Ed here: On The mighty fine Abbott Gran Medicine Show Vince Keenan talks about the books of his youth. There's not a word of treacle in the piece and there's a good deal of wisdom.
Vince Keenan:
The truth is that then as now, I consumed heroic quantities of crime fiction. And that meant The Hardy Boys. It’s fashionable to mock the series in all its gee-whiz, asexual glory. But I refuse to do that. I come here to praise Frank and Joe Hardy, not to bury them with scorn. The boys put me on a glide path that led to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, to Lawrence Block and James Ellroy. For good and ill, they made me the reader that I am today.
The series is a remarkable American narrative in itself. Created by Edward Stratemeyer, the pioneer of book packaging. Cranked out by countless ghostwriters. (I never believed in Santa Claus, but it crushed me to learn that Franklin W. Dixon wasn’t real.) The first 38 entries were substantially revised beginning in 1959 to simplify them in the face of television’s popularity and to eliminate racial stereotyping. As a result, two completely different novels with the same title could be in simultaneous circulation, a lesson I learned the hard way. Buying the “wrong” version of The Missing Chums (#4 in the series) prompted a crash course in typefaces. I soon discovered that the original editions had denser text in every sense.
for the rest go here:
http://abbottgran.wordpress.com/
2 comments:
Vince, I'm with you. The Hardy Boys put me on the path to being the reader I became. The first privatye eye series I ever read!
RJR
There were no books in my house, and I didn't start reading until I was too old for the Hardy Boys. So I missed all that...One of my favorite writers Bobbie Ann Mason gives credit to Nancy Drew. Her novel IN COUNTRY is a post-Vietnam story that is structured like a Nancy Drew book.
Post a Comment