When I was 9 years old, a friend bought me a Hardy Boys book (The Bombay Boomerang) since he knew I liked to read. I had never heard of this series, but I liked the book and started buying the rest of that original series of 58 books.
I thought it was cool that I was 9 and the books were for the “10-to-14” set…
As an adult I began to wonder how those old books would hold up to my mature taste. On my iPad I bought a few Hardy Boy ebooks, and what I found surprised me: I liked them!
Oh sure, they are obviously written for the juvenile mind, and when you read it as an adult you can’t help but see those limitations. Good literature this ain’t.
Yet just as we love Scooby Doo because every cartoon is exactly like every other one, there is something very comforting about Frank and Joe forever enjoying summer before their Senior year of High School, of Bayport being familiar, of Chet forever having a new hobby (that gets used in the mystery), and Aunt Gertrude making heaping sandwiches and thick wedges of pie for her hungry nephews.
I may use some humor and a bit of snark in my reviews, but I assure you I approach these reviews with affection and respect.
And while I’m happy to hear from folks, I set this blog up as a resource for the reader. It consists of this page, the Resources page, along with the 58 individual reviews, one or two extra posts and that’s it. After I reviewed book 58, I was done. I will leave this site up as a continuing resource. Want to comment on anything you read here? Simply email me at my gmail address: It’s simply my full name (first and last concatenated), and that’s it.
Please use the Search functionality to find what you are looking for. Want to find every book that includes Sam Radley? Search for his name. Want to find the book where Aunt Gertrude made a cherry pie? Search for “cherry pie” and you’ll have it.
To show how widespread the popularity of these books is, I get readers to this site from over 100 different countries on every continent on Earth:
Here are the 10 countries that provided the most page views in 2023:
1. United States
2. Canada
3. India
4. Australia
5. United Kingdom
6. Malaysia
7. Cambodia
8. Finland
9. Philippines
10. New Zealand
Truly the Hardy Boys are a worldwide phenomenon. Welcome, all of you!
Here are the 10 books that were most popular during 2023:
33. The Yellow Feather Mystery
45. The Mystery of the Spiral Bridge
58. The Sting of the Scorpion
48. The Arctic Patrol Mystery
27. The Secret of Skull Mountain
41. The Clue of the Screeching Owl
11. While the Clock Ticked
1. The Tower Treasure
6. The Shore Road Mystery
20. Mystery of the Flying Express
Hardy Boys books and covers are all copyright Grosset & Dunlap and the Penguin Group. Please buy copies of these marvelous books.
Oh, and if you want to buy a copy of my book, here ya go.
Thanks for reading!
Hardy Boys Book Reviews 
Hi Nicholas. Great blog and some really good information. I too read the books when I was young and read all the blue spine books eventually and most of them more than once.
I just finished reading The Ghost At Skeleton Rock and it was a good mystery. James Lawrence is one of my favourite HB writers (along with Andrew Swenson and James Buechler).
I have a question about the book. the original was written in 1957 and the rewrite only 8 years later in 1966. Any reason why the book was rewritten so quickly? Did it have anything to do with what happened in Cuba in the late 50’s and they had to alter some of the story.
Hi JT,
Thanks so much for reading and commenting. Why did Skeleton Rock get revised so quickly? I think primarily it got caught up in the process when so many other books were being revised. They got to this one, figured let’s do it too, noting your Cuba issue, and be consistent with all our books. That’s my guess.
Nicolas Akmakjian
Hi there. Just wanted to leave a note of appreciation for this blog. I too was a Hardy Boys fan as a kid, and now I’m reading the books to my five year-old son, who loves them. He’s a particular fan of Chet, to the point of requesting a birthday cake depicting that beloved gourmand:
Anyway, it’s great to have them all broken down this way, so thanks again.
Caelum
I’m so very happy to hear of children today enjoying the books we liked at that age. And yes, Chet would be a favorite! Please tell your son that the blog owner said hello.
Nicolas Akmakjian
I just read my first Hardy Boys book! I’m an elementary school librarian, I really should have read them before now. However, I read this one because I had a student with a question. He read #23 The Melted Coins c.1944, which was about a Spanish man with amnesia, counterfeiting stolen coins, and a curse of the Caribbees or Carabaya. The quiz was about something called Spoonmouth, and Zoar college. Totally different plots. But, when I search for answers, #23 comes up with only one title, The Melted Coins, and, depending on the site, different annotations of the story. Can you shed any light on this mystery?
The mystery is solved! The c.1944 edition was the original version, but this blog reviewed the second version from 1970. That version had a new plot.
