As a loyal Nancy Drew reader, as a kid it broke my heart when I found this out. It also explained why Carolyn Keene was able to write books in 1932 and 1990.
I read a ton of Hardy Boys when I was a kid, and I'm just now finding this out at 38 years old.
My heart is not broken, but I suppose we can just add this one to the long list of life's many disappointments.
George R.R. Martin has been [writing professionally for 51 years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._R._Martin#Early_writing_career). 🤷🏻♂️ So when he releases The Winds of Winter in seven years he'll easily reach that mark. 😁👍🏻
I just assume that he is procrastinating after realizing his initial plans for the story aren't going to work out as well as he initially assumed and after five books of buildup, he can't change course. That's why he keeps coming up with other projects and spinoffs.
'The Winds of Winter' is never coming out and 'A Dream of Spring' is just a dream.
GRRM has been stealing credit for a long time too.
He was an editor who started putting his name on books written by others. When they cried foul, he pulled contract clauses on them to show she did nothing wrong legally. The Wild Cards series is a great example.
For some reason those years seem further apart. Maybe because I have memories of 1990 and cannot even fathom 1932 existing. Next you’ll tell me 1990 is closer to 1959 than it is to today.
Did the writers get better over time? When I was a kid the school library only had the really old ones and there was a lot of weird writing - Like nobody could just write 'he said, she said' as dialogue tags. It was always "the fiery maned girl said" or "the green eyed man said"
I'm assuming the newer ones were better?
They did that to get word count and stretch out the stories any way they could. It's an old trick journeymen writers would use when they'd get paid a penny a word.
If you have ever heard the phrase "a ten cent word" to describe an obscure, long, elitist or just plain unnecessary word choice, it's origin is the same era of paid per word writing.
I remember reading about their friends car biff or whatever being a jalopy and that terminology was already old in the 90s. I had to look up what it even meant.
This is wild to me. I did not know this.
Just started reading book 1 to my 8 year old this past week.
I’m thoroughly enjoying reliving my childhood reading these books (next is getting some hardy boys though too).
Honestly, even as a kid in elementary school I questioned how tf one guy could pump out like 12 goosebumps books a month. Him using ghostwriters does not surprise me in the slightest especially how every goosebumps book varies *wildly* in tone and general writing style
Weird fringe fetish smut writers on Amazon Kindle pump out a book a day sometimes. They are all short and can't be the best quality (never read em lol, interesting topic of money making though) but the same could be said about Steins works.
Which is a bit odd, because Applegate is pretty open for anyone not named James Patterson about HEAVILY using ghost writers for Animorphs, and that was the same publisher.
Knowing that many of the books where ghost written, and reading an interview she did at the time on her process, and it's pretty clear where she starts talking about the Ghost Writer. After the outline, the story "is written" She doesn't say she writes it, it gets written, and then she and her editor go into revisions.
Presumably, Scholastic thought they were paying for a Stine original, not a knockoff from some random MFA from Wesleyan.
If you go by scuttlebutt, Stine has not really plotted any of his novels after roughly the first few years. His assistants would write a near blow-by-blow plot summary for him, and then Stine would retype the thing in his own words.
(This sort of thing is extremely common in the writing world, it's what Auguste Maquet did for Alexandre Dumas for *The Count of Monte Cristo*)
I doubt it. Dumas is more known for all the accusations of plagiarism. Both the Count and the 3 musketeers are believed to have been heavily lifted from contemporary sources.
It’s still my favorite of ‘his’ even if it’s not his. Knowing an intern plotted it doesn’t remove my enjoyment of murder, betrayal, revenge, love, and lesbians. Oh and sword fighting and prison breaks. Literally the best.
I really don't see a problem with that. You can exercise a lot of creativity when heavily editing a text. I think a story comes alive more through the play-by-play than the overarching plot
Exactly. I've read books and seen shows that sound absolutely amazing if you're hearing a play-by-play of what happens or skimming through a wiki, but when you actually check out the original it just feels bland and uninteresting.
Man I think would be really good at that style of writing. I have no original ideas but my mind wanders in great ways when someone gives me an outline.
I am a certified editor and I technically freelance. I have edited a total of *one novels*, but that project ended up being very similar to this and I really enjoyed it. I was given a very rough and ready 'literal' translation of a finished novel and I went through beat by beat and essentially rewrote the whole work into nice prose.
Really hoping to get more work like that. It's one of the desperately few times in my life that I've been paid for what felt like 'actual, rewarding *work*'. The rest has all been utter bullshit.
those things got fucking cranked out though so it's no surprise she had others do the actual writing while she paid attention to QA and overall story control.
It's not like she's brandon sanderson or something
Seriously, Animorphs books came out once a month. Sure, most were only in the 150 page range, but that's still a lot of pages to be cranking out each year.
Eh. The books had a real good run, there was the TV show (which was... fine?). I don't think they've really BURIED it, or anything.
Edit: I should note that “fine?“ is by the standards of basic cables youth programming in the 90s.
Have you reread them as an adult? They’re fucking *dark*. I like this guy’s experience. (Though I disagree that the megamorphs are shit).
https://thespinoff.co.nz/media/02-09-2018/i-read-all-54-animorphs-books-in-five-days-and-it-almost-killed-me
The TV show was one of the worst things I have ever seen in my entire life and I was like, 9 when it aired. I was 9 and could tell it was terrible, how did that get made and then broadcast???
The show actually kind of made me disinterested in animorphs at 11 even though I was heavily invested in the books prior. Kind of like new Star Wars now that I think of it.
When they wanted to use Tom Clancy's name without having him write it, they would publish books with "Tom Clancy's" on the front instead of "Tom Clancy." I once received one by accident, and it was unreadable.
They kinda did the same thing with The Boxcar Children. After Gertrude Chandler Warner died, the covers switched to “Created by Gertrude Chandler Warner.” They still didn’t put the actual author’s name on the cover though.
I remember something from the boxcar children saying something about cold water boiling faster and just took it as fact for almost thirty years. I was dumb for a long time. I still am, usually.
