Time to confess that I could NOT read this book that I snagged from Early Readers a while back. I love an academic study of the impact of pop culture on society and vice versa, but this was painful. The microscopic examinations of these classic tales read like doctoral dissertations. I get the impression that the book wasn't compiled for the average reader, which I admittedly am. Having said that, I would be happy to gift the book to someone who might enjoy it. ( )

I received this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewer Program.

This book is a collection of essays on Hardy Boys and other boy detective fiction. It is both informative and interesting. Some of chapters were a bit slow for me, but overall a very good book. ( )

As with any set of essays on a common subject, some of the essays are better than others. Or rather, they each have different strengths and weaknesses. Some of them are spot on topic (the Hardy boys or other boy detective series from the 1st half of the 20th century) and some range further afield (Harry Potter, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night, and others). Some are fairly straightforward, setting out a premise and then supporting it and then summarizing at the end; while others range about a bit, sometimes seeming to be near making a point and not quite getting there.
This is similar to the "Philosophy of..." series (I read the one on the Simpsons, which was quite good) in that it contains articles written by scholars for the edification of other scholars or similar enthusiasts. I didn't really know that in the whole world of unexplored subjects that we had progressed so far down the list that a scholarly treatment of the Hardy Boys novels was the next thing in line, but I guess it came right after a detailed look at the allegories contained in the works of L. Frank Baum.
At the end of the day, it was mostly well written, blissfully brief, and certainly not everyone's cup of tea. ( )

I received this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewer Program.

Nancy Drew and other girl detectives have often received more attention than the boys. This book is a series of 11 essays discussing boy detectives such as Tom Swift, The Three Investigators, and of course, the Hardy Boys. This is a very scholarly, in depth book filled with psychological analyzing and lots of footnotes. Topics discussed include the role of the father and the mother in popular boy detective novels, the boys' search for identity, comparing and contrasting the boys and the girls, the history of boy detectives on film, and if the world has outgrown boy detectives.

This book is NOT the easy reading, general guide to boy detectives in literature that I expected it would be. It reminds me of something I'd be assigned to read for a college class. There's a lot of excellent information here, but I found it hard going at times. I would recommend this book only to those who are already very familiar with this topic and who would like a deeper, more researched book on the subject. ( )

There are very few collections of essays examining the Boy Detective genre, exemplified most famously by the Hardy Boys. In fact this may be the only one! Consisting of eleven essays by academic writers, plus an introduction by the editor Michael G. Cornelius, the collection focuses on the The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators Series and half a dozen others.

Virtually created out of whole cloth by Edward Stratemeyer, the boy sleuth genre seems to have derived from the works of Horatio Alger. Stratemeyer wrote more than 1300 books himself, selling in excess of 500 million copies, and created many fictional series including The Rover Boys (1899), Tom Swift (starting in 1910), The Hardy Boys (starting in 1927) series, among others.

Several of these essays stand out. Elizabeth D. Blum’s essay on Nature in the Early Tom Swift Stories is exceptional. Alan Pickerall writes about Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators series — a run of 43 titles from 1964 until 1987. John Finlay Kerr’s final essay asks whether the world has outgrown the classic boy detective story and while his well-reasoned answer is undoubtedly yes, it appears that the contemporary version of the boy detective will continue to develop and embrace the social landscape of contemporary life. ( )