine in great late performances, and Debra Winger in one of the best performances ever.

 It was around then that I had my first and only conversation with Larry McMurtry.  (It hadn’t even occurred to me when I was in Washington that I could have walked into his Georgetown bookstore and chatted many times.  Sometimes my cluelessness astonishes me. Though I recall this was also an occasional quality of Danny Deck.) 

 My paper was no more, and I was back in my Pennsylvania home town when I tried to contact McMurtry for some freelance story I was working on—I don’t remember how or what the story was.  But one day the phone rang and it was him.  He didn’t have much to say about whatever it was I called him about—it must have had something to do with movies because when he demurred, he noted that he enjoyed the people he worked with there and wanted to continue. 

 So instead we talked about his books.  I proposed my theory that he’d written a kind of trilogy that included All My Friends and Terms of Endearment.  He agreed—he’d deliberately written that trilogy including those two books, but I’d gotten the third book wrong.  I thought the third was Somebody’s Darling, which does center on a character known to the main characters of the other two.  But even then, he downplayed that book.  No—I had missed the first of the trilogy, a novel called Moving On.  I hadn’t even heard of it, which seemed to delight him—he recommended it.  It was one of his books that, at least at the time, he liked. 

Nowadays, this trilogy is considered part of McMurtry’s “Houston Series” of six novels, which also includes Somebody’s Darling.  The next to last in the cycle is Some Can Whistle, which works out the final fate of Danny Deck.  I so disliked this novel that it put me off reading McMurtry for awhile. 

But on his advice I had read and liked Moving On.  Bill Holland, a musician and songwriter friend in Washington who was becoming a book scout, sent me a copy. He had a spare because it turned out to be a book club edition.  McMurtry always considered his work as a book scout and bookstore owner at least as significant in his life as being a novelist.  I wonder what he’d think about the fact that I’d sold the few first editions of his novels I owned to help finance my move to California.  He’d probably approve. 

 McMurtry subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove, and became a Lonesome Dove and Old West industry with novels begetting mini-series after mini-series.  The books had a lot of charm, owing perhaps to his belief that the 19^th century western figures were basically English Victorian in speech and otherwise.  He later won an Academy Award for the script to Brokeback Mountain, from a story by Annie Proulx that he admits he should have written.

 In the week or so since I read of his death, I’ve re-read Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, which has to be a unique book in his writing career.  I noted first that his comments on the dearth of books to read in his youth was a very small part of it.  He did mention a cache of boys books that got him started, and the My Book House volumes, both of which were part of my childhood.  These are the element that got me started exploring the history of my reading. But most of the book is not about all that, exactly. Although it is a brilliant, fertile book, it’s hard to say what it is about.  The autobiographical underpinning is probably its most consistent feature, though perhaps it is more an autobiography of the West.

  It started out to address the assertion made by Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Storyteller,” that storytelling in the classic sense has gone from the world.  McMurtry notes that this kind of storytelling—ordinary people telling stories to each other—was something he experienced in his childhood, before he’d read a single book.  But the places where these stories were told had largely disappeared.  In his hometown of Archer City, the natural gathering place was now the town’s Dairy Queen, which is where he read that essay.  He wondered if even there he could discern if stories were still being told.

 He wanders away from this promising beginning pretty quickly, though he makes gestures of returning to the topic now and again, and maybe in a subtle way he does.  Some of this book is very carefully written, deliberately so.  McMurtry’s lifelong habit was to toss off five pages at the typewriter every morning, as quickly as he could.  For at least parts of this book he wrote slowly, with a pen. 

But other parts of this short book contain repetitions that suggest chapters were cobbled together from other sources—prefaces to other writers’ books, etc.  However, in several places particularly, this book is uncharacteristically reflective.  He expresses his ambivalence at writing so much about the old West, when he knew that the Old West was basically a Hollywood myth, and that the actual era of the big cattle drives and the open range was the blip of perhaps 20 or 30 years total.  He set out to de-mythologize the West, and admits that instead he created a new myth, beginning with a Quixote story called Lonesome Dove that got out of hand.

 On the other hand, he was in his youth an actual cowboy on an actual ranch outside Archer City, and his grandparents—who lived with him as he grew up—were authentic pioneers in that part of Texas.  He was in that sense writing out of his own life and experiences.  He was especially conscious that his father maintained a lifelong commitment to ranching even though he knew it was a lost cause (he admitted to being in debt for 55 straight years.)  Here McMurtry suggests the Old West was a way for him to understand his father’s “essentially tragic” take on his otherwise happy life.