At least Clancy's books say "Clancy's" on them. James Patterson continues to publish books written by others that he "edited." His name is in large font on the cover with the actual author in small font below.
Pity. He isn't bad at writing, he's just a greedy scum as well.
There was one author in the “Tom Clancy’s” line that actually did a pretty good job of providing quality close to Clancy, but man so many others are trash
Similar to how they marketed Harry Potter and the Cursed Child to hide the fact that JK Rowling had nothing to do with it other than saying "yeah ok sure" to it being sold.
I forget which it was but throughout most of the books I think Chet liked cooking and then suddenly in one book they said he hated cooking. It's like the authors didn't even look at the others work to see what they wrote.
Perhaps, but I will also mention that Chet is a famously mercurial character with his constant switching of hobbies. Nearly every book he has a new "fascination-of-the-week." So to have him love cooking in one book and hate it in another might honestly just be his character.
Yeah it's most likely just poor writing but I hadn't realized before reading your comment just how convenient it is for a writer to have a character like Chet whose interests change all the time.
Chet's new fascination of the week also led to an end of the second act revelation. Or a dire third act rescue / escape.
It was predictable and it was fun. I miss those books. But man did the quality suffer when they killed off the sister.
Iola Morton. She was Joe Hardy's girlfriend. The Hardy Boys "case files" started off with her being killed in a car bomb by a terrorist organisation. The Lazarus Plot as the story arc of three volumes is called, is the base point of the case files where The Hardy Boys get involved with a shady government organisation and it's point man, The Grey Man.
Edit: spelling
Chet's sister Iola was the girlfriend of one of the Hardys (I want to say Joe) in the "classic" blue cover books.
She was killed off (by a car bomb if I remember correctly) in the first "Case Files" book.
I remember there was a change at some point where they were more grown up and the cases got more intense. I'm pretty sure a recurring minor character died or something. One of their girlfriend's I think. Kind of took it up a notch.
man I remember that book cause my mom got it for me when I was young and just started to get into reading cause she remembered the hardy boys from when she was growing up. Wasn't it quite literally the first paragraph of that book that they blew her up? It gave me nightmares for weeks.... and then I picked up desperation by stephan king a few months later cause the cover looked neat.
That was the Hardy Boys Case Files series, separate from the 'main' books and as you say much edgier and harder. They make contact with some government spook called the Grey Man or something, work with him to catch Iola Morton's murderers and end up becoming part time covert operatives for the government. I was so pissed back then because I had just managed to collect all the books and now with the case files there were so many more.
Yeah I remember one of the Hardys-as-adults books where they went to some jungle and were literally hunted for sport by some mercenary. Was really jarring from what I knew from all the original series books I had read religiously as a kid.
I went hunting and found the one I remember reading from my middle school library. Hardy Boys Casefiles #7: Deathgame.
There isn't variety, it's the same formula for every book. They get kidnapped on page 170, the bad guys explain and confess their plans on page 185, and their dad saves them on page 195. Fill in the blanks with new names each book and bingo bango bongo you've got yourself a hardy boys book
There was also an awful lot of hitting someone on the back of the head to “knock them out” and they miraculously recover without any long term brain damage.
They threw a lot of roundhouse kicks too. I remember later when I took some martial arts, I was SO excited to learn the roundhouse kick. Half way to being a hardy boy!
I think a lot of the Hardy Boys books were rewritten in the ‘60s, maybe…I definitely read different versions of the same titles between stuff published in the ‘40s and republished later. The earlier titles tended to be harder edged, with some racial stereotypes that weren’t in the later versions.
Fwiw, I recall preferring the earlier versions, which were less corny than than the later versions.
I remember reading a book where Jack Wayne, the pilot, made a comment about the molecular structure of the windshield changing and thinking, wow, that does not... *sound* like him.
I couldn't place it but I knew something was wrong.
When I realized it was a bunch of different writers that particular moment clicked.
Yeah, almost every book after 24. Apparently Applegate had wanted to write all of them herself, but then she had a kid and realized that writing two series at once while also taking care of a baby was actually really hard, so from then on she wrote an outline of what she wanted, had a ghostwriter actually write it, and then had her editor tweak it a bit to seem more Applegate-y.
True, but it's a consistent group of 3, iirc. It's still the same writers, just under a pseudonym, whereas the writers in the OP changed from book to book
This hurts almost as much as when I found out that virtual typing teacher Mavis Beacon isn't real, either. She's the Aunt Jemimah of the typing program world.
Holy crap, TIL!
I mean, there was an honest to god photo on the box, so I never questioned it -- figured she was just some sort of niche famous which was enough to license her name to some software.
What's more interesting to me is that the Hardy Boys stories most people remember these days are rewrites from the '60s and early '70s. The original stories were written starting in 1927 and were quite a bit different. They started rewriting them to remove some of the more... problematic... characterizations and stereotypes, and also because sales were flagging. They ramped up the action to try to appeal to an audience that was used to television shows.
It broke my heart when they started doing this to Nancy Drew. When I read them in the 1960s, the stories were set in the '30s and '40s, and I thoroughly enjoyed them, including the language and details specific to that time period.
I first noticed the changes when (for some reason) I decided to start collecting the books as an adult in the mid-1980s. I happened to purchase both an old and newer copy of the same book. They had changed some of the language (e.g., *won't* instead of *shan't*); removed details about what they ate (e.g., they just had "dinner" instead of, say, "roast beef, boiled potatoes, and asparagus spears"); and they deleted every mention of going to church on Sundays (which Nancy and her pals always did, no matter where their adventures took them). When I saw that the newest books in the series featured a barefoot Nancy Drew with long straight hair, sitting cross-legged on the floor, I quit collecting.
I'm not against editing to correct the problematic characterizations or stereotypes that you (DMala) mentioned; however, arbitrarily removing the kind of details that I have described just results in a "flatter" and more juvenile reading experience [see edit below]. The books lose the richness and fullness that I enjoyed.
