While the Stratemeyer Syndicate basically coined the phrase, Juvenile Series Books, they were not the first to create the concept of a monthly series of books. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and other early mystery writers often published their novels in parts in literary magazines before the complete story was published in book form a year or so later. Early Science Fiction novels were published the same way. But until 1899, books for children hadn't been produced this way. Stratemeyer did it first.
The first series to be produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate was The Rover Boys by Arthur M. Winfield (the first of many pseudonyms for Stratemeyer Syndicate founder, Edward Stratemeyer). Produced between 1899 and 1926, The Rover Boys was about three boys who go to a military boarding school and have many exciting adventures there. This series didn't have much staying power though it was really popular while it was coming out. The Rover Boys established many of the tropes that would be used by later series books such as Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys.
A second Rover Boys series began publication in 1917, with the 21st volume of the series. This time it's the sons of the original Rover Boys who are the stars of the series. This is sort of like how the original Hardy Boys series ended at book #58, but continued in the Digest series with #59 and going forward from there. Unlike The Hardy Boys though, The Rover Boys only lasted nine more books before ending or getting cancelled. There was also a six book spin-off series but I can't find very much info on it, other than it's a prequel series to The Rover Boys. According to Wikipedia the books stayed in print for a number of years after the series ceased publication, but by the time I was reading The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, The Rover Boys series was out of print and long forgotten.
After the success of The Rover Boys, the Stratemeyer Syndicate published other short series of books between 1900 and 1904. None of them lasted for more than a year or two and were re-issued once in the 1910s or 1920s. However, in 1904, the next big Stratemeyer series to debut was The Bobbsey Twins. This series was about two sets of twins, Nan and Bert, and Freddie and Flossie (Flo in more recent incarnations). While they didn't have the same multimedia presence as Frank, Joe and Nancy did, the Bobbseys are the most long lasting characters ever created by Stratemeyer. Their book series lasted until 1979 and the characters continue to make guest and cameo appearances in the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys comics published by Dynamite. Some of these books would have mysteries involved, but most of the times they don't. I guess it depends on the era. I've never read any of The Bobbsey Twins personally, but my mom loved them when she was a kid, and I'm pretty sure my sister owned some of the books as well. I just never read them myself.
A second series, called The New Bobbsey Twins began publication in 1987, around the time that Nancy Drew Secret Files and The Hardy Boys Casefiles started coming out. Once again, I can't find any information on this series, only that it ended with volume 30 in 1992.
In 1910, Stratemeyer published a new series called Tom Swift. Unlike other series books that came between The Bobbsey Twins and Tom Swift, Tom Swift would continue to return with new series every few decades, with the most recent series, Tom Swift Inventors' Academy, beginning in 2019. This series was more science based, with Tom being an inventor. The original series ran from 1910 until 1941 with a total of 40 volumes. However, a new series would begin.
In 1954 a second Tom Swift series, The New Tom Swift Jr. Adventures began. This time, the central protagonist was Tom Swift Jr., the son of the main character from the first series. This time, the series was a Science Fiction series, where Tom's inventions were meant to go out into space, hence the Sci-Fi spin to the original adventure series concept of the 1910 series. Unlike his father though, Tom would perpetually remain a teenager, never getting married or having children of his own, though he does have a girlfriend, named Phyllis, who he loves. This is the series I remember seeing ads for on the back of the dust jackets for many of my original text versions of The Hardy Boys when I was a kid. This is how I learned about Tom Swift.
Then in 1981 a third Tom Swift series, officially just called Tom Swift on the books themselves, but referred to as Tom Swift III by fans. This series is even more of a Science Fiction series as it takes place in space instead of on Earth. It didn't last long though and ended with Volume 11 in 1984.
However, seven years later, in 1991 Tom Swift returned once again in a fourth series. This time Tom would be darker and more mature much like Nancy Drew Files and The Hardy Boys Casefiles, with Tom even teaming up with the Hardys for two books. Also, the setting of the series was transferred back to Earth though Tom still dealt with Sci-Fi concepts like time travel and extra-terrestrial invaders from time to time. And unlike earlier versions of the character, Tom would prove to be dangerous with his genius because his inventions were less benign than they previously had been. But this series proved to be less popular than the previous Tom Swift series and less popular than either more mature Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series, so it was cancelled in 1993, after two years of publication and only 13 books.
That didn't stop Tom Swift though because in 2006 a new series began publication, known as Tom Swift, Young Inventor similar to the current Hardy Boys: Undercover Brothers and Nancy Drew, Girl Detective series being published at the time. The series goes back to basics after the lukewarm reception of the more mature series from the early '90s, though Tom's inventions were closer to then current technology rather than the more futuristic tech seen in previous series. But, like the previous series, this one didn't sell very well and after only 6 books were published, the series ended in 2007.