 The Walter Benjamin book’s subtitle is “Reflections At Sixty And Beyond” (He was 63 when it was published) and McMurtry becomes especially reflective in the final pages.  He writes that his major achievement may turn out to be the same as his father’s: he kept his good name and passed it on to his “gifted and responsible” son.  He considers that maybe two or three of his books are “good,” (without saying which ones.) “I would have liked my fiction to have a little more poise, a little more tact—but those are qualities that seem to have found their way into my son’s songs, and that is satisfaction enough.”  His son, James McMurtry, is a singer-songwriter, as now is his grandson, Curtis McMurtry.

 McMurtry made lit biz news in recent years when he moved back to his hometown and amassed a mammoth number of books in his Archer City bookstores, filling several buildings on its decaying main street.  The town where in his youth the only books sold were drugstore paperbacks now had more books for sale that any other town in America. When some of those buildings started falling apart, he had a huge book sale, but still retained more books than the few surviving used and antiquarian bookstores of big cities possess.  (The decline of bookstores in his lifetime is a theme he sets besides the melancholy self-defeat of the cowboy and the Old West.)

 Unlike some book scouts and bookstore owners, he loved reading the books he acquired.  He seemed to retain an enormous amount from his wide-ranging reading.  (The daughter of his close friend and writing partner Diana Ossana described him as “a data base with opinions.”)  The worst moments after his major heart surgery in the early 90s, he wrote, was when he was unable to read.  

 “In my seventh decade,” he concludes, “I feel a new haste, not to write but to read.”  It does seem that he’d stopped writing largely for love some time ago.  But he didn’t lose his pure love for reading.  He was eighty-four when he stopped, the last Thursday in March 2021.  May he rest in peace.  His work lives on. 

Library Days: The Hardy Boys

This is one of a series of posts on my childhood reading and origins of my relationship with books, prompted by Larry McMurtry's reflections in his book, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen.  Previous installments are Library Days and My Book House.

I was a little too old for The Mickey Mouse Club television program. All that singing and dancing was girl stuff anyway. But my younger sisters watched it on our only TV set, in the living room. So one afternoon I chanced to see something that caught my eye: a filmed story about two young detectives, small town brothers investigating a mystery, the Hardy Boys.

 It was the fall of 1956. The story was told in a series of fifteen minute segments every day. I got involved enough to learn (and remember) the names of the actors: Tim Considine and Tommy Kirk (both of whom would show up in a number of Disney TV and film stories.)

I was 10, and had begun going to the Greensburg public library on my own. Browsing books in the children's room I came upon this now familiar name: the Hardy Boys. Soon I learned to look for the light brown volumes with dark brown titles, and the silhouette of two figures--one with a hat and a scarf--against a jagged background. They must have been among the first books from the library I read all the way through.

 In the novels, Frank and Joe Hardy were in their mid to late teens--not early teens as in the Disney series. They rode motorcycles, drove cars and boats and occasionally carried revolvers. They got into fights with adult men, and didn't always win them. But they mostly used their heads, and were old enough to act on their lines of inquiry. They were in some ways the perfect age for me to read about--older boys at the barely imaginable threshold of adulthood, so old enough to be models but not too old to identify with.

 Their father, Fenton Hardy, was a highly respected private detective, which also added to the appeal. Their relationship to him and his work, and the way he treated them, were fascinating to boys whose fathers disappeared all day at their unromantic jobs and behind the newspaper in the evening.

The first three Hardy Boys novels were originally published in 1927. The first ten books had been published by 1929, and they then were released at the rate of one a year--for the next 50 years. The author's name emblazoned on all these books was Franklin W. Dixon, though the first 16 and several more later were written by Leslie McFarlane, with other writers between and afterwards. They were writers for hire, with the premise and stories outlined by publisher Edward Stratemeyer, who also came up with Nancy Drew and Tom Swift. He probably also did some rewriting before publication.

 There would be new versions of the Hardy Boys over the years since, just as there have been other Hardy Boys on television. There are more than 500 Hardy Boys stories now. But the first 59 volumes are considered the classic series.

 Some 36 titles had been published by the time I discovered them. In fact, the first Disney series I saw that adapted the first novel (The Tower Treasure) seems to have borrowed an element from the 36th (The Secret of Pirate Hill.)

I'm not sure how many volumes the Greensburg Library had. I just know I read several, and would eagerly search through what was in the library when I visited. But there was competition--other boys were reading them (and perhaps girls, too, though I didn't know of any) and I knew only one school friend who claimed his older brother actually owned a number of these books. They were only in hardback.

 I don't remember which Hardy Boys books I read. I do remember, however, which Hardy Boys book I started writing.

 It was "The Creaking Stairs Mystery." I wrote a couple of pages, and was working on them at school in fifth grade. Our regular teacher wasn't there, and a parish priest, Father M., was more or less babysitting. We were supposed to be "working silently" on our own at our desks. He walked up and down the aisles. I was startled when he stopped at my desk and picked up my notebook. He read some of it to himself and then announced the title to the class (getting it wrong.)

 He also read out loud a sentence about someone driving a "roadster." He mocked being impressed. I was more than a little sensitive about that word, because in fact I did not know what "roadster" meant. Not knowing precisely what a word meant was not uncommon, either in my reading or in listening to television, or to adults talking, etc. I would know roughly what it meant from context. In this case I knew it meant a kind of car. To me it was a mysterious, romantic word, part of the mysterious world I entered in these books. But to have this ignorance possibly exposed and mocked was embarrassing.

 Anyway, as a result of this exposure, I became too self-conscious to continue writing my Hardy Boys story. But I did keep on reading them. I had followed stories told in serial form on television, and loosely so in our school readers, but the Hardy Boys were among the first books I read with a single story developed over its length. These books were deliciously different because I was in charge of reading the story--I could stop at any point, or read chapter after chapter, and just stay in that world.

 The books contained funny dialogue and characters, simple descriptions of a party or an afternoon at the beach, but mostly they were exciting, one event or clue, one question, leading to another. I could linger over a scene and ponder it, or go back to something that happened earlier, or re-read something I didn't understand. But as I absorbed the book's world, I read fervently, eager to know what happened next, and to test my impressions and guesses.  Though I didn't always manage it,  I sustained attention enough to learn the particular delights of doing so.

In 1959, the publishers started revising and shortening the earlier titles, and these versions are the more easily available now. In those books, the roadsters have become jalopies (though more technically roadsters were early two-door convertibles), the "touring cars" are sedans. The revisions were made partly to update such references (and eliminate offensive racial and ethnic stereotypes) so new readers could recognize their world and identify with the young characters.
 Later novels with entirely new stories would continue this updating, so in the more recent paperbacks, the Hardy Boys say things like "As if."

 The irony of course is that by now a 1959 revision is almost as arcane and unfamiliar as the 1929 original. The later versions in turn will become obsolete. Personally I wouldn't give up the magic that still adheres to the word "roadster."

 In fact, I'm glad I read the unrevised originals for a number of reasons. For one thing, in later books the Boys got increasingly sophisticated and unreal, acting more like combinations of Tom Swift and James Bond. This trend started in the 1959 revisions.

 According to the indispensable The Hardy Boys unofficial home page, these revisions to the originals are disappointing. "Although the stories were given the same titles and some of the plots remained basically the same, many books were given new plots and are unrecognizable from the originals. Unfortunately, the quality of the writing was nowhere near as high as in the unrevised versions and the resulting stories lost much of their original charm."

 A little later, the opinion is more strongly stated: "The quality of the revised stories is generally so far below that of the originals that it can only be considered as an act of literary vandalism."

Harsh words, so I compared a few volumes to their originals. The originals were revised over 15 years beginning in 1959. The HBUHP categorizes them as "slightly altered" (generally the later books, which often had been written by the same people doing the revisions) "altered," "drastically altered" and "completely different." I read both versions of The Tower Treasure (#1, marked Altered), The House on the Cliff (#2, Altered),The Shore Road Mystery (#6, Completely Different) and What Happened At Midnight (#10, Drastically Altered.)

Leslie McFarland, the first Hardy Boy

I'll make some general remarks and conclusions here, and follow with more about each book for those who might be interested. All four of these were written by the first Franklin W. Dixon: a newspaper reporter who later became a filmmaker, Leslie McFarlane. He is generally considered the best writer who contributed to the series.