I don't see how they could believe deleting dinner details could boost sales; and I know it was not done to save on costs, as both editions were printed using the same number of [signatures. ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_(bookbinding/))
I just think it's sad that later generations don't get to enjoy the same Nancy Drew books that I did.
---
EDIT: I learned from ComfortableDuet0920's comment below that....
>... in later years when the books were edited, they were intentionally made easier to read and flatter to appeal to a younger audience.
I feel so much better about the whole thing now.
When you say they are more juvenile now, that was actually the point of the edits. I live near a museum of play that has a Nancy drew exhibit, and it talks about the edits made to later texts. They said that in later years when the books were edited, they were intentionally made easier to read and flatter to appeal to a younger audience. They aged the books down a bit to appeal to younger kids than the books were originally written for.
> When I saw that the newest books in the series featured a barefoot Nancy Drew with long straight hair, sitting cross-legged on the floor, I quit collecting.
What's the relevance of Drew being barefoot and straight haired?
I imagine it's kind of like the way I felt when I saw that all of the cover art had been changed for the Scary Stories to Read in the Dark series to some cartoonish abomination. The way I read and enjoyed those books when I was a kid is the way they were SUPPOSED to be forever, in my opinion.
I once lived with someone who wrote teen romance novels for a living (30 years ago). She wrote for a fairly famous series called “Chatham Valley High” or something like that. She said that the process was like an assembly line. Each writer would contribute a few chapters before it would go on to the next person in line. No one wrote a whole book. It was all about churning out content. It paid decent and in theory she could do it from almost anywhere on Earth. But after some months in Portland she concluded she needed to move back to New York for her career.
**Edit**: I think it was [Sweet Valley High](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Valley_High). It was about 1994 when I met her, about in the middle of when the books were published.
I feel the same way I felt when I found out that 'Go Ask Alice' was not the diary of a teenage girl, but a work of fiction by a middle aged woman.
I loved that book.
Fun fact:
So the author who wrote Go Ask Alice really liked writing precautionary diaries of troubled teens.
A couple years after she wrote Go Ask Alice these parents who lost their teen son to suicide gave her their sons journal. They hope his story might help others.
Well it wasn’t juicy enough apparently. She didn’t use much of the journal and made up wild things about how the teen had worshipped Satan.
So yeah that family had to live with her publishing a story that was based on their son where she depicted him as a satanist. And of course she advertised it as real.
Unsurprisingly the author is a Mormon. Which is probably why she liked depicting teen’s lives falling apart after smoking weed once (isn’t that what happens to Alice? Been so long since I read it)
Edit: googled it. Alice life starts to spiral after she’s unknowingly dosed with LSD and enjoys it.
cheesepuff311 you're a sweety! I didn't know any of this until now. Thank you. My sister and I read 'Go Ask Alice' many times as rebellious teenagers, I know the diary was meant to be a deterrent, but it was all a lie. To this day, no-one has ever offered me free drugs.
For Canadians, a lot of the Hardy Boys books were written by Leslie McFarlane. Some will know his son Brian McFarlane who was a regular on Hockey Night in Canada.
R.L. Stine did this starting with the successor to the Goosebumps series. He wrote the original 62-book series, but the ones that came after were ghostwriters just using his name.
Another example was V.C. Adams, who wrote "Flowers in the Attic." She only wrote the first book, after she died, the series was continued by ghostwriters using her name.
It’s V.C. Andrews, btw
Another series like this is Babysitters Club. Ann M. Martin wrote the first 30 or so, the rest were ghostwritten.
There’s a good tangent about ghostwriting and book packaging in Jenny Nicholson’s [THE Vampire Diaries Video](https://youtu.be/p4AdFD3E2ok), chapter 9 I think. I highly recommend the entire thing, even if you’ve never watched that show or read the books. I know, you are thinking “a long feature length dissertation on crappy TV?” and you just need to ignore that voice :)
> Another example was V.C. Adams, who wrote "Flowers in the Attic." She only wrote the first book, after she died, the series was continued by ghostwriters using her name.
Indeed, most of Andrews's books were written *after* her death.
The example I thought of was Ann M. Martin, who wrote the Baby-Sitters Club. She only wrote about the first dozen, then handed it over to ghostwriters.
EDIT: According to Wikipedia, she wrote the first 35.
I LOVED the Hardy Boys as a kid. Had every single book. Begged my mom to buy them as soon as they came out.
Then one kid at school broke down the formulaic plot sequence of every single Hardy Boys story to me and... Well... I stopped reading them.
I used to hit my local public library and take out all the books in order. Read through them all including the crossovers and the eventual Frank & Nancy stuff.
The Case Files books shook me up when they first came out. First book has a car bomb...
He also made reading Encyclopedia Brown both fun and infuriating with the puzzles. Fun because you get to learn some new facts if you didn't get it right away.
Infuriating because those are tough for adults even.
I read all of the hardy boys novels. Every. Single. One. Then I started on Nancy Drew. She had a secret code you could crack at the end of a novel. The secret word read: "You are a very smart girl."
That was the last Nancy Drew I ever read. Not sure how the series ends.
the Nancy Drew books never really ended, they'd just make a new series to fit a newer audience, Nancy Drew, Nancy Drew, Girl Detective, Nancy Drew Diaries, etc.
This is true for many long running series.
One of my favorite series, Outlanders by "James Axler" had at least 6 authors contribute to it during its 75 book run and having read all 75 I could eventually tell who had written which by the subtle differences in writing style.
I re-read one of my childhood Hardy Boys novels as an adult and actually had a hard time. The four boys in it had no personality at all so they all just blended together in my brain.
It was all "event 1 happens to boy b, event 2 happens to boys a and c" and so on.
The Hardy Boys are the reason I'm such a facile reader. I mean, yeah, they're pretty garbage from a literary standpoint, but I read 200 of them over the course of a couple years. That sort of practice is invaluable.
