Enchanted Prose

What happens to traumatized people years after their catastrophic stories were reported on TV news? (NJ/NYC beat & New Orleans; 2000 to 2021): More After The Break reads like a riveting and emotionally stirring collection of short stories. Except these stories are so real you wish they were fiction.

Of the “ten thousand” people Emmy-award winning journalist Jen Maxfield interviewed for TV, chosen from “four thousand stories” spanning twenty-two years, ten are revisited in this compassionate, groundbreaking book. Each breathtaking, and delicate in reaching out to people she’d been thrown-together with amidst horrific circumstances.

How many reporters dare to re-open doors not knowing what “chaos and sadness” they might be stepping back into? “We dip our toes in the pool of your grief but never jump in for fear of drowning.”

Maxfield’s commitment to the highest ideals of journalism shines, so it’s not surprising she now teaches broadcast journalism at her alma mater, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Keenly aware the afflicted person at the center of the story always comes first, despite the rush to get the story, the author’s warmth, honesty, respectfulness, and graciousness offers comfort to the darkness. Humbly though, she asks: “What can I offer”? Answering with, “The space to tell their story.”

Tracking down people met in crisis years ago is the easy part thanks to technology she says, but there’s nothing easy about these stories. The reward, which the reader perceives, is that she “could not have predicted how much these reunions would enrich my life with joy and optimism.”

Maxfield’s gratitude is also refreshing. Grateful for the extraordinary “emotional intimacy within minutes” granted whenever interviewing/intruding on someone in his/her most vulnerable, naked state; the cameramen (no female photographers in these stories) who stood beside her so she never felt “alone”; and being cocooned in the “live truck” with her crew preparing to transition from reality into the surreal.

How does a journalist find balance in their life stepping outside their world to the unknown abyss? For Maxfield that means getting the urgent call, having to drop everything to race out the door, leaving her family – husband and three children, young during her coverage of these stories – to be consumed by nightmare stories working up to sixteen hours a day. These ten stories are staggering in terms of human trauma, which makes the idea for and realization of this book high-stakes and notable.

More After The Break comes at a crucial time when the public’s trust in the media has reached alarmingly low rates. If only wide readership of this book could reverse the trend, by witnessing serious journalists/reporters/anchors do their upmost to maintain the principles and ethics of the Fourth Estate.

Maxfield wonders whether the people she contacts will even remember her. Although trauma can wipe out memories, we understand why no one forgets the genuinely empathetic newswoman.

Having cut her teeth at two local upstate New York TV stations, Maxfield worked at Eyewitness News on ABC7 New York for ten years; since 2013 she’s covered the news for NBC4New York. Her real start she describes came in graduate school, making a documentary for her thesis. This story saved for the last, perhaps to sum up two decades worth of lessons learned.

Bergen County, New Jersey is the author’s home. So while she covers local and NYC news stories, one is included reliving being called upon to cover Hurricane Katrina a day after it devastated Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Twenty-eight at the time, it was the most “high profiled” and “massive” story of her career. It shatters any notions you might have that TV news reporting during catastrophes is to be envied. Lives are reduced to the absolute minimum of basic needs – drinking water, coffee, bathrooms, and gas for the vehicle. Still, enviable compared to the disaster.

“TV news reporting is not a glamourous job, but its purpose is lofty. Spotlighting the people who represent the best in human nature helps our viewers see beyond the despair of the situation, and it gives us all hope.”

Perhaps another journalist could have written this book as beautifully. But not with the same sensitive and compassionate prose reflecting Maxfield’s laudatory approach to her profession.

We don’t know the people in these stories. Nor the disasters that hit them, with the exception of Hurricane Katrina and perhaps the “60,000-pound ferry” that crashed into a Staten Island pier. “Angel on the Ferry” opens the collection, maybe because it’s the most awe-inspiring, though there’s plenty of competition. The victim interviewed was twenty-four at the time, a NYC waiter who didn’t earn much money on his way home. Also interviewed was the heroine nurse who saved his life, opportunely vacationing from Wales. Could Maxfield have been as courageous? she reflects. It does take a different type of courage to re-enter Paul Esposito’s life, not knowing what kind of physical and mental condition she’d find him in after losing both of his legs. His words and mental attitude, like the book’s title, are unforgettable. “The ferry crash was the start of a new chapter” he says, in which he “takes nothing for granted and savors the beauty of every day.” Is this the definition of Grace?