 The literary quality of these books is not high, but McFarlane has a way with dialogue in several of these books, and a humorous and satirical Dickensian flair here and there. The revisions get into action quicker, though those action sequences are often absurd. Even given arcane language, cliches and some awkwardness, there is more life and interest in the originals. The stories are generally more realistic, and better paced.

 One notable difference (so others have noticed it, too) is that in the originals, the Hardys relationship to authority, particular to the official police, is strained and even hostile. In the revisions they are much more respectful and the police are much more efficient and cooperative. Maybe it was all that "juvenile delinquency" stuff in the 1950s, plus J. Edgar Hoover and commie subversion that scared the revisers.

The revisions vary in quality from not terrible (The Tower Treasure) to so carelessly written as to be insulting (What Happened At Midnight.) Though I picked up a bunch of the revised novels in a picture cover format at a thrift store, my future reading wherever possible is going to be the originals, especially the McFarlane originals.

In that regard, I've found some used originals with something I never would have seen at the library: dust jackets. (The above photo is not of my collection. I have only two with dust jackets. Needless to say, there are serious collectors.) So here are my observations on the originals versus the revised:

 The Tower Treasure (#1)

The original version of this first novel in the series begins with exposition, while the revised starts with an action scene. This appears to be one item of the brief for the revisions--hook the reader with action. This time it works, in others I read the action is absurd by the standards set in the original series--of realism, especially of the Hardy Boys as normal or at least believable boys.

 Another item in the brief was to shorten the books to the same length of 180 pages. So what took two chapters and 17 pages in the original is reduced to one chapter and 8 pages in the revised.

 Some arcane language in the original is a bit disruptive, though funny, cf. "I'm going to ask these chaps if they saw him pass." But the revision goes further than updating words and eliding the story--it unaccountably adds incidents and characters, to no better effect than the originals. Plus it doesn't actually eliminate all ethnic stereotypes--just the ones people were more sensitive to in 1959.

 It isn't long before the losses become obvious. The original has a comic set piece involving a group of farmers; the human comedy is entirely lost in the revision. Similarly a scene involving the small town police chief and his detective is derisively funny. That such scenes reminded me of Dickens is reinforced a few pages later by a reference to a character habitually carrying Dickens' novels (naming three.) (The original also throws in a sly Hamlet reference.)

 But the loss of a certain literary quality is more telling in a line Fenton Hardy says to his sons on page 76 of the original, when he tells them they can help "by keeping your eyes and ears open, and by using your wits. That's all there is to detective work."

Later, when the boys accidentally find themselves in a location no one had considered and realize it may be the key to the mystery that has puzzled everyone (including their father), they solve it by finding the treasure. Afterwards they conclude that "The main thing is that we've proved to dad that we know how to keep our eyes and ears open." (209)

 The symmetry of these lines more than anything else starts off this series of books. They are entirely absent from the revision.

The revision has the good sense to keep the subplot of the father of one of the Hardy Boys' school friends who is unjustly accused of a crime (a similar situation will be repeated in a subsequent book), even keeping most of the dialogue. But for every arcane line the revision eliminates ("Brace up, old chap," he advised; p67) it seems to lose one of delicate feeling or meaning: "Frank and Joe, their hearts too full for utterance, withdrew softly from the room." (68)

 This being the first novel, it has the first instances of official police incompetence, and Fenton Hardy's disdain for the local police. In the revision this is gone, though the comic futility of the chief and his detective Snuff is replaced by a comic Snuff, now an aspiring private detective, and his self-importance, ambition and incompetence.

 The climactic scene in the revision suddenly adds a character to increase threat and action (the Disney teleplay has its own version of this character though he appears early, and interestingly represents a seeming friendly but ultimately untrustworthy and violent adult) but it adds little to the scene. The ending of the original is longer and more satisfying.

The House on the Cliff #2

The original story begins with the Hardy Boys and their pals (or "chums") exploring a haunted house (which is also the beginning of the second and final Hardy Boys adventure on Mickey Mouse Club, though that story quickly diverged. It notably took place in mostly one location.) Frank and Joe Hardy discover tools were stolen from their motorcycles, and then witness an attempted murder and rescue the victim from drowning.

 The revised version begins with Fenton Hardy letting the boys in on a case in progress. This is another odd trend in the revisions: the boys are less independent.