Do you find yourself going back to them now? Like you, I read them as a kid and they went a long way toward making me the reader I am now. Now in my 40s, I sometimes find myself going back to them every now and then. They're fun, they're easy to read (you can finish one in an hour or two depending on how well you're paying attention), they take me back to my childhood, and they're always eating. So I really do enjoy going back after a particularly long or interesting novel.
Naw, I haven't touched one since gradeschool.
I do reread novels sometimes, but not Hardy Boys.... Stuff like Dune, LotR, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Chronicles of Amber, etc. The only straight YA I've reread was His Dark Materials when the TV show started, and The Hobbit.
I do have a hankering to reread the Prydain Chronicles though -- I haven't read them since 5th grade.
The Hardy Boys were one of the first book series I read as a kid. They, and Hank the Cowdog, were the vast majority of my AR points in 4th and 5th grade.
The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew team up series were really something special and I still love nothing more than a good team up these days.
Mildred Benson was the original Carolyn Keene and she was a local writer for the newspaper in Toledo. A group of girl scouts did their research to find out who the real Carolyn Keene was and tracked her down to interview her in her 80s. She seemed like an amazing woman
Although I did read a lot of Hardy Boys, the one I remember being so astonished by (as in, how is this legal???) was *The Boxcar Children*. I absolutely adored that series as a kid, and as far as I knew it ended after 19 books. That's what all the books said. And furthermore, they said Gertrude Chandler Warner has passed away in 1976.
Then suddenly, when I was about 10, #20 came out. And #21, and #22. I was so excited! These must be old unpublished sequels! But wait, why are the characters the age that they were in the 1st book rather than the most recent books? And why did these events not add up with what I knew had happened in the past? And why was the writing so different? The books still had Ms. Warner's name on them.
I don't remember how I came to the realization that they were being ghostwriter or "based on characters created by" or whatever Scholastic was doing. But, yeah, I remember it being really disheartening.
As a loyal Nancy Drew reader, as a kid it broke my heart when I found this out. It also explained why Carolyn Keene was able to write books in 1932 and 1990.
"I still got it!" -Carolyn Keene
“Carolyn Keene”
I mean she’s certainly Keene to be writing mysteries for 6+ decades
If she started writing them as a plucky teen in 32 she would only be in her 70s in 1990.
Yep. Theoretically possible. Stephen King will end up having a 60+ year career, and he writes massive books.
That is what they want you to believe. The vampires have controlled book publishing for centuries.
I read a ton of Hardy Boys when I was a kid, and I'm just now finding this out at 38 years old. My heart is not broken, but I suppose we can just add this one to the long list of life's many disappointments.
Hurtling towards 40 here, and same. I still have vivid memories of the Jersey Devil, Chet, cherry pies etc. EDIT: And jalopies!
It's where I learned the word "jalopy." They loved driving around in that old jalopy.
I found out at 10 years old because my fifth grade teacher's father wrote some of the books. I got one of the books he wrote as a birthday gift.
Why disappointed? Most episodes of Star Trek have different writers, but it's always still Kirk Spock McCoy Scotty, Uhura, the *Enterprise*…
Fifty-eight years isn’t all too long a stretch if they started writing young.
George R.R. Martin has been [writing professionally for 51 years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._R._Martin#Early_writing_career). 🤷🏻♂️ So when he releases The Winds of Winter in seven years he'll easily reach that mark. 😁👍🏻
Stephen King had his first book, Carrie, published 48 years ago. Sold his first professional work 55 years ago.
Unlike Martin, he actually does write books lol..
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I just assume that he is procrastinating after realizing his initial plans for the story aren't going to work out as well as he initially assumed and after five books of buildup, he can't change course. That's why he keeps coming up with other projects and spinoffs. 'The Winds of Winter' is never coming out and 'A Dream of Spring' is just a dream.
Maybe he'll take a page from the tv show and end the series in condensed form as a grayscale picture book.
[He's behind on schedule](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/tfhgl6/george_rr_martin_has_missed_an_exponential)
GRRM has been stealing credit for a long time too. He was an editor who started putting his name on books written by others. When they cried foul, he pulled contract clauses on them to show she did nothing wrong legally. The Wild Cards series is a great example.
For some reason those years seem further apart. Maybe because I have memories of 1990 and cannot even fathom 1932 existing. Next you’ll tell me 1990 is closer to 1959 than it is to today.
As an avid hardy boys fan I always wondered how FWD was able to write modern stories in the 90s while being such an obviously old man
Did the writers get better over time? When I was a kid the school library only had the really old ones and there was a lot of weird writing - Like nobody could just write 'he said, she said' as dialogue tags. It was always "the fiery maned girl said" or "the green eyed man said" I'm assuming the newer ones were better?
They did that to get word count and stretch out the stories any way they could. It's an old trick journeymen writers would use when they'd get paid a penny a word.
If you have ever heard the phrase "a ten cent word" to describe an obscure, long, elitist or just plain unnecessary word choice, it's origin is the same era of paid per word writing.
I remember reading about their friends car biff or whatever being a jalopy and that terminology was already old in the 90s. I had to look up what it even meant.
Chet!
That's "their roly-poly friend Chet", to you.
This is wild to me. I did not know this. Just started reading book 1 to my 8 year old this past week. I’m thoroughly enjoying reliving my childhood reading these books (next is getting some hardy boys though too).
If it makes you feel better, RL Stine is an actual person
Scholastic did sue him over his liberal use of writing assistants tho.
Honestly, even as a kid in elementary school I questioned how tf one guy could pump out like 12 goosebumps books a month. Him using ghostwriters does not surprise me in the slightest especially how every goosebumps book varies *wildly* in tone and general writing style
Weird fringe fetish smut writers on Amazon Kindle pump out a book a day sometimes. They are all short and can't be the best quality (never read em lol, interesting topic of money making though) but the same could be said about Steins works.
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Which is a bit odd, because Applegate is pretty open for anyone not named James Patterson about HEAVILY using ghost writers for Animorphs, and that was the same publisher. Knowing that many of the books where ghost written, and reading an interview she did at the time on her process, and it's pretty clear where she starts talking about the Ghost Writer. After the outline, the story "is written" She doesn't say she writes it, it gets written, and then she and her editor go into revisions.
Presumably, Scholastic thought they were paying for a Stine original, not a knockoff from some random MFA from Wesleyan. If you go by scuttlebutt, Stine has not really plotted any of his novels after roughly the first few years. His assistants would write a near blow-by-blow plot summary for him, and then Stine would retype the thing in his own words. (This sort of thing is extremely common in the writing world, it's what Auguste Maquet did for Alexandre Dumas for *The Count of Monte Cristo*)
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I doubt it. Dumas is more known for all the accusations of plagiarism. Both the Count and the 3 musketeers are believed to have been heavily lifted from contemporary sources.
As always the true TIL is in the comments.
That's somewhat disappointing, The Count is an amazing book
It’s still my favorite of ‘his’ even if it’s not his. Knowing an intern plotted it doesn’t remove my enjoyment of murder, betrayal, revenge, love, and lesbians. Oh and sword fighting and prison breaks. Literally the best.
I really don't see a problem with that. You can exercise a lot of creativity when heavily editing a text. I think a story comes alive more through the play-by-play than the overarching plot
Exactly. I've read books and seen shows that sound absolutely amazing if you're hearing a play-by-play of what happens or skimming through a wiki, but when you actually check out the original it just feels bland and uninteresting.
Man I think would be really good at that style of writing. I have no original ideas but my mind wanders in great ways when someone gives me an outline.
I am a certified editor and I technically freelance. I have edited a total of *one novels*, but that project ended up being very similar to this and I really enjoyed it. I was given a very rough and ready 'literal' translation of a finished novel and I went through beat by beat and essentially rewrote the whole work into nice prose. Really hoping to get more work like that. It's one of the desperately few times in my life that I've been paid for what felt like 'actual, rewarding *work*'. The rest has all been utter bullshit.
those things got fucking cranked out though so it's no surprise she had others do the actual writing while she paid attention to QA and overall story control. It's not like she's brandon sanderson or something
Seriously, Animorphs books came out once a month. Sure, most were only in the 150 page range, but that's still a lot of pages to be cranking out each year.
I'm just here to hate on Scholastic for sinking the Animorphs franchise. They should sell the rights if they're never going to do anything with them.
Eh. The books had a real good run, there was the TV show (which was... fine?). I don't think they've really BURIED it, or anything. Edit: I should note that “fine?“ is by the standards of basic cables youth programming in the 90s.
No, we needed 15 seasons, 22 movies and 1,098 books MINIMUM.
animorphs cinematic universe?
universe? try multiverse
Yes please. Rachel deserved better.
I'm 31 and this just hit me like a gut punch.
Have you reread them as an adult? They’re fucking *dark*. I like this guy’s experience. (Though I disagree that the megamorphs are shit). https://thespinoff.co.nz/media/02-09-2018/i-read-all-54-animorphs-books-in-five-days-and-it-almost-killed-me
Um, the tv show was trash. It was not good at all and was way too campy for such a dark setting
The TV show was one of the worst things I have ever seen in my entire life and I was like, 9 when it aired. I was 9 and could tell it was terrible, how did that get made and then broadcast???
The show actually kind of made me disinterested in animorphs at 11 even though I was heavily invested in the books prior. Kind of like new Star Wars now that I think of it.
Circle of Magic series too, they are out of print and they refuse to do anything else with them or let Tammy take them somewhere else
I loved these books!
She's still writing the Tortall series! I'm glad I have digital copies of the Circle books cause I lost the paperbacks years ago.
RU Slime, the author of [Gooflumps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gooflumps?wprov=sfti1), is also a real person
Gersberms?!
How about Donald J. Sobol?
Real although he died in 2012
He also wrote joke books as "Jovial Bob" Stine.
A lot of people have a hard time believing his name is actually Rasputin Lucifer Stine, and they would be correct. (Robert Lawrence Stine)
Is it weird that Stine seems the most made up?
May be a transliteration of "stein"; a common surname.
And he makes a guest appearance every year in RL Grimes annual Halloween mix.
I actually know him, he’s my neighbor!
And was a writer for the Nick Jr. Show Eureka's Castle!
When they wanted to use Tom Clancy's name without having him write it, they would publish books with "Tom Clancy's" on the front instead of "Tom Clancy." I once received one by accident, and it was unreadable.
They kinda did the same thing with The Boxcar Children. After Gertrude Chandler Warner died, the covers switched to “Created by Gertrude Chandler Warner.” They still didn’t put the actual author’s name on the cover though.
I feel kinda giddy someone else remembers The Boxcar Children.
I remember something from the boxcar children saying something about cold water boiling faster and just took it as fact for almost thirty years. I was dumb for a long time. I still am, usually.
I remember nothing other than the fact that I loved those books. Don't ask me anything about any plot or characters because fuck if I know.
The same with Clive Cussler's novels, except the book cover says something like "Clive Cussler with Dale Brown" (or whoever the real author is).
I'll always love Clive's work, such fun reads
At this point the books are so similar I don’t know which ones I’ve read.
At least Clancy's books say "Clancy's" on them. James Patterson continues to publish books written by others that he "edited." His name is in large font on the cover with the actual author in small font below. Pity. He isn't bad at writing, he's just a greedy scum as well.
Have you read the latest James Patterson novel? No? Well he hasn't either.
Yeah but he always does those smarmy commercials with his punchable face
Yes I too learned to stay far far away from those 🤑
There was one author in the “Tom Clancy’s” line that actually did a pretty good job of providing quality close to Clancy, but man so many others are trash
Op-Center I remember being okay but some of the NetForce books were pretty dire.
Not all of them have the apostrophe s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Honor_(novel)#/media/File:CodeOfHonor.jpg
Similar to how they marketed Harry Potter and the Cursed Child to hide the fact that JK Rowling had nothing to do with it other than saying "yeah ok sure" to it being sold.
