Jess: Overdue Podcast & The Hardy Boys

With our mention of the Hardy Boys and podcasts in class today I thought I would mention some details about that publishing story via this podcast episode of Overdue.

Overdue is a bit of a "two dudes talking" podcast but I swear it works. They're billed as a comedy podcast. The premise is that one of them reads a book they've never read before and explains it to the other, rotating each week. The books are typically classics or bestsellers but they vary depending on Patreon requests. They also usually give the author and publishing history background to open the episode.

I particularly like when they talk about children's books because I love a trip down memory lane. They also do very special episodes where they read through a choose-your-own-adventure series. TBD if those are actually funny because I have only listened to them while at work under circumstances where the mere fact that I should not be laughing makes everything funnier.

If you do not feel like listening to the episode, these are some highlights:

The Hardy Boys were published under the Stratemeyer Syndicate. This was essentially a book packager run by Edward Stratemeyer who published the Nancy Drew series, The Bobbsey Twins, the Tom Swift series, and more you may not have heard of like Baseball Joe and The Y.M.C.A. Boys.

All of the series are written by several different authors who share a pseudonym who is not a real person. Frequently, a series would be published with 10 or so books all at once to see if it would take off. This set was referred to, unfortunately, as 'breeders.'

There were also a bunch of rules the books had to follow. Chapters should end mid-situation to build suspense. Books would begin with a review of the previous books in the series and end with a preview of additional books to promote them. For example, the first Hardy Boys book ends with: "They hoped another mystery would soon come there way, and one did at the House on the Cliff." The best rule is that characters were not allowed to age or marry (because sales dropped when they tried that).

Many of these books have been re-written and re-packaged to remove troubling racist stereotypes because they were concerned about declining sales. The Hardy Boys also apparently got "real cool with the law" in these re-writes. The original writer felt it was important to teach children that the American power structure was capable of being corrupt and stupid. In the sixties, the powers that be wanted to clean that up. The Hardy Boys also used to drink. They don't do that anymore.

If you just want the publishing history this is all in the first 20 minutes before the first ad break.