And I thought I was the first to debunk the "Harry Potter" scam....
Doug Moe: Reading Rowling ... whoever she is
By Doug Moe
July 16, 2005
I HAVE a question for all you Harry Potter fanatics out there who are bleary-eyed from reading the latest installment of the famous series of books by J.K. Rowling.
"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" became available at midnight last night, and I'll bet plenty of Madison readers were up all night reading. Especially the younger readers who have made the series such a phenomenon.
It's like that with books by favorite authors, especially a series of books about a continuing cast of characters.
My question to the Potter fans is: What would happen if you found out there wasn't really any J.K. Rowling?
Oh, I know, you have seen pictures and news clips of the somewhat reclusive author. In between books Rowling issues press releases through her publisher to dispel rumors, and to keep interest in the franchise high, though that hardly seems necessary.
But what if it turned out Rowling was just a front for a series of writers hired by a book publishing syndicate that recognized it could virtually print money as long as books in the franchise kept appearing?
Maybe it wouldn't matter, but I think it might. The writer-reader connection is a living, multi-layered thing.
In any case, for some of us of a certain vintage, the Rowling question is not altogether hypothetical.
When I was a kid in the 1960s, Harry Potter was named Frank and Joe Hardy.
Somewhere in a box in my basement, I have dozens, maybe scores, of mystery books with titles like "The Tower Treasure" and "The House on a Cliff," authored by Franklin W. Dixon and featuring teenaged brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, sons of a famous detective who begin solving mysteries on their own.
The target audience for the Hardy Boys series - which by 1999 had sold more than 70 million copies - was spelled out on the back covers of the books: "Boys between 10 and 14 who like mystery and adventure." I started reading them when I was 8. Sometimes I would read one straight through in a day. My mom would shake her head, but she'd always get me the next one in the series.
I started writing them - crude, two-page mysteries of my own devising but starring the Hardy Boys - when I was 9. It's no exaggeration to say I wanted to be Franklin W. Dixon.
Except that I learned, years later, that there isn't any Franklin W. Dixon and never was.
It's an interesting tale, well told in the 2004 book, "The Secret of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate," by Ohio University journalism Professor Marilyn S. Greenwald.
Reviewing the book last year in Booklist, Bill Ott wrote: "For this reviewer - and for thousands of other young readers - the discovery that Franklin W. Dixon, author of the Hardy Boys novels, didn't really exist was a blow and a bad one, almost on a par with the news that Santa Claus, too, was a fictional character."
I can't remember when I first learned that there was no Dixon. Perhaps I have suppressed the memory.
But in 1999 - five years before Greenwald's book came out - I came across an excellent piece on salon.com that made the case that while there was not a Franklin W. Dixon, the creation of the Hardy Boys was largely the work of one writer, a Canadian named Leslie McFarlane, whom Greenwald included in her book's subtitle.
According to Steve Burgess in his salon.com piece, McFarlane was 23 years old and a struggling "serious" writer when he was approached by Edward L. Stratemeyer, a New Jersey-based publisher (Stratemeyer Syndicate) of juvenile books including the Bomba the Jungle Boy and Tom Swift the Boy Inventor series.
Stratemeyer gave McFarlane an outline for the Hardy Boys series and McFarlane wrote the first 16 books. The syndicate then began hiring other ghostwriters and by 1999 there were 150 titles.
McFarlane eventually wrote an autobiography that told his side of the Hardy Boys tale. It was titled "The Ghost of the Hardy Boys" and it makes one difference between McFarlane and J.K. Rowling abundantly clear. Rowling has earned hundreds of millions of dollars from the Harry Potter franchise. McFarlane got $100 a book for his first few Hardy books and a grand total of $4,000. He noted that he never knew what the W stood for in Franklin W. Dixon, but it wasn't "wealthy."
There was this, though. Sometime in the 1940s, McFarlane's son, Brian, came across the first books in the Hardy Boys series on a shelf in the family home. Brain told his dad that all his friends at school loved the books.
Brian said, "Did you read the Hardy Boys books as a kid, Dad?"
To which Leslie McFarlane replied: "Read them? I wrote them."
Heard something Moe should know? Call 252-6446, write PO Box 8060, Madison, WI 53708, or e-mail dmoe@madison.com.
madison.com |
