Seen at the Violent World of Parker

[james_davis_nicoll]

Comments

[bunsen_h]

Back-cover blurb for Hardy Boys Casefiles No. 4: The Lazarus Plot:

Camped out in the Main woods, the Hardy boys get a real jolt when they glimpse Joe's old girlfriend, Iola Morton. Can it really be the same girl who was blown to bits before their very eyes by a terrorist bomb?

[dsrtao]

WTF? I guess the Hardy Boys have come a long way from driving around Bayport. And isn't Iola's brother their chum Chet?

[ba_munronoe]

The Hardy Boys turned into a Giallo horror series so gradually most people didn't notice.

[bunsen_h]

Yes, she is.

The more recent Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Tom Swift series are a lot more violent than they were.

[brooksmoses]

I remember that one. I think that was one of the first Hardy Boys books I read, so it formed rather a good bit of my impression of the series. I did not choose to read further.

Also it formed a good bit of my mental reference for the "fridge the girlfriend to drive the plot" trope, and my distaste for it.

The actual explanation for that one was particularly horrific (especially for the not-Iola woman involved) and also felt very derivative even though it was my first exposure to that particular plot.

[bunsen_h]

The versions that I read in, ooh, probably the early- to mid-1970s were considerably milder. I remember spending part of one summer vacation burning through all of them that I found at my local library: borrow the limit of 6, return them a day or two later, repeat. (Though that doesn't seem that it can be quite right, as the library only had about 50 of the things. At that rate, it wouldn't have taken all that long to go through them.) I know that I read a few Nancy Drews, but couldn't get into them as much.