“A Daughter’s Love” is a survival story on two fronts that will take your breath away. How did Tamika Tompkins, a twenty-four-year-old mother of two, one a newborn, survive being stabbed twenty-seven-times (!) by her ex-boyfriend? Wait, there’s more! How did her two-year-old daughter have the wherewithal to jump on top of her bleeding mother stopping her from bleeding to death? Stunning what even the very youngest of children are capable of. A stark warning that adults need to pay closer attention to what they say and how they behave in front of their impressionable kids who hear and observe far more than they’re given credit for.

The “Friday Night” story about a twenty-three-year-old animal lover Tiffany is achingly sad. Her life cut short by an intoxicated hit-and-run driver while she was trying to save a dog lying in the street also hit by a car. Sadness turns to outrage when we learn how just justice is. If the perpetrator had moral convictions – stayed at the scene of the crime as legally required – a jury would likely have found him drunk and guilty, imprisoned for maybe as much as twenty years (NJ law). But who can prove how much alcohol is in your system when you’ve run away? Seven years in jail for erasing a life is an indignation, but what do you call getting out of prison on parole in six months?

Obviously, there’s more stories in this moving collection. Each strike at the randomness and fairness of life. And, how some people do care deeply about that.

Lorraine

How one woman tells us so much about Freedom, Feminism, and Environmental Stewardship (Fellowship Point, imaginary haven on the coast of Maine. Also Philadelphia and NYC’s Village, 2000 – 2008; backstory early 1960s): Fellowship Point reads and feels like a literary masterpiece. One of the most satisfying novels I’ve ever read.

Elegantly written with such welcoming prose and soothing broad-mindedness, nearing 600 pages and you’ll still wish it never ends. Because you’ll lose yourself in, dwell in, the highly-principled and independent world of eighty-year-old Agnes Lee.

Envisioned twenty-years ago, ten years in the writing, Alice Elliott Dark couldn’t have imagined how much her bighearted feminist novel – entwined with her best friend Polly she grew up with in Philadelphia, also eighty – would mean to so many of us when a woman’s freedom to choose the direction of her life has been torn asunder. Although Agnes will swear, “I never realized I was a feminist. I realized I was a person, a human being, with desires and needs and talents and abilities – the same as everyone else.”

The thing is Agnes isn’t like everyone else. A contrarian who marches to her own beat, she might intimidate you at first, until you get to know her and are struck by how deeply she cares about the existential things in life; her friendships, never wanting to “lose sight of the good people;” and the beauty and bounty of Nature – her “serenity.” Dark wants us to know Agnes as well as she does. The wholly unorthodox Aunt we wish we had, or if you’re really lucky, cherish.

As a fourth-generation Quaker from the city of Liberty and Love, Dark’s second novel is a literary work of art, embodying the spiritual values of a movement that believes in Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship. Agnes lives and breathes this moral code and philosophy without being religious at all. Hear these values described below:

“What makes you happy?” “What is free will?” “Or freedom?” “Or will?” “What is a soul mate?” we’re asked. So when Agnes wonders, “Who cares about an old lady?” you’ll want to shout out that you do! She has so much to tell us about how to live your life on your terms. How to celebrate the complexities of life with all the grace and dignity you can muster. To care about “making the world kinder.” To be honest with yourself and the actions of others. How to survive unbearable sorrow. To not give up even when the odds seem hopeless. To value “sticking up for yourself,” and others. To give and love as much as you can but not expect the same in return, although if reciprocated, maybe not the way you expected, it’s still beautiful.

Agnes and Polly have chosen very different destinies mostly because their personalities are very different. Agnes chose singlehood; Polly marriage, motherhood, and now reaping the joys of grandparenthood. Polly knows Agnes doesn’t care much for her self-absorbed husband, Dick, and how Polly is so “cowed” to him. Agnes tells it right. You won’t like him either. Nor her eldest of three sons, James, an investment banker, who presents a significant roadblock to the environmental cause, activism, and sensitivities Agnes’ possesses and pays homage to.

For 150 years, her ancestors managed to protect a fictional spit of land on the coast of Maine named Fellowship Point. A “hallowed thirty-five acre tip on the peninsula” nicknamed the Sank, short for Sanctuary. Preserved by a fellowship of five friends and their families, today it’s in grave jeopardy as not all five current members have the same conservancy agenda. Agnes is dogged in this pursuit, but Polly is torn between her allegiance to her and her three children. 

Agnes epitomizes the best of what it means to fully embrace a “personal religion of sisterhood with trees, flowers, birds, squirrels, rocks, and even snakes.” A laudatory theme about caring for the environment like we should care about people.

The other threat is ageist attitudes towards Polly by her children, and Agnes’ diagnosis of cancer, which we learn of early on. Do not assume Agnes’ fate is sealed because she has a lot of living to do! When she asks, “How do you achieve enlightenment?” she’s letting us know she’s far more enlightened than most of us. Her tale of all-embracing fellowship shows the “upsides and downsides” of how she achieved that. 

Agnes celebrates the best we can be even if our lives turned out not to be as we hoped. “What are you grateful for?” she asks. She’s “grateful for another day, for writing and for the sea.” A beloved children’s author of the When Nan series. When another female character enters her self-determined life early on in the novel, a persistent one who doesn’t give up – twenty-seven-year-old editorial assistant Maud Silver who works at the publishing house that’s produced “dozens” of the When Nan books – she’s curious who Nan is and how she understands children so well when she’s never had a child of her own. As Nan’s profoundly moving story rolls out, along with the charming, developing relationship between young and old, we see the dramatic meaning of sisterhood and motherhood.

Agnes isn’t afraid to speak her mind yet she’s kept some secrets even from Polly, despite not being able to “quantify” how much Polly’s friendship has meant to her over the course of her life. There’s other meaningful female relationships too: Agnes’ younger sister, Elspeth, whom we meet through her loving diary-like letters and notebooks, diverting from the 3^rd person narrative; and her loyal, long-time, gatekeeper/housekeeper Sylvie. (The Lees were wealthy but it was “bad manners” to be showy). Agnes also has male relationships that matter too, some heartening, heartbreaking, and vexing.

Opening with a handy imaginary map of the Maine coastal area, on the west side you’ll see Agnes’ Leeward Cottage, Polly’s Meadowlea next door, and a shared graveyard that keeps the spirits of those they’ve loved and lost near. Archie Lee, Agnes’ cousin, lives south of Polly at Westerlee with his wife who offends Agnes’ values. They also own a flamboyant mansion on the eastern side, Easterlee, which overuses the region’s distinctive granite rock with pink coloring. This dislikable duo commit and enable a terrible injustice towards Agnes and Polly’s mutual friend Richard Circumstance, who they defend staunchly.

Armchair atmospheric, this is the “boom of the ocean” Maine, with its “mossy forest floor, the dun-colored needles, the expressive tree bark, this slowed-down world.” The place where Agnes “felt – free.” Freedom is what Agnes exemplifies.

Caring for both the land and the Abenaki Indigenous tribe who settled on it before anyone else, the Maine Coast Heritage Trust is cited since it represents the preservation vision Agnes has for Fellowship Point. An environmental activist’s message from an author who spent summers in Maine. 

Agnes is also the one who brings us so much nostalgia. She affects us when she asks why girls who “giggled” and felt “blasts of joy” ceased “playing and running?” when “we loved it so much.”

Like Maine, Fellowship Point is a state of mind. Agnes’ state of mind will live in our hearts and minds for a long time. That’s why this novel is a masterpiece.

Lorraine

Gentrification – what it feels like and does (Upper Manhattan, 2015-ish): Fifteen years in the making and it shows. You will not be able to put Neruda on the Park down.

Fifteen years to establish Cleyvis Natera’s fantastical goal, stated in her Acknowledgements: to “let our stories change the world with the power and beauty of our imagination.” Fifteen years to imagine an exquisite, fiery immigrant’s tale reflecting the realities of how Natera and her Dominican Republic family “survived” the “immeasurable pain, loss, joy, and love as immigrants in the United States.”

Immigrants who carved out a new home in the one city in the world that has more Dominicans than anywhere else outside of their Caribbean island homeland – New York City. Specifically, in the upper reaches of Manhattan near Washington Heights, dubbed “Little Dominican Republic,” north of Harlem, in the area where the author grew up since age ten.

Fifteen years pouring her literary heart and soul into a place, its people, community, and culture inventing a neighborhood – Nothar Park – and two unforgettable characters: twenty-nine-year-old, Ivy-league educated lawyer Luz Guerrero, and her mother Eusebia, the loving force behind her. Calm father Vladimir loves his family too, a policeman on a manhunt upstate so he’s gone during much of what heats up between mother-and-daughter. Growing tensions on several bombshell fronts frame the gentrification plot: what it means to be told to “Go Home” in more ways than one. How the color of your skin influences and energizes, good and bad, who you are, aspire to be, and who you become.

The best way to describe how this high-spirited novel reads is to imagine you’re on a train that feels like it’s going too fast along the subway tracks of NYC. Three major events have converged, so you’re aware it’s not going to stop at your destination, acting like it has a mind of its own. In this scenario, three minds going in different directions. Luz and Eusebia on the verge of breaking ranks in terms of where they want to go, though neither knows where their destinies lie. Luz has felt a floating “emptiness” and “loneliness” for a while; Eusebia has newly decided if no one else is going to stand up, she will. The third mind is far more powerful: the developer determined to execute his fantasy. Bigger than any urban project ever built.

You’re in the hands of the driver of the train – the author – who’s had plenty of time to decide and command her train how far she wants to take it. The atmosphere inside the train is filled with the voices, love, passions, yearnings, struggles, sacrifices, and pride of passengers who’ve come to America from the same impoverished Dominican country for the same reasons: to make a better life for themselves and their loves ones. They include neighbors and friends, who like the Guerrero family, brought reminders and symbols of Home with them: rhythmic, genre music and dance (Meringue, Salsa, Bachata, Son); sweet, spicy foods (habichiuelas con dulce, pollo guisao, pasteles) that can take hours to prepare out of love; and their nation’s blue-white-and-red flags hung on windows and draped over the fire escapes of their brownstone apartments.

Everyone on this train is in it together, so they’ll be embroiled in the fires the Guerrero family ignites (Eusebia), wants to put out (Lutz), while Vladimir (supported by Luz) has been working on an entirely different plan – dreamy – kept secret from the one person who desperately needs to be told.

The train hasn’t moved when the novel opens, but its rumbling. The noise is louder than what you’ve grown accustomed to hearing in one of the noisiest cities in the world. The “wrecking ball” described in Chapter One, subtitled, “White Out, Washed Out,” prophetically announces the set-up.

Gentrification: a fancy word that means forcing out the urban poor to make room for the wealthier and privileged.

The piercing sounds of the “demolition” – “the sound of split wooden frames, shattered glass windows, and fractured brownstone” – are the thunderbolt that marks the onslaught of lives turning on a dime. Profoundly expressed in one of the two quotes in the epigraph:

Selecting words from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s poem “How Much Happens in a Day” – his “Love Poems” meaningfully popping up elsewhere in the novel and obviously inspiration for the title – speaks to Natera’s boldness. Well-aware the legacy of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 for “poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams” has been tainted by his own admission of rape, she doesn’t shy away from his prescient words. Instead, she crafts a stirring commentary about what can happen so quickly when people feel utterly powerless even when they’ve played by the rules. For the Guerrero family, that’s twenty years making NYC their home.

Aimed at provoking the economic, social, and cultural forces that have sought to oppress the Latinx community spectacularly, gentrification at the center of this storm is spectacularly real. Because today sitting across the street from fictional Nothar Park is the behemoth development called Hudson Yards, which broke ground after 9/11, finished in 2019.

You’ll hear that “wrecking ball” in all three Parts of the novel – “Demolition,” “Excavation,” and “Grounding.” The erasure of yet another NYC ethnic community starting with the richly diverse Lower East Side, Nothar Park is the last in Manhattan. The Yards represent the epitome of what happens when you have billions and don’t care about destroying lives and the soul of what once made the city magnificent, bursting with color and character. 

The author pays tribute to her own mother in the second quote in the inscription:

“Remember – you are trunk, not a branch”

(Regina “Masona” Lucas)

Remember it as Luz’s story evolves. Opening when Luz is exuberant, headed to meet her elder Latino role-model/mentor at the law firm she’s devoted seventy hours a week to for five years. At the so-called Special Place restaurant, she orders champagne for breakfast anticipating her heads-up on becoming partner. Only to find out she’s actually going to be let go! Even though she’s done everything right. Shocked and humiliated when her estranged, childhood best friend Angelica overhears the conversation waitressing at said private spot, spreading the news to her mother’s bingo-playing neighborhood close friends called The Tongues because they’re so gossipy. Her devastating secret is out, but Luz hopes Eusebia doesn’t find out until she finds the right time to tell her. The tension between former best friends who chose different paths after high school is thick; Angelica is part of the neighborhood, so the two bump into each other. When she asks Luz if she thought she was fired because of discrimination, initially Luz denies the possibility. Why?

Around the same time, Eusebia has an accident with consequences felt throughout. You’ll think you’ve figured out her problem. You’ll guess wrong. Combined with the backdrop of a violent act towards one of their precious, young own, this novel is about people and a community at the “cusp” of something monumental.

Accompanying the richness and passion of a culture, a steamy romance develops, too quickly like the other events, between Luz and a white man who embodies everything going wrong, aptly named Hudson. Their relationship burns brightly too, but we sense something isn’t going in the right direction as well.

Don’t stand on the noisy platform when this train arrives. Hop on. Take the ride. Because it’s going someplace you’ve likely never been before.

Lorraine

Music for comfort and beauty amidst the suffering – the life of Johann Sebastian Bach (Leipzig, Germany; 1726 – 1750): What role does music play in our lives?

Music as the central theme of The Great Passion drew me to this supreme novel because passion for the arts tends to propel its way into enchanted prose. I had no idea that British writer James Runcie’s 11^th historical novel was as much about faith as it is about art.

The thing is you don’t have to subscribe to Bach’s deeply held religious beliefs, or any other Protestant or Christian denominations, to appreciate what Runcie has achieved. I say that with confidence since I’m not of the Christian faith, nor someone who’s studied the scriptures. Nor, one of an amazing number of Bach scholars who’ve devoted their lives to understanding one of the greatest classical composers in history and the meaning of his masterworks. Nor a musicologist or musician well-versed in music terminology – cantata, courante, andante, toccata, fugue, allemande – and can play the “King and Queen of instruments,” the organ, or the harpsichord, oboe, viola, violin, even the recorder. Because “the trick is to give particular voice to universal feelings,” Bach says to his prized thirteen-year-old, soprano singing student Stefan at the all-boys boarding Latin music school St. Thomas, as Musical Director (Cantor) in the “devout town” of Leipzig, Germany in the first half of the 18^th century.

By focusing on a specific piece of classical “sacred music” – The Passion According to St Matthew introduced to the parishioners at the St. Thomas Church on Good Friday, April 11, 1727 – The Great Passion is more universal than that. It’s meant to show how “love and sorrow came together in the same word, passion.” It’s more about “how we live” than how “we may travel through the shadow of death.” And it’s certainly about how music can “console us through our desolation, and leave our hearts with unexpected joy.”

In posing provocative philosophical and existential questions, the novel asks universal questions about the meaning and purpose of a well-lived life. “How can our time on earth be enjoyed”? Do we have to suffer to appreciate “bliss” even from a secular perspective? Of course, there’s many “moments of grace” that are religious, specifically Bach’s religion Lutheranism, with its roots going back to the 1500s to when Martin Luther questioned Catholicism and set off the Protestant Reformation.

To get a feel for how you can “give sorrow such beauty” in music (which Runcie does novelistically), here’s a seven minute clip of the 3 to 3 ½ hours long performance of St Matthew Passion, considered one of the greatest pieces of sacral music played during Holy Week:

Runcie explores both the music and the man.

Johann Sebastian Bach/Sebastian was highly disciplined, hot tempered, and exultant about his life’s purpose: “to give our lives to our music” aimed at “striving for a defining beauty.” His music resonates with his sorrow over the death of his first wife, Maria Barbara, and raw grief losing his three-year-old daughter Etta.

He’s not the only character burdened by grief. Stefan recently lost his mother. His organ-making father sent him away from his home in Freiberg for a year telling him that to make organs he must first learn what it feels like to play one. But it’s his singing voice that endears him to Sebastian. A voice that at his age could break at any time. The fragility of life is a tenderhearted theme, seen in Stefan’s friendship with Bach’s oldest daughter Catharina, a “lonely beauty” with a passion for butterfly collecting. Grief is a bond they share, both mourning the loss of their mothers.

When the novel opens in 1726, Bach is the father of eight children: four from his first marriage and four from his second to Anna Magdalena, as beautiful and saintly as her name implies. Immensely devoted to Bach, sixteen years older, caring for and loving so many children at age twenty-four. By the time the novel ends in 1750, he’s fathered more children than probably anyone you’ve known. Which makes Anna a fascinating woman, who says, “If a house has enough love, there’s always space.” Miserably unhappy Stefan doesn’t have any space for himself nor does he feel he belongs at the school. A victim of tremendous bullying on account of his red-hair and jealousy by other students that the Cantor now favors him. “My wife will look after you,” Bach assures Stefan, thus welcoming him into their hectic “music-making,” playing, and singing family.

Readers may be surprised how different this novel is from Runcie’s six The Grantchester Mysteries adapted into PBS’s Grantchester series, now in its 7^th season, set in a cozy 1950s English village outside Cambridge where the author lives. Googling, you’ll learn Runcie’s father was the Archbishop of Canterbury, so it’s not a surprise his fictional detective Sydney Chambers is a member of the clergy. Moreover, that he’d bring so much insight, knowledge, and passion into composing this ambitious novel.

The Great Passion opens when Stefan, our narrator, is now thirty-seven. “There are gaps of time into which we sometimes fall, when the pattern of our days is suspended,” he intimately opens his story that tells Bach’s story. Reflecting on what it was like to be one of “the first to sing Bach’s music” and to be swept up into the world of JSB, his is a coming-of-age story learning how to live with grief and go on with your life over time. “Time is the best preacher.”

Time as a theme is ever-present, as Stefan and the reader know his time with the Bach family is predetermined. Everyone feels the anxiety and urgency of time as the master’s deadline approaches for playing his masterpiece on the most sacred day in Christianity. Stefan also struggles with learning how to “sing out into the spaces” – “like a breeze towards the altar; a blessing, a scent of summer, the flow of a river, God’s grace.”

There’s so much grace and sensitivity in the pages. Until you reach page 200. For a few pages, your senses are abruptly interrupted with a shocking event that takes place in the town. Your first reaction, at least mine was: Why is this here? The fact that it bursts into the story sent me looking for an explanation. Runcie understands not all is beatific in this town, but doesn’t dwell on the controversy: anti-Semitism. He could have chosen an earlier sacral piece of Bach’s music St John Passion, also played during the holiest week in the Christian faith, engendering greater angst.

Arising from Bach’s staying true to Martin Luther’s scriptural faith written in the lyrics – centuries-old beliefs that the Jewish people are responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. The novel also suggests what others believe. That Bach felt everyone was responsible for the pain, suffering, and sacrifice, including Lutherans. (Some examples discussing the controversy from both sides: 1, 2, 3, and 4).

Runcie, though, focuses on Bach’s passion for people working together to create something far better than any single person could. The lofty message is we’re all in this thing called life together. Interestingly too is that Bach didn’t write the controversial lyrics. His friend, a famous “flamboyant” (as in wore a “lilac coat”) German poet who called himself Picander, wrote the “libretto” to Bach’s music exemplifying how “loss was part of love.”

No denying there’s a great deal of religious fervor to digest and reflect upon. But there’s also the secular, universal pursuit of the “great examination of what it means to be alive.”

Lorraine

The ghostwriter who hooked millions of boys on reading (early 1900s–1975; Northern Ontario, Canada and Springfield, Massachusetts): How good a sleuth are you?

Did you detect the picture hanging on the wall, spying through the window of the nostalgic cover art of the Ghost of the Hardy Boys, is the cover of the first book in the original mystery series published in 1927, The Tower Treasure? In the spirit of anonymity, the identity of the good sleuth who clued me in shall remain a secret.

