Hardy Like a Fox at a Crime Scene

This month, some musings on recent reads/listens, followed by a piece of news I find pretty exciting.

THEY CERTAINLY ARE HARDY, THOSE BOYS

I like to listen to audiobooks on my daily walks, and often I choose to listen to favorite books from my childhood. The sense of nostalgia is a welcome break from the daily grind, and it's always fun seeing exactly how much I remember. I've listened to all fourteen of L. Frank Baum's Oz novels, Treasure Island, The Swiss Family Robinson, The Westing Game, Pippi Longstocking, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, The Once and Future King, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Wind in the Willows, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and The Lord of the Rings (in a new reading by Andy Serkis so good I've listened to the whole thing twice).

Last month I listened to a package of four of the early entries in the Hardy Boys series by "Franklin W. Dixon." I'm sure I'm not the only crime writer whose first introduction to the genre was these books (or Nancy Drew--but I'm old enough that, in my youth, boys reading Nancy Drew simply Wasn't Done). I had, if memory serves, a set of the first seventy or eighty novels, in their distinctive blue-spined hardbacks with the painted covers. Encyclopedia Brown probably came along at about the same time, and then The Three Investigators (much better books, as I recall) and the McGurk Mysteries (which nobody but me seems to remember). Then came Sherlock Holmes, followed by Agatha Christie . . . well, you get the idea.

(An aside: I wonder what happened to the original paintings the publisher commissioned for the covers of these novels. Were they, like so much commercial art, discarded and forgotten? Are there people who collect them?)

It's been decades since I read the Hardy Boys, and I found listening to several in a row a little startling. It rapidly became clear, first of all, that the audiobooks were not the versions I read in the 1970s, which had been heavily edited and, as much as was possible, updated. Those blue hardbacks filling my shelves always had exactly twenty chapters, for one thing, while the audiobooks had 23 or more. They were clearly the originals, from the 1920s and 30s, which made things a bit disorienting. It's hard to identify everything that was different, but there were more scenes with the Hardys simply hanging out with their friends, and even going to school, than I recalled. Also, I really don't think the Frank and Joe I knew were quite as accustomed to toting guns, which their earlier incarnations very casually bring along on several of their adventures. They never actually shoot a person--at least not in the books I listened to--but they cheerfully dispatch large numbers of snakes and wolves in ways that modern, ecologically-conscious readers might be a bit uncomfortable with.

I should say, by the way, that the readings, by Gary McFadden, were quite good--even given his choice to make the Hardys' chums Chet Morton and "olive-skinned Italian-American" Tony Prito (who's described that way literally every time he appears) sound like, respectively, Gabby Hayes and Chico Marx. Chet, the primary chum, is the only one given anything more than a single defining personality trait (Biff Hooper is athletic, Tony Prito is Italian, Callie Shaw is pretty). I remembered Chet as being a) fat and b) cowardly. In the originals, though, he's a) fat and b) a practical joker, whose jokes usually backfire on him.

I did definitely remember the extremely limited and repetitious vocabulary employed by "Dixon." Friends are always "chums." Fired revolvers invariably "crash." Cars are either "roadsters" or "jalopies." On the other hand, there were some turns of phrase I found quite novel. Several times, expressing enthusiastic agreement with a statement just made, Joe breaks out not with "I'll say!" but rather "I'll tell the world!"

Plotwise, the books are . . . let's be generous and call them thin. They're not really mysteries, as the bad guys (gangs of thieves or kidnappers, generally) are immediately obvious from the first page, and it's just a matter of tracking down their hideouts. There were two things I found very striking about the books. First, storms. I listened to four books, and in every single one of them the Hardys (and usually some of their chums) are put into moral peril by a sudden hurricane-level storm or, if it's winter, the worst blizzard in decades. These are always preceded by Frank casting a worried glance at the gathering clouds, but deciding that the boys probably have time to do whatever detective task they're engaged in before the storm hits. He's always wrong. As a variation on the theme, there are cave-ins, which happened three times in the four books. The minute Frank and Joe decide to go into a mine, the supporting timbers immediately age by several hundred years.

The other thing that was impossible to ignore was probably one of the main elements that had been updated for the 1970s versions. In the originals, the Hardys live in an America that is still overwhelmingly rural. Trains are the main way to get from town to town; most roads, outside city limits, are unpaved; airplanes are still a novelty. Most families grow at least some of their own food. Odd hermits can built themselves cabins in the woods not far from town and go unchallenged. Teens go ice skating on frozen rivers. Placing a long-distance telephone call requires lengthy negotiations with operators and a bit of luck. Outside their hometown of Bayport, the landscape for hundreds of miles in every direction is farmland, dotted with occasional small villages that generally aren't even named. I found it all quite fascinatingly alien. 

