In 2022 Jonathan Keeperman, then a lecturer in the English department at the University of California, Irvine, who for years had moonlighted
Their suspicion of the past plays out on a more personal level in their vexed relationship with their father, who serves as an embodiment of the generation they will succeed. The brothers may admire Fenton but they also see him as their opponent. Their goal, as aspiring detectives, is to prove their worth by beating him at his own game, and in the original version of The Secret of the Old Mill this leads them to withhold evidence from him—in effect impeding and potentially sabotaging the investigation—so that they can be the ones to claim victory. Respect for male authority is foundational to the far-right worldview, as is vividly apparent in the fawning language conservatives use to describe Trump. Keeperman has called Trump a “great father of the American people”; the official White House X account has referred to Trump as “Daddy”; and in late 2024, at a campaign event in Georgia, Tucker Carlson likened Trump to a “pissed” father who, upon returning to office, would “spank” America for being a bad child. In contrast to this culture of filial worship, the Hardy boys are perfectly willing to acknowledge their father’s vulnerabilities, and with good reason: Fenton is constantly disappearing, overlooking clues, and getting into scrapes from which his sons must rescue him. It’s possible to read the novels as dramas of oedipal frustration in which the brothers act on an imperfectly suppressed desire to “murder” their father, to get out from under his influence and surpass him, to clear their world of dusty remains and adults past their prime in order to become creative forces in their own right. In the original version of The Tower Treasure, when a friend tells Frank that Fenton “can do anything,” Frank replies, “I used to think so, too.” As the literary scholar Tim Morris has noted, “Fenton Hardy never captures a single criminal or solves a single case.… He is infallible but always failing,” and in this way he exemplifies “what many think of their own fathers: utterly powerful, contemptibly inept.” What will young people today find in the original Hardy Boys novels? Will they find nostalgic narratives of white male supremacy, or tales of heroes anxious to be free of the past? Like the Hardy boys, children know when they’re being told half the story; they know the full truth is something they’ll have to discover for themselves. In the revised version of The Tower Treasure, in a line that always haunted me, the narrator remarks that “Frank and Joe had learned early in their boyhood that it was impossible to keep any secrets from their astute father.” But their father can’t keep any secrets from them either.
