Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys Case Files - Dead women, sexy covers, and bodycounts

[MirrorNoir]

Finally made the plunge and bought a bunch of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys Casefile books off of Ebay. The Casefile incarnations were the "grim and gritty" late 1980s reboot of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew franchises, with stories with mature themes, violence, people getting killed (like one of the Hardy Boys girlfriends), and sex.

My elementary school library had hardcover version of the first ten of both series and I later got to read most of the later volumes at my local library. My high school library had the original Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy books and they all paled compared to the Case Files books.

Anyone else remember/have fond memories of the Case File era Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy books?

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Of course. I was shocked to find Nancy's author was male the whole time.

Also the Hardys were fags and Bess and George were total dykes.

 

[Reverend]

Hardy Boys blue books were the shit. Loved reading them it was an adventure in a hardback.

Why the hell did they go the grimdark route with those books?

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Of course. I was shocked to find Nancy's author was male the whole time.

Nah, the book series was written by a slew of different authors over the years, but Mildred Benson wrote the early books.

Nana had some books she had let me borrow and read alongside a few Trixie Belden books, and I loved them to death, partly because I love the artwork for the books, and partly because "Yooo it's a girl detective with strawberry-blonde hair, sweet!". (Have only met one strawberry-blonde in person, but she's the most iconic strawberry-blonde to me.) Whenever we'd go to the library, I always made sure to get one Nancy Drew book with my stack, and it typically was the first I would read. Honestly couldn't tell you which was my favorite book, although "Mystery of Crocodile Island" stands out to me if only because awwww yeeeeeah, crocodiles.

Biggest mystery to me, though, is if Nancy and Ned ever finally tied the knot. Probably will never know.

Never got into Hardy Boys, though. Not sure why despite Dad having a few books.

 

[Phalanges Mycologist]

We never got these in the UK or if we did we didn't get them in a big way, we did get Harriet the spy and some other one like it aimed at boys but is wasn't all that good.

We used to get Detective and Spy books in the Scholastic book mobile thing and that was great, Finger print kit with a already dry ink pad, Magnifying glass that made things smaller, a photofit kit that had 20 noses, 3 types of hair, 1 set of eyes and no eyebrows.

 

[Dog-O-Tron 5000v5.0]

The 80s Tom Swift books were some absolutely cracking sci-fi with fast ships, giant space habitats, robots, interdimesional travel, a cyborg planet,etc.

Haven't read them since I was a kid but I suspect they would hold up today.

The covers were rad as hell too.

I mean shit, look at that last one, it's like he's stuck in a Trapper Keeper from 1986!

 

[Alexander Thaut]

The 80s Tom Swift books were some absolutely cracking sci-fi with fast ships, giant space habitats, robots, interdimesional travel, a cyborg planet,etc.

Haven't read them since I was a kid but I suspect they would hold up today.

The covers were rad as hell too.

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I mean shit, look at that last one, it's like he's stuck in a Trapper Keeper from 1986!

Tom Swift's been around since 1899 or sth, he's had a lot of iterations over the past century, but I like how they kinda turned the books into loosely knitted "generational" thing where the protags are just descended from the original one. (Last I recall)

the actual original tom swift books even had a thing called an electric rifle.

While Swift wasn't the first "boy inventor", nor the most famous one, the character's legacy's survived and is mostly remembered for the TASER.
Yes.

Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle.

It's the official acronym.

Yes, cops use TASERS, which were originally electric rifles used by turn of the 20th century adventurer boys to shoot elephants, wild animals, and niggers in Africa.

What's changed?

 

[Dog-O-Tron 5000v5.0]

Yeah when I was a kid I also read some of the 50s books. They were dated but great in a bonkers retrofuturism "everything can be nuclear powered!" kinda way.

Just your average squarejawed 1950s American Boy inventing giant submarines, space stations, and nuclear powered flying Cadillacs.

What Tom Swift invents:

What his son invents: