The Fredösphere

Like many, I was saddened to hear of the death of Franklin W. Dixon, but I was downright infuriated by the media blackout that accompanied his death.  True, it had been a couple years since his once-ubiquitous face had appeared on TV and in newspapers (he last made news in 2003 when he testified before congress on the woeful state of disaster preparedness in New Orleans).  But considering the scores of best-selling titles to his name, not to mention his astonishingly large footprint on our culture generally, this lack of notice (in tandem with the unending stream of outrageous lies) seems terribly disgraceful.

I was lucky to interview the author back in 2000.  I submitted it for publication to all the likely periodicals (Biblical Archaeology Review, Tiger beat, etc.) but to my surprise, it was rejected by all.  Now seems an excellent time to give the world a look at some excerpts from this rare document.

The Fredösphere:  You were living the life of an American expat in France after World War I.  Why did you come home?

Franklin W. Dixon:  I finally got bored with the whole scene, proving to Hemingway I could out-drink him in the absinthe bars by night and out-write him by day.  And then, I started feeling guilt over the way his envy of me just consumed him.  His envy lead to his suicide, you know.  Besides, the literature the Lost Generation produced was too conservative, too timid.

I knew I had in me a genuinely revolutionary voice, and I needed time alone to find it.  I finally realized the ultimate subversive message could be communicated via the medium of mystery stories featuring a pair of super smart, well-funded brothers without adequate parental supervision.  The result, in 1927, was The Hardy Boys:  The Tower Treasure.  The rest is history, if you will allow me a cliché.

TF:  No one could have predicted the Hardy Boys would be so popular among prepubescent males.

FWD:  No one did predict it -- and yet, who else but the young are ever ready for revolution?  Still, your point is well taken.  I never expected the Hardy Boys to be a big commercial hit.  I never dreamed The Tower Treasure would see sequels.

TF:  Through the years you've remained reticent in response to questions about your personal life.  Are you ready now to open up?  You've done so many amazing things.  There's your failed marriage to Marilyn Monroe....

FWD:  Failed?  Failed?  Let me remind you I was married to Marilyn 18 days more than most people.

TF:  Well then, we'll stick to the public record.  You served as an informal "advisor" to the Manhattan Project; you were on Henry Wallace's short list of running mates in 1948; you smoked dope with John Lennon...

FWD:  Allegedly.

TF:  ...allegedly; you were Eric Severeid's ghostwriter; you introduced Carl Sagan to the concept of Nuclear Winter; you were predicting as far back as 1960 that microwave ovens would be big.  Yours is a long and astonishingly varied career.

FWD:  Yes.  Thanks.  Please also note it was a strange vision I had of the death of Stalin that prompted my good friend Bishop Fulton Sheen to predict the dictator's death on his TV show.

TF:  I did not know that.  Your perfectionism is legendary.

FWD:  Well, that's been a source of pain for my editors, but I take pride in it.  Certainly, no other author can claim so many revisions.  Many of my books have been completely rewritten, some more than once.

Take volume number 20, The Mystery of the Flying Express.  I wrote the first version in 1941, while I was living at 7 Middagh St. in Brooklyn, and the underlying message was all about that lying S.O.B. Roosevelt and what he was doing to railroad us into an illegal war.  I might add, it amuses me that so many supposedly sophisticated adult readers think the story is a straightforward account of a train -- but the kids, my true fans, they must have got it.  Anyway, by 1970, WWII was ancient history, and I felt it would be more relevant to critique the Vietnam War -- thus, the train morphed into a hydrofoil, and I added a Zodiac subplot to mock Nixon's foreign policy.

There's so much more to this wonderful interview, and it saddens me it will never see the light of day.  One final bit of good news:  Dixon's output was so vast, he created a backlog of Hardy Boys novels, so his death will not prevent his publishers from introducing new titles for many years to come.