What Happened at Midnight

What Happened at Midnight by Franklin W. Dixon (1967) Since this may be my favorite of all Hardy Boy books, for fun I re-read the re-write (which I had read as a kid) just to see how much it changed from the original text, which I recently read. Also, the later version has one of my favorite covers. It turns out the masked thug, on the cover, with the anchor is “Anchor Pete”—a rough customer. I lost count of all the physical altercations in this book—toward the end it gets quite ridiculous. One of the Hardys is knocked unconscious twice in this book—so many head injuries! It’s got some great parts, like when Frank puts on a disguise (really good illustration), and there’s the master criminal, Taffy Marr. The best part (as in the original) is the Hardys’ trip to New York, which is full of mishaps and confrontations. At one point they even pursue a guy into a subway tunnel and are almost killed by a train! (Kids? Don’t even remotely consider this!) I think that bit is missing from the original. But overall, this book is a really good illustration of how some of the books were revised. (Well, some aren’t revised too much, and some share only the title with the original.) When the books were revised, they were streamlined and shortened, and in some cases, some of the oddball, humorous, and sometimes downright weird details were removed. You still have the dull predictability (which is to some degree comforting), but you lose a lot of what make the books worth reading in the first place.