So I was recently in a Half Price Books, and I made a lot of nostalgia purchases. I don't usually do that, but I found myself looking at these books, and I couldn't help but buy them. I keep saying I'm going to post a picture of my finds that day. Maybe tomorrow. Who knows?
You've heard a lot about the person who abused me when I was a kid, but I'm going to say something nice about him for a change. Like both my biological mom and dad, this guy encouraged me to read.
I've been on record before stating that without the Hardy Boys, I probably wouldn't be writing today. I'm talking, the teenaged sons of Fenton Hardy, not the WWE (F?) wrestlers. Or the awful TV shows. I mean, the books.
Funny thing about the books. I'll get to that in a bit.
My stepfather loved reading, maybe as much as I do now. He loved hard SF because he was a biologist. But whenever he had the urge to buy books he asked if I wanted to go, too. He said he'd let me get some books. So I always said YES! Please!
We walked across the tracks, went down the road, past the White Hen and the Ace Hardware. Over the bridge to York. We'd turn right and head down and just across the street from the York Theater there was this great used books place called Ye Olde Book Worm. My stepfather would browse around the SF area, which was fuckin' huge, and the owner knew me, so he allowed me into the back room, where he kept all of his Hardy Boys books.
I am 90% certain that this is where I got the book that changed my life, that sent me down this path to becoming a writer. The Haunted Fort was the Hardy Boys book. It was an updated version, but I loved it so much I started writing stories of my own. I made up The Detective Boys. Yeah . . . But hey, without my Hardy Boys rip-offs, we wouldn't have, say, Tales of Unspeakable Taste. Or Dong of Frankenstein, for that matter. Sorry, Franklin W. Dixon, even though you never existed. Yeah, Dixon was the name that all these work-for-hire writers did the Hardy Boys books under. I hear it was a flat rate of $100 a book. Not bad for back then.
My stepfather would get his books, and then he'd check with me in the back room. I always had one Hardy Boys books too many. I figured that out early., No matter how many I held, it was always one too many. He said I had to put one back. So I got into the habit of picking up an extra one that I didn't want, and when confronted with this rule, I'd put that one back. I'd fib, of course, and hem and haw over it, but that's what happened. I devoured these books as soon as we got home.
And one day Ye Olde Book Worm disappeared. In fact the building they were in was no longer there. It broke my heart. It was a great place. I loved it. It was the first used book store to go out of business on me. I'd experience that at least a dozen more times in my life.
Fast forward until I'm in my late twenties or early thirties. I was driving around, looking for a place, and what the fuck did I find in Bensenville on the railroad tracks there? YE OLDE BOOK WORM! They hadn't gone out of business! They'd just moved! I parked and, since it was payday the day before, I went directly in. Obviously the old man who ran the place didn't remember me. Shit, he'd been in his late seventies when I'd seen him as a kid. He had to be pushing 100 by then. But he was there! And he still had a back room full of Hardy Boys books!
I went on the biggest book buying spree I've ever gone on in my adult life that day. I bought a lot of books, including my copy of Poker According to Maverick. And yes, I got a few Hardy Boys books, including the one that taught readers how to become crime investigators, which I always wanted as a kid.
The thing about the Hardy Boys is this: every generation has their own version of them. In the Thirties, the originals were, to put it mildly, racist. Then they were reprinted with changes in them to make them more friendly to young boys who weren't just white. And the next generation had them rewritten again. The Eighties got kung-fu Hardy Boys from S&S And then, the generation I was a part of, just barely as I was passing out of that phase, they decided to do the gritty reimagination of the Hardy Boys called The Hardy Boys Casefiles, in which Joe's long-running girlfriend gets killed in a car bomb by a Middle Eastern terrorist whose name translates to The Bullet. Fuckin' weird, right? But I was still on board for a while. And then the next generation got their Hardy Boys, which looked really silly to me, but the kids loved it. I'm sure there have been two more versions of the series since then.
Frank and Joe Hardy will be with us for a long time. Kind of like superheroes. Bruce Wayne will never die for real. Peter Parker will always be slinging webs and might be a teenager forever. Jonah Hex will always . . . well, maybe not. He wore the Confederate uniform, after all. That's really not a good one to come back from, and I'm sure DC is done with him. Maybe.
And then Ye Olde Book Worm disappeared again. I wouldn't be surprised if it was because the owner died at the age of 300. He was a great guy, though. He loved books. Or maybe he loved the experience of the smoke shop, because he still sold tobacco products there. And Lotto tickets. But I have loved many used bookstores in my life. Most run by elderly folks who probably died and had the business sold off by their inheritors.
But I really miss being in that back room as a kid. Selecting the Hardy Boys books I wanted.
So yeah. I bought a bunch of Hardy Boys books from Half Price in the nostalgia section. I also got some Tom Swift books. My dad gave me his collection from when he was a kid. I lost them somewhere along the way. (Read as: my stepfather threw them away when moving from the apartment I grew up in.) I got a few Tom Swifts, too. It felt really good.
Really fucking good,.
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