Stereophile: Never Use the Word "Very"

I grew up on the works of Franklin W. Dixon and Victor Appleton II, which is to say the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift, Jr., as they appeared in the early 1960s. I've had the same disillusioning experience as Gene Weingarten—except that I also devoured the original 1930s versions when I discovered the pulps collection at Alderman Library at UVA.

However, I'm no Gene Weingarten, so I failed to see the profound tragedy at the heart of my boyhood idols.

But this is a story of redemption too. Aunt Gertrude enters the series: "If you are a good writer, you cannot hide it forever, no matter how hard you try. It's like trying to stifle a sneeze."

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Reader Comments

Posted Fri Apr 6, 2007, 5:15 PM — By Mark Fleischmann

Give me Walter R. Brooks any day: http://www.freddythepig.org/ I reread three of the Freddy novels a few years ago and they still have a certain charm.

Posted Fri Apr 6, 2007, 5:29 PM — By Wes Phillips

I avidly read the Walter Brooks books as a child—and I partcularly loved the ne where Freedy and the other farm animals played the Mratians in a baseball series. That pig had a wicked slider.

Does anybody else remember the "bacjwatds? novels that posited an alternate Earth where everything was revesred—as in "flashdarks"?

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