I don't think I feel the need to listen to any more of the books, but revisiting them was fun. Maybe I'll try a couple of Nancy Drews. I've been told that, on average, they hold up better. Anyone want to vouch for that?

THE SHELF YOU LIVE ON

While I was listening to Frank and Joe, the actual physical books I read over the last few weeks were just a tiny bit different, being new novels from a couple of titans of American literature who have been around since the 1960s: Fox, by Joyce Carol Oates, and Shadow Ticket, by Thomas Pynchon.

Of the two, I found Fox more successful and compelling. It concerns the murder of a popular teacher at an exclusive New Jersey middle school who, it turns out, was also a serial pedophile. It's a long book, and most of it is concerned with putting us in the heads of the characters--including, in a number of chapters that sometimes get very difficult to read, the pedophile. The structure of the central plot, though, is a fairly straightforward murder mystery, and while Oates leaves more plot threads dangling at the end than is typical in such a work, she does ultimately provide a satisfying answer to the question of whodunit.

Shadow Ticket, meanwhile, is about Hicks McTaggart, a Milwaukee PI in the early 1930s who gets caught up in the search for a missing heiress--the daughter of "the Al Capone of cheese." The quest eventually takes him, against his will, to Eastern Europe, where people are more concerned with a certain political uprising that it's getting harder and harder to make fun of. Does this plot reach a satisfactory resolution? Hard to say because, as in most of Pynchon's novels (and especially his recent works), the very structure of the book seems designed to undermine the idea of plot. Or causality. Or logic. There are vast global conspiracies that may or may not exist, phantom submarines, vengeful golems, Hungarian biker gangs, vigilante autogyro pilots, spies, counterspies, and swing musicians, and after a while it's pretty much impossible to tell what any of them are trying to do or if they manage to do it. This is a book that openly mocks the idea that anyone is going to try to make sense of it. You just go along for the ride, and if you're a certain kind of reader, the absurdity and humor make it worth your time. It worked for me for a while, but I can't say I was sorry to get to the end.

So, what we have here is a murder mystery and a PI novel--and yet, I'm sure the vast majority of bookstores will put them on the general fiction shelves, not the mystery shelves, mainly because of the names of the authors. A lot of Oates's books in particular involve murder or other serious crimes, and she's been in Best Mystery Stories of the Year and Ellery Queen many times, but I don't often see her books alongside those by Richard Osman. I don't know that I have a point here, beyond noting that a lot of "serious" or "literary" fiction is really just crime writing wearing a tweed jacket and a pair of wire-rimmed specs.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

Hey, speaking of books on shelves . . . 

I try to avoid vulgar self-promotion in these columns, but there are times I can't resist.

It's been fifteen years since I published my first crime story. In that time, I've hit a number of milestones that I found thrilling. First sale to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. First sale to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. First award nomination. First acceptance to an open-call anthology. First award win. First inclusion in an invitation-only anthology. First Honorable Mention in Best Mystery Stories of the Year, followed by the first actual inclusion in the volume. First Bouchercon. Joining SleuthSayers. Becoming the president of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Of course, I haven't notched nearly the number of publications and impressive achievements that many of the other columnists on this site can boast, but I'm having a blast chasing them. I figure I only have to live another 500 years or so to publish as many stories as John Floyd has, for example.

This past week I hit another personal milestone, and one that's especially meaningful to me, when Level Best Books published Crime Scenes, my first collection. Not too long ago, I thought such a thing would never happen, but here we are. The book includes twenty of my stories, including finalists for the Edgar, Derringer, Thriller, and Shamus Awards, two winners of the Al Blanchard Award, and several selections from Best Mystery Stories of the Year. 

Even if I never have another book published under my name, I'm thrilled to have this one out in the world. I didn't publish my first piece of fiction until I was in my forties. For many years, I thought being a published author was a dream that would be forever out of reach. Now I've got something I can put on the shelf to show that I made it after all. I'm proud of that, and also extremely grateful--to Level Best, to every editor and publisher who ever accepted my work, and most of all to the readers who have enjoyed it.

Because it turns out that actually being a writer is a lot more fun than dreaming about being one. I'll tell the world!