Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys: Same Author?

Years have passed since I read The Nancy Drew Mystery Series by Carolyn Keene. I never read The Hardy Boys by Franklin W. Dixon because we didn’t cross gender barriers 50 years ago. Today both of my grandchildren, Ivey and Zane, enjoy reading Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys because they get to solve a mystery through deductive reasoning.

The real mystery is: were the creators of both series one and the same? Being an amateur sleuth myself, I quickly learned that the man who created Frank and Joe Hardy was Edward Stratemeyer. Franklin W. Dixon was a pseudonym for a slew of ghost writers with the most prolific being a man named Leslie McFarlane. He came up with the name Franklin W. Dixon.

It turns out that Edward Stratemeyer also created Nancy Drew Sleuth, which is the female counterpart to The Hardy Boys series. Although Stratemeyer may have come up with the concept, it was a woman named Mildred A. Wirt Benson who wrote 23 of the first 30 books. She is credited with developing Nancy into such a likeable, spirited character.

To tell you the truth, I’m a bit disappointed in finding out that Carolyn Keene is not really the author of the Nancy Drew Mystery Series. It reminds me of my disillusion the day I discovered that Santa Claus was a fabrication concocted by parents to control their children during the year. You just can’t trust adults.

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