If you grew up bookended by brothers, your only sister vastly older – ten years older! – than you, your first introduction to mystery novels and an amateur sleuth was not the intrepid Nancy Drew, but the fabulously clever Hardy boys, Joe and Frank, Personally, I scoffed at Nancy – I didn’t even like her name; I imagined her far less plucky than she was reputed to be, even kind of namby-pamby if you know what I mean, which, if truth be told was a completely unfair assessment given that I had never even cracked open one of her books, never mind cracked one of her mysteries. But never mind all that, nor the admonishment by Miss Tuttle, the wobbly, waddling old librarian with the wispy hair who prefaced each of our visits to the Arnprior library to never judge a book by its cover – though I doubt she split the infinitive. I rejected all the Caroline Keene titles featuring pert, perfect, little Nancy’s blonde, all-American looks without a second thought.
But those Hardy boys – they were another story. Now there were some good-looking detectives a girl could be interested in. Though a little preppy, to be sure, in their Oxford cloth button down shirts and old man cardigans, I found their looks ever so appealing, especially the way a shank of dark, shiny hair always seemed to have fallen down over their foreheads as they scrambled fearlessly up a dark stairway into an even darker attic, flashlight in hands, eyes gleaming with excitement. Clark Gable had that hair in Gone With the Wind; Joey Tribiani did, too, in the best episodes of Friends; Maverick, aka Tom Cruise in Top Gun sported the same look. So, I might add, did my handsome husband. But I digress. The real reason I couldn’t get enough of Frank and Joe was that reading their adventures provided me the only excuse I had to enter into the mysterious realm of the army green oilskin tent that my brothers occupied each summer on the lawn outside our cottage. Once inside, not only could I consume book after book of their adventures, just as Mark and Charles did; I could also poke around inside their lair.