The original story involves Fenton Hardy kidnapped by drug smugglers, the boys putting together the pieces of the puzzle involving the "haunted" house on the cliff and hidden tunnels. They rescue their father, though they are almost immediately captured. There's a lot of action, including fist fights but they are believable. Some believe this is the best written novel in the series. The revision has some sloppy writing and makes inexplicable changes in scenes but basically follows the same story.




The Shore Road Mystery #6

The HBUHP calls the revision "completely different" but it basically reassembles elements of the original plot in a less coherent way.

 The original is more vivid in its scene-setting, and is pretty good at the effect on the town as a series of car thefts continue without a clue. There a nice school scene that's a kind of interlude. Scenes of the Boys in the caves where the thieves have hidden the cars are exciting, even if their handling of "revolvers" comes out of nowhere. The revision again starts with a big action scene--the Hardys have more technology now, like police radios on their motorcycles--but the plot seems more contrived.

In both stories, it's a school friend who is unjustly arrested for the thefts, but the revision adds a buried treasure mystery for some reason. Also the thieves aren't just stealing cars but smuggling in "foreign" arms for "subversives" in the US. Hello, 1950s!

 In the original, the Hardy Boys solve the mystery, and catch the bad guys in the act. But in the revision, they gets their butts saved by Dad, who incidentally has "an iron fist." What's up with that? as the Hardys wouldn't say. Also the revision suggests that the Boys' hometown of Bayport is in New England. Which, as we will now see, contradicts one of the originals.



What Happened At Midnight #10

This is my favorite of the originals I've read as an adult, but I don't think that's entirely why I'm contemptuous of the revision, which HBUHP calls "drastically altered."

 The original is well-paced and balanced, as each increment of the mystery is pursued with activity, such as the Boys trip to New York City. But most of all, it has a real sense of high school boys doing the investigating, their normal life integrated with the mystery.

 It's also a great 1930s story, starting with the opening scene at Bayport's newest innovation, the Automat. Joe is kidnapped, Frank and his chums find him, but that's just the beginning. The brothers impulsively follow a suspect on the train to New York, lose their money to a pickpocket, sleep on park benches safely, prepare to hitchhike back to Bayport and earn a meal by washing dishes at a diner. (The diner owner is right out of a movie by Frank Capra or Preston Sturges.) They get a key clue overhearing a hotel switchboard operator, and learn of the existence of the collect call!

 As obsolete and therefore nostalgic as all this seems now, none of it was so arcane in the 1950s when I might have first read this book. The telephone system was basically the same, and I remember going to an automat restaurant in Manhattan in the 1960s.

 But the revision dumps pretty much all of it anyway. (Though I thought for sure the revision would drop a key scene of the boys in a biplane that loses power- they have parachutes and go out on a wing to bail out. But the revision makes the plane an antique reconstruction, and the scene happens in a different part of the story.) 

Bayport, by the way, in this novel is about 200 miles south of New York City, which suggests New Jersey.

 The mystery is solved through a combination of legwork, deduction, serendipity and coincidence. (Which fulfills Fenton Hardy's definition of a detective as someone who basically pays attention.) Some may object to the coincidences, such as the clues supplied by the clueless Aunt Gertrude. But it sure makes for a good story that keeps moving forward.

A coincidence puts the Boys in touch with a couple of FBI agents, and so the big finish is more believable with the adult agents doing the shooting and fighting during the capture, though Frank manages to chase and wrestle down the ringleader of the diamond thieves gang. (The Boys relationship with the local police is also better than in previous originals.)

 Other elements of the story are kept, but there are inexplicable changes. This time the gang is stealing diamonds and "electronics." (What kind of electronics? Why are they valuable? It doesn't say.) Again another needless and basically useless if not confusing plot element is added, a secret invention.

 The revision begins with a completely outlandish fight between the brothers and adult thieves. In general, the revision is haphazard and careless--literally in the sense that it seems to be written by someone who doesn't care. For dialogue that sounds somewhat formal, it substitutes dialogue that sounds entirely wooden. As for updating arcane expressions etc., the revision actually has one of the boys say "Gadzooks!"--a word from the 17th century that barely made it into the 19th.

 Finally, let me point out something else that's apparently obsolete. Especially in the originals, I did not find a typo or a grammatical error. These boys books, written quickly and expected to be read by teenagers or younger and then to disappear, are immaculately edited, copyedited and proofread. So 20th century, right?