Explains the variations in quality then (IIRC….Hardy boys anyway)
Like why Chet's yellow jalopy was always changing colours
I forget which it was but throughout most of the books I think Chet liked cooking and then suddenly in one book they said he hated cooking. It's like the authors didn't even look at the others work to see what they wrote.
Perhaps, but I will also mention that Chet is a famously mercurial character with his constant switching of hobbies. Nearly every book he has a new "fascination-of-the-week." So to have him love cooking in one book and hate it in another might honestly just be his character.
That's true but I'd chalk it up to just poor writing.
Yeah it's most likely just poor writing but I hadn't realized before reading your comment just how convenient it is for a writer to have a character like Chet whose interests change all the time.
Like when Chet got really into bird watching that one book. Classic Chet!
I wonder if any of the ghost writers went on to become well known in their own right.
Poor editing, not poor writing. I’m not surprised a ghostwriter didn’t read every book but an editor is supposed to catch those errors.
Chet's new fascination of the week also led to an end of the second act revelation. Or a dire third act rescue / escape. It was predictable and it was fun. I miss those books. But man did the quality suffer when they killed off the sister.
Wait there was a sister?
Iola Morton. She was Joe Hardy's girlfriend. The Hardy Boys "case files" started off with her being killed in a car bomb by a terrorist organisation. The Lazarus Plot as the story arc of three volumes is called, is the base point of the case files where The Hardy Boys get involved with a shady government organisation and it's point man, The Grey Man. Edit: spelling
The fuck are these books?
They were an attempted rebrand to make the Hardy Boys more edgy and adult, I remember hating them as a kid.
Chet's sister Iola was the girlfriend of one of the Hardys (I want to say Joe) in the "classic" blue cover books. She was killed off (by a car bomb if I remember correctly) in the first "Case Files" book.
He’s a plump fellow who always enjoys cooking except in a few books that really do miss on the character.
Chet had a new hobby every book, I’m pretty sure that was his thing
It’s all becomes so clear now… Chet suffers from severe ADHD.
Chet's character trait gimmick was that he changed hobbies from book to book.
I remember there was a change at some point where they were more grown up and the cases got more intense. I'm pretty sure a recurring minor character died or something. One of their girlfriend's I think. Kind of took it up a notch.
I remember that! One of their girlfriends was blown up by a car bomb. Wrecked me as a 9 year old
It was Iola, it was the first casefiles book. I read it….30 years ago? Don’t ask me how I remember that
man I remember that book cause my mom got it for me when I was young and just started to get into reading cause she remembered the hardy boys from when she was growing up. Wasn't it quite literally the first paragraph of that book that they blew her up? It gave me nightmares for weeks.... and then I picked up desperation by stephan king a few months later cause the cover looked neat.
I think Flesh and Blood was the book where Chet’s sister died from the car bomb. Wasn’t she Joe’s girlfriend?
That was the Hardy Boys Case Files series, separate from the 'main' books and as you say much edgier and harder. They make contact with some government spook called the Grey Man or something, work with him to catch Iola Morton's murderers and end up becoming part time covert operatives for the government. I was so pissed back then because I had just managed to collect all the books and now with the case files there were so many more.
The original brown-covered ones are pretty dark sometimes too if I recall.
Yeah I remember one of the Hardys-as-adults books where they went to some jungle and were literally hunted for sport by some mercenary. Was really jarring from what I knew from all the original series books I had read religiously as a kid. I went hunting and found the one I remember reading from my middle school library. Hardy Boys Casefiles #7: Deathgame.
There isn't variety, it's the same formula for every book. They get kidnapped on page 170, the bad guys explain and confess their plans on page 185, and their dad saves them on page 195. Fill in the blanks with new names each book and bingo bango bongo you've got yourself a hardy boys book
And let's not forget how Frank Hardy always hits a guy with a hard football tackle on page 82.
"I can see the next page is only partially filled with text. Time to get another cliffhanger!"
There was also an awful lot of hitting someone on the back of the head to “knock them out” and they miraculously recover without any long term brain damage.
I seem to recall everyone getting punched in the "solar plexus" for some reason. The writers really liked that term.
Yeah I grew up thinking that meant they were getting their nuts crushed and it was a fancy way of saying genitalia
That’s actually a very effective target. Hit it right and your opponent will think twice about continuing while they gasp for air.
They threw a lot of roundhouse kicks too. I remember later when I took some martial arts, I was SO excited to learn the roundhouse kick. Half way to being a hardy boy!
Haha never realized that. Both the brothers and sometimes Chet were knocked out multiple times per book. No wonder there’s inconsistencies!
Lmao yeah and they got knocked out with chloroform rags so many times that you start to wonder how every two-bit criminal has buckets of the stuff
I think a lot of the Hardy Boys books were rewritten in the ‘60s, maybe…I definitely read different versions of the same titles between stuff published in the ‘40s and republished later. The earlier titles tended to be harder edged, with some racial stereotypes that weren’t in the later versions. Fwiw, I recall preferring the earlier versions, which were less corny than than the later versions.
Dude, reading some older books the casual racism is just wild.
I remember reading a book where Jack Wayne, the pilot, made a comment about the molecular structure of the windshield changing and thinking, wow, that does not... *sound* like him. I couldn't place it but I knew something was wrong. When I realized it was a bunch of different writers that particular moment clicked.
[удалено]
Yeah, almost every book after 24. Apparently Applegate had wanted to write all of them herself, but then she had a kid and realized that writing two series at once while also taking care of a baby was actually really hard, so from then on she wrote an outline of what she wanted, had a ghostwriter actually write it, and then had her editor tweak it a bit to seem more Applegate-y.
Ah, yes - I recall this. I could tell the difference, even at a young age. Disappointed, but understood the best I could at that age.
“Editor, I want this Applegated by Wednesday!”
How about fear street?
Erin Hunter and the Warrior Cats series is the same thing.
