To the extent that contemporary readers know the series was updated, it’s likely because they’ve heard tell, as I had, of the original novels’ racism and sexism. But when I read the first three books from the 1920s I found that the problematic passages were few and far between, comprising only a handful of moments in each novel, and that they consisted largely of the sort of crude stereotypes and retrograde turns of phrase you’d expect to find in any number of books written in the early twentieth century. In The Tower Treasure an Italian grocer is portrayed as having, “like most of his countrymen…an excitable nature.” In The House on the Cliff one of the smugglers is described as a “rascally Chinaman” who would love to have “white men in his power.” And in the same book Frank expresses his suspicion that his father is in trouble by saying he has a “hunch that there’s a n[⸺] in the woodpile.”
All of this language has been scrubbed out of the revised versions at no cost to the quality of the narratives. The damage done by the midcentury bowdlerizations is almost entirely tonal and structural. What many readers now think of as an effort to sanitize the books of offensive content was, in truth, part of a broader project aimed primarily at ensuring their commercial survival. (It’s also worth noting that the sanitizations went only so far: the 1959 The House on the Cliff, for example, still has the Hardys running across a lawn “lithe as Indians.”) The Stratemeyer Syndicate, much like publishers today, saw its product threatened by new media and diminished readerly patience. Faced with the rise of television and the changing cultural mores of postwar America, it met its customers where they were, giving them novels that read like pop screenplays.
And yet it’s precisely the expurgation of these offensive moments that evidently attracted Passage’s interest. As the press laments in a publisher’s note preceding each book, the revisions meant that “politically incorrect content was removed, the writing was simplified, and the plots were given more of an action-theme” [sic]. In restoring the originals, then, Passage appears to be acting on two related motivations: a political one and an aesthetic one. If its objective in publishing the original versions of the novels was simply to restore them to their narrative complexity and occasional lyricism, we might say that its project was successful. (We might also say it’s redundant: another publisher, Applewood Books, began reissuing the original versions back in the 1990s, albeit with a prefatory note dutifully warning readers that they might find some language “extremely uncomfortable.”) But Passage is also on a crusade against political correctness: the originals are better, it suggests, not despite their offenses but because of them. Yet the novels themselves may not live up to the publisher’s anti-woke marketing. It’s hard to imagine that their relatively tame transgressions will do much to excite a far-right audience already awash in racist memes.