You will find that to be true of most of the original 58 Hardy Boys: They were originally written from the 1920s through the 1950s, but then in the 1950s, 60s and 70s they were rewritten. In some cases the plots stayed more or less the same, but in others it’s an entirely different story. The Flickering Torch Mystery (#22) is famously completely different from edition to edition.
Wikipedia often describes both plots, as it does in the case of The Melted Coins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Melted_Coins
Thank you! Now we know! The student and I will have a new challenge: read the originals and then read the rewrites. Maybe ponder on WHY they were re-written. Thank you for solving this mystery for us, Frank and Joe would be proud 🙂
I’m really enjoying your website. I read all of the Hardy Boys books when I was a kid, and your reviews are bringing back positive memories. My husband and I are planning on moving soon, and I’m sorting through a lot of old books, including my HB mysteries, to decide what to keep and what to donate to our local library’s book drive. I have a small frozen dessert business called Huge Hound, and I wrote a blog post for my business website about Biff Hooper’s huge bloodhound Sherlock—and his near-fatal encounter with poisoned ice cream—in Danger on Vampire Trail:
http://www.hugehound.com/blog/2017/3/4/a-huge-hound-in-the-hardy-boys
Thank you for writing. I created this site for people such as yourself who enjoyed the books a kids and have fond memories of them.
Great idea to tie in Sherlock’s experience to your business!
I am a 61 year old who has enjoyed the Hardy Boys my entire life. Of course, I have all 58 books, along with most rewrites and a few 1920’s originals. I have read them all multiple times – never gets old. I most enjoy the camping trips and traveling adventures away from Bayport. I laugh today, because the books couldn’t be written in the 21st century. Many chapters were written of the boys trying to reach a phone to call home, in some cases many miles and days went by before a working phone was found. The Flying Express (the train) comes to mind. With cell phones today, all these chapters would have to be revised. Anyway – love the blog. Dan
Thanks for the nice comments, Dan. I’ve also thought about how many plot points turn on the difficulties of communicating back then.
I really like your blog. I read all of the 58 books plus the Detective handbook when I was younger. I want to go back and reread a few of the better ones any your blog is the perfect resource to help me select one. I know one of my favorites was The Secret of the Old Mill because as a youngster, during wheat harvest My dad ran an old style wheat elevator in a tiny town. While a mill and an elevator are not the same thing, they kind of resembled one another. My cousin and i who kind of had a resemblance to younger versions of Frank and Joe Hardy both rode motorcycles. I think this is why the books were so popular, kids could relate to them but also fantasize about mystery and adventure.
Thank you so much for your comment. I created this site precisely for people such as yourself. I’m very happy you enjoyed it.
Just wanted to leave you a message to thank you for creating this site! I’m really enjoying reading your reviews. I collected the original 58 as a kid in the 70s-80s and still have all of them, including the Detective Handbook (which still bugs me isn’t the same size as the others). I wouldn’t part with them for the world. It’s great knowing there are others out there who loved these books as much as I did as kids, and still do as adults!
Yes, that Handbook WAS too big! Lol. Thanks for the kind words.
I mean, really…any kid diligent enough to save his/her allowance every week to collect all 58 books is obviously anal rententive/OCD. How cruel to make that Handbook bigger than the others.
Jerry Diekmann
Hello – Is there any chance that will ever be able to review the original Hardy Boys series, especially the ones ghost written by Leslie McFarlane? These books are almost always superior in the use of language compared yo the later revisions, and the plots are often much better too. The original #2 book, “The House on the Cliff”, is generally considered to be the very best of the entire series, and #8, “The Mystery of Cabin Island” is seen as the book with the most action.
Thanks for reading. I never read the original, early books. Since this site is a reflection of my childhood nostalgia, I only reviewed the books I originally read, not the modern ones, nor the older, original ones.
Hi, great site! I came across it searching for a ranking of Hardy Boys books. I still have my entire collection of books, from when I was 10-12 years old. My mom made the mistake of telling me she’d keep buying them as long as I read them. Before long she had to qualify that with “up to two a week”. Eventually I ran out of books in the series, and in the early 80s would get the paperback books as they were released. Somewhere around 1983 or so is when I stopped reading.
Anyway, I decided to revisit some of the books, and decided to read a few of the best ranked, which led me to your website. You appear to be the #1 Google search result for “Best Hardy Boys Books”, so congratulations there! You may want to consider that as you’re likely getting a lot of incoming traffic to that specific page.
Thanks for the kind words. And yes, whaddya know, that is the #1 hit on Google. Cool!
Did you re-read all the books specifically to review them, or did you remember that much about them?
I re-read each book, then posted about it here. So each review was very fresh in mind when I wrote about the book. Obviously I have my childhood memories of the books, but the re-read happened as an adult, so I have my meta views about it as well.