And yet, in 2019 Tom Swift returned in a new series called Tom Swift Inventors' Academy. As with The Hardy Boys Adventures and Nancy Drew Diaries, Tom is de-aged from his usual older teen self that has been portrayed since the original 1910 series. Most likely because as the years have gone on, the audience for the Series Books have gotten younger, and so they wanted characters they could better relate to. The first five books are out with books six and seven due to come out in 2021. This series has a much more modern twist on Tom Swift, with current technology being the focus.
Since 1899 when Edward Stratemeyer first wrote The Rover Boys, the Stratemeyer Syndicate had been producing many Series Books. Though none of these series would have any lasting power, with none of them being adapted into movies or TV shows. However, that all changed in 1927 when The Tower Treasure, the first book in The Hardy Boys series was published. The Hardy Boys was the first of the Stratemeyer Series Books to go for more than 100 volumes in the original series, and over 300 volumes across multiple series, spanning 93 years (and counting). And then in 1956, 29 years after the series first began publication, The Hardy Boys was adapted into a TV serial on The Mickey Mouse Club and ran for 19 episodes, each running 15 minutes in length. Then about ten years after that the Hardys returned in an animated series produced by none other than Filmation. In 1977 the Hardys returned in another live action TV show, teaming up with Nancy Drew for The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, which ran for three seasons. The Hardys wouldn't return to Television again until 1995 when a Canadian series aired, this time for only 13 episodes before getting cancelled. Which leads to the upcoming TV series that's airing on Hulu in the U.S. and on YTV here in Canada. The Hardys have also appeared in comic books and video games, though they have yet to have their own movie.
Including the revised text and the Digest series, The Hardy Boys Mysteries ran for a total of 190 volumes from 1927 until 2005 when the series was finally laid to rest. The first 39 books in the original series were revised in the '50s and '60s while new volumes were still coming out. If you want to find out about all of the cover variations and text variations, go to the Unofficial Hardy Boys Home Page, which documents every single variant and edition of the original series. I'll put the link at the end of this post.
In 1987, a new Hardy Boys book series began publication to run concurrently with the original series, which was still publishing new volumes in the Digest format. The new series was known as The Hardy Boys Casefiles, which was a more mature take on the world of the Hardy Boys. For example, on the first page of book #1, Dead on Target, Joe's girlfriend, and Chet's sister, Iola is killed when a bomb goes off in Frank and Joe's car. Unlike in the original series, Frank and Joe use guns in these books. This series ran for 127 volumes spanning ten years, ending in 1997, though the final book in the series came out in January, 1998.
The Hardys weren't away for very long though, as in 1997, they returned as 8 and 9 year olds going to Bayport Elementary School in a series for third and fourth grade readers called The Hardy Boys Clues Brothers. This series only lasted for 17 volumes and ended in 2000 because they weren't as popular as the original series or Casefiles were.
But in 2005, just after the original series ended, The Hardy Boys: Undercover Brothers began publication. This was an attempt to modernize the Hardys for the 21st Century and it worked pretty well. Some changes were made, like Frank and Joe's friends don't play as big of a role as they had in the original series or The Hardy Boys Casefiles, though Chet Morton and Biff Hooper still make the most appearances of all of Frank and Joe's friends. Other changes include Aunt Gertrude changing her name to Trudy, and Frank and Joe are no longer dating Callie Shaw and Iola Morton, though the two girls do show up in the series still. Oh and Frank and Joe fight crime as secret agents for American Teens Against Crime (ATAC), an organization created by their father, Fenton Hardy for the sole purpose of building a support network for his sons's activities as ace crimefighters. The series ran for seven years and 39 volumes, ending in 2012. It also had a graphic novel series published by Papercutz, which ran concurrently with the main series.
A year after Undercover Brothers ended, a new series known as The Hardy Boys Adventures. This series is still going on today. What's unique about this series from what I can gather from the research I'm doing as I write this blog post is that the series starts off with Frank and Joe retired from their detective work and enjoying being regular high school students. But when a new mystery plagues Bayport, the Hardy Boys come out of retirement to solve it. According to the excerpt I read on the Simon and Schuster website Frank and Joe "retired" for the reason the Ghostbusters retired between Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II, no license and tons of lawsuits. Which actually sounds unique and interesting despite the fact that normally I would role my eyes at the more realistic take on classic characters. For some reason it works for the Hardy Boys.
Despite The Hardy Boys: Undercover Brothers continuing it's publication run a new Hardy Boys series started in 2010 as a companion piece. The series was called The Hardy Boys Secret Files and just like The Clues Brothers, Frank and Joe are in elementary school. It ran for 19 volumes over five years, ending in 2015.
With The Hardy Boys Secret Files ending in 2015, it's replacement, The Hardy Boys Clue Book began in 2016. Again meant for younger readers, this series was interactive, where you could actually write in the book on a special page before the last chapter to figure out the mystery yourself, using the clues in the illustrations to solve it. Which is a fun idea. With this series basically being a continuation of the Secret Files series, the age of the characters are the same. Clue Book is still being published today alongside The Hardy Boys Adventures.
With the success of The Hardy Boys and the realization that girls were also reading them, Stratemeyer decided to create a new series with a female detective named Nancy Drew. In 1930, Nancy Drew debuted in The Secret of the Old Clock, the first book in The Nancy Drew Mysteries. Like the Hardy Boys, Nancy solved mysteries with the help of her friends, Bess and George, her father, Carson, and her boyfriend, Ned Nickerson. It wasn't long before the Stratemeyer Syndicate had another hit on their hands, with boys and girls reading both The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. As with The Hardy Boys, the Nancy Drew books were revised in the '50s and '60s while new volumes were still coming out, and the series changed to paperback by Simon & Schuster in 1979. However, unlike it's brother series, the Nancy Drew paperback series is considered to be a continuation of the original Grosset & Dunlap hardcover series rather than a separate "Digest" series.
Also unlike the Hardys, it only took Nancy eight years to make it into an adaptation when the film, Nancy Drew: Detective, starring Bonita Granville as Nancy, came out in 1938. Three more films came out in 1939. Nancy wouldn't be seen again until 1977 when she was portrayed by Pamela Sue Martin on the ABC TV series, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries which ran until 1979, though Pamela Sue Martin was replaced by Janet Louise Johnson at the end of the second season before the character was dropped for the show's third and final season. Along with Frank and Joe, Nancy starred in her own TV series in 1995, produced in Canada. It too only lasted 13 episodes before being cancelled. Nancy was portrayed by Tracy Ryan in the Canadian series.
There was apparently a TV movie that aired in 2002 on The Wonderful World of Disney that was meant to be the pilot for a new TV series, but then ABC decided not to pick up the series and it was passed on by UPN after Maggie Lawson, the actress playing Nancy, was cast on another show. Five years later though Nancy would return to the big screen in the 2007 Warner Bros. film, Nancy Drew. Emma Roberts was cast as Nancy but the movie bombed at the box office with critics mixed on it much as they'd been mixed about the four films released in the late '30s. Another Nancy Drew movie, called Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase, was released by Warner Bros. in 2019. Produced by Ellen DeGeneres, the movie starred Sophia Lillis, who played Beverly Marsh in It: Chapter One. It too bombed, making only $946,027 at the box office, against a budget of $17 million. Though the critics were more favourable on it than they had been with previous Nancy Drew films. Also in 2019 Nancy Drew returned to Television in a series produced by the creators of The O.C., Gossip Girl, and Marvel's Runaways, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage. The series got picked up for a second season and it airs on The CW.
One of the reasons for the success of Nancy Drew is that, like Lois Lane would in 1938, Nancy broke all conventions of what a girl was supposed to be in the '30s. She was smart, capable, and daring. She was a role model for the girls who read the books. After 175 volumes the original series ended in 2003. Though Nancy Drew lived on.
In 1986 a more mature Nancy Drew series when Secrets Can Kill, the first book in The Nancy Drew Files was published. As would happen with the Hardys in 1987, The Nancy Drew Files was an attempt to make the character more adult than she had been up to that point. More drama and romance were injected into the series too. The series ran for 124 books before ending in 1997.
In 1994, another Nancy Drew series began. This time Nancy was 8 years old and in the third grade. Unlike the main series and The Nancy Drew Files, the mysteries in these books were more like the type of cases you'd see in Encyclopedia Brown with kids stealing stuff from other kids, and little things like that. It ran for 69 books and ended in 2005.
In 1989 a spin-off of The Nancy Drew Files, called River Heights began publication. Nancy Drew was nowhere to be found in this series, aside from cameos in some of the books. Instead the books focused on other characters from Nancy's hometown, including her neighbour, Nicki. As a result, the series had no mystery aspect to it, instead it focuses on the romance aspect that was part of the series this was a spin-off of. It ran for 16 books and ended in 1992.
Another YA series debuted in 1995, called Nancy Drew on Campus. In this series, Nancy, Bess and George are off to college where Nancy wants to get a degree in journalism. She and Ned also break up when he goes to a different school than Nancy and her friends do. Like River Heights, this series focuses more on the romance and college drama though there's still some mysteries involved. Because this series is aimed at older teens, more serious topics like drug abuse and date rape are the subject of cases. It ran for 25 books, despite the mixed reaction from critics and fans. It ended in 1998.