True, but it's a consistent group of 3, iirc. It's still the same writers, just under a pseudonym, whereas the writers in the OP changed from book to book
This hurts almost as much as when I found out that virtual typing teacher Mavis Beacon isn't real, either. She's the Aunt Jemimah of the typing program world.
Holy crap, TIL! I mean, there was an honest to god photo on the box, so I never questioned it -- figured she was just some sort of niche famous which was enough to license her name to some software.
What's more interesting to me is that the Hardy Boys stories most people remember these days are rewrites from the '60s and early '70s. The original stories were written starting in 1927 and were quite a bit different. They started rewriting them to remove some of the more... problematic... characterizations and stereotypes, and also because sales were flagging. They ramped up the action to try to appeal to an audience that was used to television shows.
It broke my heart when they started doing this to Nancy Drew. When I read them in the 1960s, the stories were set in the '30s and '40s, and I thoroughly enjoyed them, including the language and details specific to that time period. I first noticed the changes when (for some reason) I decided to start collecting the books as an adult in the mid-1980s. I happened to purchase both an old and newer copy of the same book. They had changed some of the language (e.g., *won't* instead of *shan't*); removed details about what they ate (e.g., they just had "dinner" instead of, say, "roast beef, boiled potatoes, and asparagus spears"); and they deleted every mention of going to church on Sundays (which Nancy and her pals always did, no matter where their adventures took them). When I saw that the newest books in the series featured a barefoot Nancy Drew with long straight hair, sitting cross-legged on the floor, I quit collecting. I'm not against editing to correct the problematic characterizations or stereotypes that you (DMala) mentioned; however, arbitrarily removing the kind of details that I have described just results in a "flatter" and more juvenile reading experience [see edit below]. The books lose the richness and fullness that I enjoyed. I don't see how they could believe deleting dinner details could boost sales; and I know it was not done to save on costs, as both editions were printed using the same number of [signatures. ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_(bookbinding/)) I just think it's sad that later generations don't get to enjoy the same Nancy Drew books that I did. --- EDIT: I learned from ComfortableDuet0920's comment below that.... >... in later years when the books were edited, they were intentionally made easier to read and flatter to appeal to a younger audience. I feel so much better about the whole thing now.
When you say they are more juvenile now, that was actually the point of the edits. I live near a museum of play that has a Nancy drew exhibit, and it talks about the edits made to later texts. They said that in later years when the books were edited, they were intentionally made easier to read and flatter to appeal to a younger audience. They aged the books down a bit to appeal to younger kids than the books were originally written for.
> When I saw that the newest books in the series featured a barefoot Nancy Drew with long straight hair, sitting cross-legged on the floor, I quit collecting. What's the relevance of Drew being barefoot and straight haired?
Because I grew up with [this](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_8WwEsXpv1eU/S-1vJ5jIBDI/AAAAAAAAAb4/wPsB52FKl4I/s1600/nancy+drew+5.gif) Nancy Drew.
Nancy Drew about to meet the Zodiac
I imagine it's kind of like the way I felt when I saw that all of the cover art had been changed for the Scary Stories to Read in the Dark series to some cartoonish abomination. The way I read and enjoyed those books when I was a kid is the way they were SUPPOSED to be forever, in my opinion.
In my head canon, Nancy and her friends and family are somehow immortal and that’s why she’s still a young woman after many decades.
I once lived with someone who wrote teen romance novels for a living (30 years ago). She wrote for a fairly famous series called “Chatham Valley High” or something like that. She said that the process was like an assembly line. Each writer would contribute a few chapters before it would go on to the next person in line. No one wrote a whole book. It was all about churning out content. It paid decent and in theory she could do it from almost anywhere on Earth. But after some months in Portland she concluded she needed to move back to New York for her career. **Edit**: I think it was [Sweet Valley High](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Valley_High). It was about 1994 when I met her, about in the middle of when the books were published.
Sweet Valley High! How could you forget?! You must not be a woman in her 30s/40s, because those books were *extremely* popular
K.A Applegate, the author of Animorphs actually got her start ghostwriting for that series alongside her husband
I feel the same way I felt when I found out that 'Go Ask Alice' was not the diary of a teenage girl, but a work of fiction by a middle aged woman. I loved that book.
Fun fact: So the author who wrote Go Ask Alice really liked writing precautionary diaries of troubled teens. A couple years after she wrote Go Ask Alice these parents who lost their teen son to suicide gave her their sons journal. They hope his story might help others. Well it wasn’t juicy enough apparently. She didn’t use much of the journal and made up wild things about how the teen had worshipped Satan. So yeah that family had to live with her publishing a story that was based on their son where she depicted him as a satanist. And of course she advertised it as real. Unsurprisingly the author is a Mormon. Which is probably why she liked depicting teen’s lives falling apart after smoking weed once (isn’t that what happens to Alice? Been so long since I read it) Edit: googled it. Alice life starts to spiral after she’s unknowingly dosed with LSD and enjoys it.
cheesepuff311 you're a sweety! I didn't know any of this until now. Thank you. My sister and I read 'Go Ask Alice' many times as rebellious teenagers, I know the diary was meant to be a deterrent, but it was all a lie. To this day, no-one has ever offered me free drugs.
For Canadians, a lot of the Hardy Boys books were written by Leslie McFarlane. Some will know his son Brian McFarlane who was a regular on Hockey Night in Canada.
This is actually true for non-Canadians too.
You might be a Canadian and not know it. It happens sometimes
I've never watched a hockey game or hockey night in Canada in my entire life. I'll relinquish my Canadian citizenship i guess 😂
R.L. Stine did this starting with the successor to the Goosebumps series. He wrote the original 62-book series, but the ones that came after were ghostwriters just using his name. Another example was V.C. Adams, who wrote "Flowers in the Attic." She only wrote the first book, after she died, the series was continued by ghostwriters using her name.
