The Secret Syndicate Behind Nancy Drew | Hacker News Reader

The Secret Syndicate Behind Nancy Drew

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102 pointsPharmakon33 comments

I often wonder why, in this age of reboots and cinematic universes, no one has mined this series, and the Hardy Boys for material. Iirc, there was a tv series for each in the '70s.

Related; there was some really great writing for television back then; Circus Boy and The Rifleman are two examples.

Dynamite recently had a Nancy Drew miniseries comic

> I often wonder why, in this age of reboots and cinematic universes, no one has mined this series, and the Hardy Boys for material.

As of last year, a Nancy Drew series whose pilot had been rejected by CBS was in development at NBC.

> Iirc, there was a tv series for each in the '70s.

Also (and they flopped) the 1990s (in Canada, I believe.)

And Nancy Drew had an ABC TV movie intended to launch a series in 2002, but no series emerged.

And there was a 2007 Nancy Drew movie.

So, it's not exactly a property that's been ignored, even if there hasn't been much success with it since the 1970s.

The Stratemeyer syndicate also published, in addition to the Hardy Boys books mentioned in the article, the Tom Swift SF juveniles.

And the Rover Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, and others.

I read some nancy drew from the local library as a kid but I preferred the hardy boys. They had a secret hideout in their junkyard, a caravan buried under junk. The bad guys always seemed to drive a black sedan though I had no idea what a sedan was.

The junkyard hideout was the Three Investigators, not the Hardy Boys. As far as I remember, the Hardy Boys didn't have a hideout.

Christ I almost forgot about Three Investigators, but I really liked them at the time. "The green backs" as I thought of them (Nancy Drew was red) Probably one of those things you should never re-read though. Using Alfred Hitchcock as "cover author" must have really paid off

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/sep/23/thre...

"The Three Investigators were created by Robert Arthur, who wrote the first few books and then oversaw and edited the rest of the series. It was he who had the brainwave of having Alfred Hitchcock as the patron of the team. Hitch introduced each case, and often called them in to set them off on their latest adventure. It was this intrusion of real life into a fictional world that cemented my relationship with the Three Investigators. Could these stories possibly be true ... ?"

And...

"The real magic, though, was in the boys' headquarters, hidden among the piles of junk in Uncle Titus's scrapyard. Built from an abandoned trailer, the secret base was accessed via a series of ingenious secret passages, with the codenames Green Gate One, Tunnel Two, and Red Gate Rover – the latter so named because it was hidden behind a painting of a dog."

I ripped through around 15 or 20 of these one summer holiday (and slightly beyond) back in the late 70's or early 80's - I think I was around 11-12 years old. They were certainly more prevalent on Scottish holiday shop book stands than The Hardy Boys (which I never got around to reading - by the time school went back in I'd moved onto James Herbert horrors which scared the bejesus out of me :) ).

The Three Investigators were truly immersive and fun to read. You'd hardly get a peep from me once I got stuck into one. I think I was reading almost one a day and would burn all my holiday pocket money on them. I didn't read them in any particular order and just grabbed them whenever I found a new copy I hadn't read before.

I reckon there must be a box of these somewhere in my dad's attic, it'd be fun recover them to see how they stand up.

we had similar childhoods - those Rats books were like a horror movie that lasted for days till i finished each book ;-)

Did The Incredible Melting Man (the novel based on the film) figure in your childhood as well? That was a bit of a shocker for 12 year old to read back in 1979/80. That one gave me some sleepless nights for a long time :)

Wow, I was pretty certain I never read the three investigators but I am must be wrong and mixing up different series! Getting old! I was pretty sure the Hardy Boys had a base like that too. And a friend called Chuck or something. They had some kind of a lever thing to raise some of the junk that concealed the entrance to the base. I was searching for a reference and found this 8 year old guardian article that mentions both series and the junkyard base.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/sep/23/thre...

I'm totally there for you on "sedan" and other throwback words.

I'm 48, so I read the Hardy Boys books mostly in the mid to late 70s. That whole era seemed to be stuck in time; lots of pop culture sort of pushed as "current" was clearly from at least 10 to 20 years before, but even as a kid it was pretty clear there was a disconnect. The Hardys never watched TV, for example. They used terms like "jalopy" and "sedan". Etc.

