Junior Detective

A while ago (3 months, maybe?) Ben's reading interest drifted briefly through a series of books called "The Hardy Boys Secret Files". These are Hardy Boys books for much younger kids. The only reason his interest in these was brief is that there were only five or six of them at the time, and he read them all really quick.  He loved them, but alas, it is a series in progress.

At the time, I was perplexed. I noticed on the books that they were still being written by Franklin W. Dixon. I really enjoyed the Hardy Boys books when I was young, but I knew the first books in the original series were written in the late 1920's and 1930's. Yet here were some new books, published in 2010, with the same guy's name on them. Is this guy still alive? He'd have to be over 100 years old! Or maybe this is an F.W. Dixon Junior writing the new stories? Were they just using the guy's name still? I was curious. A quick online search revealed that Franklin W. Dixon was never a real person. Mystery solved.

Fast forward to now. We read a little to Ben every night before bed (and then he goes to bed and reads by flashlight for another hour - that's a different story in itself).  Anyway, we decided that we'd see if the original Hardy Boys books were something that he could get into, and the past two nights we've been reading #1 The Tower Treasure together.

Tonight we finished the second chapter. These first two have been a bit of build-up, introducing the characters and setting the stage for the rest of the book. The chapter ends with the boys thinking to themselves excitedly that this might be their very first case.

As I closed the book for the night, Ben said to me very matter-of-fact, "No.. this isn't their first case."  I showed him that yeah - this is the first book - there's a number 1 on the front and everything. I didn't understand, and I should have known better than to argue with him.

So he explained it to me, "But Dad, it said that Frank is 18 and Joe is 17. In my other Hardy Boys books, Frank is 9 and Joe is 8. And they solved other cases in those books."

His memory, and his ability to connect things together amazes me. We talked about it for a little bit, how these are fiction, and this book was the first one written, and the other books are newer. I think he gets it. Maybe tomorrow night he'll look at the copyright date, and tell me that the author can't possibly be writing these books still.