The title of Marilyn Greenwald’snew book, The Secret of the HardyBoys, could easily be a title inthe internationally popular children’smysteries series.

Books like The Secret of the Old Mill or The Secret of the Caves reveal the crime-solving adventures of Frank and Joe Hardy around their hometown of Bayport. But the “secret” in Greenwald’s book is the identity of writer Leslie McFarlane, who authored the first 16 Hardy Boys mysteries under the pen name Franklin W. Dixon.

Greenwald’s interest in McFarlane began when she read a Washington Post reporter’s humorous reminiscence about the books and his curiosity about author Franklin W. Dixon. The reporter’s search for Dixon uncovered McFarlane.

“Of course he discovered that Franklin W. Dixon didn’t exist,” says Greenwald, a professor of journalism at Ohio University.“Dixon was the late Leslie McFarlane, a Canadian journalist with aspirations of becoming a serious writer.”

Intrigued by what she read about McFarlane and the plethora of diaries and letters he left to his children, Greenwald thought if she could talk to his children about their father and read his diaries, it would make an interesting book.

She discovered that McFarlane’s son Brian — keeper of the diaries — intended to write his father’s biography. He declined Greenwald’s request to read them.

“Later, his daughter, Norah, called and said she’d like me to write it,” Greenwald says. “But she didn’t want to continue without her brother’s approval. Then one day out of the blue, Brian called and said, ‘I’ll never write that book. You can look at the diaries.’ I think she persuaded him.”

The story began in 1927, when McFarlane debuted a new series for the Stratemeyer Syndicate about the sons of internationally famous detective Fenton Hardy. McFarlane drew Frank and Joe Hardy as intelligent, likeable, irreverent, and friendly teenagers with whom young readers could identify. He laced the books with references to Shakespeare and Dickens. He used big words. He respected his readers.

“During interviews McFarlane said there was nothing wrong with sending boys to a dictionary; it gave them a sense of accomplishment to discover the meaning of a word,” Greenwald says. “The books were of a fairly high level and very popular.”

Even so, many librarians criticized the series for having no literary value and banned them from the shelves.

The rewrites are just as controversial.

“Beginning in 1959, the Syndicate began updating the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series,” Greenwald says.“They removed perceived racial slurs, but they also cut the books by 30 percent and eliminated the richly drawn character descriptions.”

In The Secret of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate, published by Ohio University Press in spring 2004, Greenwald recounts a 1973 Toronto Star interview in which reporter Bob Stall asked McFarlane to compare the original books to the rewrites.

“What he didn’t know and what Stall showed him that day in his living room was that the books were dramatically reduced in length, entire scenes eliminated, characters’ personalities changed, and colorful descriptive passages gutted,” she writes. The revelation came as a shock to Les, and as he perused the passages Stall showed him, the angrier he became. “‘My God, they’ve been gutted,’ Les said, later calling the revisions‘a literary fraud.’”

“The rewrites were terrible,” Greenwald says. “And people who read the originals were livid.”

After dedicating 20 years to the Hardy Boys and to freelance writing, McFarlane joined the National Film Board of Canada and also became a television writer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He died in 1977.

But today the original Hardy Boys books are getting a second look, Greenwald says.

“A small bookstore in Massachusetts, Applewood Books, obtained the rights to the original books and is reprinting them,” she says. “They’ve already reissued the first 10 books.”

For more information about Marilyn Greenwald, visit theWeb at http://scrippsjschool.org/faculty.php?story_id=137.