In 2004 a replacement for the original Nancy Drew series began publication. The series was called Nancy Drew: Girl Detective. In this series Nancy is a regular teenager, solving mysteries and she's subject to all the regular fallacies that plague Humanity. Including focusing on other things besides mysteries. She was also very single minded, being forgetful to do her chores or homework when working on a case. She's also clumsy. Basically she's like Usagi/Serena on Sailor Moon, though she's not as lazy as Serena is. Bess and George get an overhaul too being less perfect than they had been in the original series. Nancy and Ned are together again in this series, and Ned lives in River Heights now, whereas, he was from another town in the previous series. Which I didn't remember because it's been so long since I read any of the Nancy Drew books. This series ran for 47 volumes and ended in 2012.
As both a companion piece to Nancy Drew: Girl Detective and a replacement for Nancy Drew Notebooks, Aladdin Paperbacks, who were responsible for the later books in the original series for both Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys, published another series of books for younger children called Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew. Like the previous Notebooks series, Nancy, Bess, and George are in the third grade and are 8 years old. They solve mysteries like finding a stolen ice cream formula entry. Good for younger readers.
The most recent main Nancy Drew book series is Nancy Drew Diaries. Starting in 2013, the new series has had 20 volumes so far with volumes 21 and 22 due to come out in 2021. Like Girl Detective, Diaries has Nancy in high school and solving mysteries with Bess, George, and Ned. Of course there's modern technology. Though unlike The Hardy Boys Adventures, it doesn't seem like they're taking the harsher route with Nancy being a detective. Personally, I would love to see how Nancy would handle needing to "retire" from her detective activities, but it doesn't seem like that that's what they're doing with this series. I haven't read this series and there's little information about this series on Wikipedia in terms of story and character changes. Though the Unofficial Nancy Drew Home Page has a bit more information on it than Wikipedia does.
As a replacement for Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew, Aladdin Paperbacks began the Nancy Drew Clue Book series. It's the exact same format as the Hardy Boys version so I won't go into details here. It started in 2015 and has had four volumes published already with another two coming in 2021. It serves as a younger readers companion to Nancy Drew Diaries.
There's one more series that I need to talk about but for that we need to travel back to 1934. It had been four years since Nancy Drew came onto the scene and her and the Hardy Boys were vastly popular. Naturally, the Stratemeyer Syndicate wanted to capitalize on their own successes and came with a female duo, reminiscent of the Hardy Boys, known as the Dana Girls. Unlike Nancy and the Hardys though the Danas did not succeed and they didn't last beyond 1979. The reason being is that people weren't interested in them. They were fine with Nancy Drew and the Hardys, along with the Bobbsey Twins and Tom Swift, the other popular characters from Stratemeyer that had some semblance of staying power. The Dana Girls Mystery Stories ended with volume 30 in 1968. But that was not the end of the girls, Louise and Jean.
A second series started in 1972 with The Mystery of the Stone Tiger. This series was short-lived though and ended with volume 17 in 1979. This would still not be the end for the girls though. They appeared in 2010, appearing in an issue of the Nancy Drew: Girl Detective comic book series from Papercutz.
As you can see the Stratemeyer Syndicate's Series Books have become staples of our pop culture, often reaching new fans as the decades continue. Many of these characters are more than a hundred years old, but the continued reprinting of the early books, as well as movies, TV shows, comic books and video games has made sure they aren't forgotten, even if they never reached the success of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. But what makes these characters so tailor made for TV show adaptations? Well, because the books are written and distributed like TV shows. Each book is a new episode, and each continuation, reboot and spin-off is a new season or series based on the original, much like the way Star Trek is handled to this day. It also laid the groundwork for Scholastic Press in the '70s, '80s and '90s as they prepped their own packaged book series, some longer than others, some more popular, but each one with it's own fanbase that continues to this day.
And that is going to be it for me for today. I'll be back sometime this weekend with a comic book review for you and then part 2 of this series will be out sometime next month. I plan on doing this once a month just because it does require research and planning for them, which means I need time to do it all. Later.
Links
The Unofficial Nancy Drew Home Page: http://nancydrew.info/nddiaries.htm
The Unofficial Hardy Boys Home Page: http://hardyboys.us/hbos.htm
The Dana Girls: http://seriesbooks.info/dana.htm
Tom Swift: http://tomswift.net/ts1.htm
List of Stratemeyer Syndicate Books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stratemeyer_Syndicate_series
*All images taken from The Hardy Boys Wiki, the Nancy Drew Wiki, and Librarything.com.
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