I assume the mismatch was partly because of the rapid societal changes that took root starting in the 60s, plus a sort of refusal to acknowledge those by the generation just ahead of the boomers that were really still in fundamental control through the 80s.

> They used terms like "jalopy" and "sedan". Etc.

And Chet was rarely fat, but often 'portly', 'heavy-set', 'chunky' or 'stout'. :)

I was thinking of chuck but you're right it was chet!

...or Chester, as his aunt (I believe) insisted on calling him - probably the only person to use his given name!

In retrospect (I read 75-80 Hardy Boys books as a kid, many of them over and over), it is amazing how formula-based the story trajectories were and how one-dimensional all the characters were. I bet with some practice, an author could churn out a book in the time it took me to read one.

That part always bothered me, since their portly chum and I share a name.

Is "sedan" really a throwback?

This seemsa part of current vernacular to me, and I have lived in several different regions of the US.

Maybe because everyone drives “SUVs” these days.

I didn't really think "sedan" was a throwback word... might be a local dialect thing but we use it often to differentiate between passenger cars: a 4-door is a "sedan" while a 2-door is a "coupe".

It's just really formal. Teens wouldn't use it, generally.

and caves! always a cave...

The Hardy Boys series had to be rewritten hastily in the 1970s due to phrases like “there’s a [n-word] in the woodpile”.

Many of the bad guys in Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys were described as “swarthy”. My girlfriend’s father, who was a truly lovely man, would go on to use that word to describe me back in the 1980s. She and her mother were horrified but I thought it was hilarious.

Does "swarthy" have offensive / embarrassing connotations? It doesn't matter, because I never use it, but I didn't know that until now.

It means dark-skinned (e.g. Mediterranean) and so tends to be seen as racist now.

Holy shit. I always thought it meant somebody with a rough, rugged sort of appearance, that you'd get from a drunken wind-swept life.

I have to be honest. Even at the time I didn't regard it as racist, but I sure as hell have avoided that term other than retelling the story ever since.

The word is not really offensive or embarrassing per se. I think part of the parent's point is that it's remarkable how often in the books swarthiness and evil intent correlated, which is a legacy of racial attitudes.

I often felt that ‘Goosebumps’ must have done a similar thing. I never thought even as a kid that ‘R.L. Stine’ was a real person.

Edit: I’m shocked to find out from the Wiki article that it seems as though he really did write them!

Check out the various fairies series by "Daisy Meadows" - there has to be at least a thousand of them. They mine a theme/set with a book for each element (the seasons, rainbow colors, precious gems, etc) and they follow the exact same plot for each one. My wife and I used to joke that "D.A.I.S.Y. M.E.A.D.O.W.S. has got to be a acronym for the computer program that writes them all.

If I've learned one thing from YouTube, it's that there are definitely content creators whose brains are built in such a way that what they want out of life is to put tons of effort into building up a library of highly-structured and predictable content. (I'm not talking about the "putting pre-fabbed CG parts together to make a buck on infants" videos here; I'm talking about things like the infinite stream of nail-art tutorials, or things like SummoningSalt's timelines of speedrunning efforts of a particular game.)

Such people could vary their formula—they're not doing this as work-for-hire with strict requirements under a producer, this is just the stuff they publish as a hobby. And you'd expect a "normal" person in such a situation to get bored and want to vary their formula, especially as they gain more followers. Most creators do, but these ones don't. They just keep on makin' what they're makin', to a strict standard that lets them continue to pump out a lot of it, rather than making each successive work more of a production than before. It's what they like doing.

I'm not a psychiatrist, so I can't say for sure what's going on with such people (though I've heard the phrase "systematizing personality" before and it sounds applicable here.) But I can say for sure that such people certainly do exist.

Barbara Cartland was one of the most prolific authors ever, with more than 700 novels to her name.

According to Wikipedia, in total they sold in the ballpark of a billion copies.

Then again, I guess it could be argued she basically wrote the same book more than 700 times.

Was expecting some algorithmic analysis of the books to cluster the works to different authors and attempt to match them to other works with known authors. But thats not the case. Entertaining background about the business though.

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