I Love Aunt Gertrude

If I mention Aunt Gertrude, how many of you think Hardy Boys? The Adventures of Frank and Joe Hardy, particularly the original 58 hardcover books, have served as a meaningful source of entertainment for me for over thirty years. I could go deep into the history and background of this classic book series, but you’d do better to visit this site, or one of the other Hardy Boys sites, instead.

Over the years I managed to acquire all of the original series in the classic blue hardcover, and even snagged a copy of the Detective Handbook. I wasn’t really worried about the value of the books… I was mainly trying to capture a slice (a durable, blue, hardcover slice) of my childhood. As I began to have children of my own I urged (okay, pushed) them to read the books, but none of them ever got interested. Lately, my seven-year-old decided he liked me to read them to him. Of course, I obliged.

I was always intrigued by several things in this series. Frank, Joe, and his buddies certainly never had to worry about post-concussion syndrome. These guys got whacked in the head more times than those little moles at Chuck-E-Cheese, and yet they were never worse for the wear. They came across as tough, yet polite. Not wimpy, but never the bullies, either.

Eating was never a problem for the Boys and their friends. Between their mother (Laura Hardy), Aunt Gertrude, and Chet, Frank and Joe rarely ever had to want for food. The authors (a stable of ghost writers scribing under the pen name of Franklin W. Dixon) managed to capture the simple, Boy Scout-ish era of the 1950s.

To me as a youngster in the 1970s, the books were each an exciting adventure. Now as an adult, I enjoy the simplicity, the story structure, and the innocence. I would hope that he would not be offended, but rather consider it an honor: I’ve always thought Clive Cussler’s novels were sort of a Hardy Boys for adults. If you’ve read both the Hardy Boys series and all of Cussler’s fiction novels as I have, I’d have to believe you feel the same way.

Oddly enough, I never read past the last hardcover Hardy Boys book. Though their numbers are now almost in the two-hundreds, I’ve never read one of the paperbacks that pick up the series at number fifty-nine. Ultimately, I think I always felt that moving on past the original hardcover series would be nothing short of sacrilegious.

As a fairly high-tech guy, I generally never long for the “simpler times.” Don’t give me any of that crap about churning ice cream on your back porch and all that. I’ve tried it - it’s no fun. I’ve been camping, and anything more than two days is too much. But when I would immerse myself in a Hardy Boys book, I would live vicariously for hours at a time as a kid from the 1950s roaming the Eastern seaboard solving mysteries and getting whacked on the head.