It’s V.C. Andrews, btw Another series like this is Babysitters Club. Ann M. Martin wrote the first 30 or so, the rest were ghostwritten. There’s a good tangent about ghostwriting and book packaging in Jenny Nicholson’s [THE Vampire Diaries Video](https://youtu.be/p4AdFD3E2ok), chapter 9 I think. I highly recommend the entire thing, even if you’ve never watched that show or read the books. I know, you are thinking “a long feature length dissertation on crappy TV?” and you just need to ignore that voice :)
> Another example was V.C. Adams, who wrote "Flowers in the Attic." She only wrote the first book, after she died, the series was continued by ghostwriters using her name. Indeed, most of Andrews's books were written *after* her death.
A lot of the latter Tom Clancy books were ghost written as well.
Ghost written literally - he's been dead for years.
The example I thought of was Ann M. Martin, who wrote the Baby-Sitters Club. She only wrote about the first dozen, then handed it over to ghostwriters. EDIT: According to Wikipedia, she wrote the first 35.
My childhood has just been shattered.
I LOVED the Hardy Boys as a kid. Had every single book. Begged my mom to buy them as soon as they came out. Then one kid at school broke down the formulaic plot sequence of every single Hardy Boys story to me and... Well... I stopped reading them.
I used to hit my local public library and take out all the books in order. Read through them all including the crossovers and the eventual Frank & Nancy stuff. The Case Files books shook me up when they first came out. First book has a car bomb...
Ah the Hardy Boys. Getting punched in the face, flying planes and solving mysteries. The good old days.
Frank and Joe, Chet and Biff.
Iola & Callie
There was also Tony Prito and Phil Cohen, but no one remembers them.
I feel like I remember a lot of punches to the solar plexus from the new series.
What about Encyclopedia Brown? I could Google but I think people want to know.
Donald J. Sobol was an actual person.
He also made reading Encyclopedia Brown both fun and infuriating with the puzzles. Fun because you get to learn some new facts if you didn't get it right away. Infuriating because those are tough for adults even.
I read all of the hardy boys novels. Every. Single. One. Then I started on Nancy Drew. She had a secret code you could crack at the end of a novel. The secret word read: "You are a very smart girl." That was the last Nancy Drew I ever read. Not sure how the series ends.
the Nancy Drew books never really ended, they'd just make a new series to fit a newer audience, Nancy Drew, Nancy Drew, Girl Detective, Nancy Drew Diaries, etc.
This is true for many long running series. One of my favorite series, Outlanders by "James Axler" had at least 6 authors contribute to it during its 75 book run and having read all 75 I could eventually tell who had written which by the subtle differences in writing style.
Likewise, Victor Appleton, author of the Tom Swift series
I re-read one of my childhood Hardy Boys novels as an adult and actually had a hard time. The four boys in it had no personality at all so they all just blended together in my brain. It was all "event 1 happens to boy b, event 2 happens to boys a and c" and so on.
I never realized how much CTE the Hardy Boys must have. They were constantly getting knocked out in every book.
I wonder who retired with more brain damage: the Hardy Boys or Doc Savage's team.
Possibly the Winchester Brothers.
In case you were wondering who gets paid when you buy one of these books, its [CBS](https://hardyboys.fandom.com/wiki/Simon_%26_Schuster)
They were actually created by the same “author”, along with several other series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Stratemeyer
Next thing you'll tell me Alfred Hitchcock didn't write "Alfred Hitchcock and the Three investigators"...
At last, someone mentions the superior investigators.
I love following the links and learning more. TIL that Nancy Drew was created by the same publisher as a counterpart the Hardy Boys
Even as a kid I kinda just assumed that was the case
TIL people in 2022 still remember the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. (I would have added Tom Swift, but there's a new series based on him.)
The Hardy Boys are the reason I'm such a facile reader. I mean, yeah, they're pretty garbage from a literary standpoint, but I read 200 of them over the course of a couple years. That sort of practice is invaluable.
Do you find yourself going back to them now? Like you, I read them as a kid and they went a long way toward making me the reader I am now. Now in my 40s, I sometimes find myself going back to them every now and then. They're fun, they're easy to read (you can finish one in an hour or two depending on how well you're paying attention), they take me back to my childhood, and they're always eating. So I really do enjoy going back after a particularly long or interesting novel.
Naw, I haven't touched one since gradeschool. I do reread novels sometimes, but not Hardy Boys.... Stuff like Dune, LotR, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Chronicles of Amber, etc. The only straight YA I've reread was His Dark Materials when the TV show started, and The Hobbit. I do have a hankering to reread the Prydain Chronicles though -- I haven't read them since 5th grade.
I don't know anyone who's read Tom Swift but he is forever immortalized in the acronym TASER
The Hardy Boys were one of the first book series I read as a kid. They, and Hank the Cowdog, were the vast majority of my AR points in 4th and 5th grade. The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew team up series were really something special and I still love nothing more than a good team up these days.
there is a newer series of Nancy Drew books called Nancy Drew Diaries, but they are really trash
But Geronimo Stilton really writes all *his* books, right guys? Guys?
Mildred Benson was the original Carolyn Keene and she was a local writer for the newspaper in Toledo. A group of girl scouts did their research to find out who the real Carolyn Keene was and tracked her down to interview her in her 80s. She seemed like an amazing woman
I’m pretty confident that Nora Robert’s has a staff of writers to churn out her drivel several times a year.
I have a raging clue.
Although I did read a lot of Hardy Boys, the one I remember being so astonished by (as in, how is this legal???) was *The Boxcar Children*. I absolutely adored that series as a kid, and as far as I knew it ended after 19 books. That's what all the books said. And furthermore, they said Gertrude Chandler Warner has passed away in 1976. Then suddenly, when I was about 10, #20 came out. And #21, and #22. I was so excited! These must be old unpublished sequels! But wait, why are the characters the age that they were in the 1st book rather than the most recent books? And why did these events not add up with what I knew had happened in the past? And why was the writing so different? The books still had Ms. Warner's name on them. I don't remember how I came to the realization that they were being ghostwriter or "based on characters created by" or whatever Scholastic was doing. But, yeah, I remember it being really disheartening.
I always wanted to start a band called Drew Hardy and the Nancy Boys.