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."
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/sep/23/thre...
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.
And Chet was rarely fat, but often 'portly', 'heavy-set', 'chunky' or 'stout'. :)
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.
This seemsa part of current vernacular to me, and I have lived in several different regions of the US.