Talk about secrets! It took fifty years for “the writer behind the world’s most famous boy detectives” to reveal his identity – Leslie McFarlane aka Franklin W. Dixon – and for most of us another fifty years with the publication of this entertaining and enlightening memoir. First published in 1976, a year before the Canadian ghostwriter died, for most of us it’s likely these are brand new revelations about an indelible slice of Americana.

If you were a Nancy Drew reader, like I was, you too will find the memoir fascinating as both series (and The Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, Rover Boys, Dana Girls series) were the brainchild of the “sales genius” behind “one of the great merchandising ideas in the history of American publishing”: Edward Stratemeyer. Who? “A Henry Ford for fiction for boys and girls.” Founder of Stratemeyer’s Syndicate. Creator of 800 juvenile books.

Staying within Stratemeyer’s outlines – titles, characters, mystery – McFarlane “hammered out” the original 21 volumes of The Hardy Boys from 1927 to 1947, published by Grosset & Dunlap. His memoir is a treasure trove of early-19^th century journalism, and one man’s control and transformation of the children’s book market.

Marilyn S. Greenwald, journalism professor at Ohio University and 2017 author of The Secret of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate, writes in her Introduction that The Hardy Boys were one of the “most enduring series in the history of young-adult literature.” (For a complete list see: https://hardyboys.us/hbos.htm.)

Via today’s sleuthing tool, you can learn that McFarlane’s fictional series in Bayport, Long Island, New York was “similar” to his hometown in Baileyville, northern Ontario. Ripe for two made-up boy sleuths – Joe and Frank Hardy, whose father Fenton was akin to Sherlock Holmes – yet adventures in some real places like Barmet Bay, Lakeshore Road, and cliffs. “How does one explain the subtle, magnetic attraction of one’s native land?”

Early on, you’ll read about the circumstances that led to McFarlane’s writing the first three Hardy Boys books. Published at the same time, the clever marketing “breeder” strategy meant the reader was apprised in book one that The House on the Cliff and The Secret of the Old Mill were awaiting. Circling back to the books later, he writes more about the books in the series. A technique he repeats when discussing the remote cabin in the Ontario woods where he wrote all the books after circling back home from America as a reporter for the Springfield Republican.

As of 1975, McFarlane tells us 11 million copies of his books were sold. But he never received name recognition for them, part of his benefactor’s strategy to be in command. Spinning a yarn about Ernest Hemingway, with whom he worked when the two were reporters for the Toronto Star, he warm-heartedly lets us know how he felt about anonymity. “No doubt a Nobel Prize winner feels pretty good when he learns he’s made it, but he can’t feel any more elated than a novice writer who sees his name in print.”

There’s no anger or resentment in McFarlene’s reflections. A “wordsmith” who admired great literature and “fine writing,” he doesn’t feel betrayed by Stratemeyer who paid him a pittance and became a millionaire. The chapter like “A Book is a Book is a Buck” shows he tells it like it was: these books weren’t the “Better Stuff” he aspired to but the reason he was able to eke out a living. “One should be thankful for whatever gift, no matter how small.”

Still wanting to incorporate some “embroidery” into his writing, “opting for Quality,” he created a character fans loved: Aunt Gertrude, his father’s sister. He also understood “you couldn’t go wrong by larding the action with a little funny stuff.” Years later his daughter says he “hated” the books, but in his telling he takes a pragmatic and generous tone.

“Honesty is everything,” the memoirist says, one of the life lessons he sought to instill. Another, a can-do spirit that nothing’s outside of a young person’s reach with enough “patience,” “luck,” and “ability.”

Nostalgia draws you to the memoir. To more “wholesome” times when our youth weren’t exposed to and victims of all the ills of modern society. As seen in his delightful writing and old-fashioned prose like “lads,” “rascals,” “scoundrels, “belly-buster,” “knee-slapper,” “tiddlywinks,” “buffooneries,” “gosh,” and “golly.”

McFarlane’s “comic itch” can be attributed to growing up on silent era comedians like Charlie Chaplain and W. C. Fields, vaudeville, and minstrel shows. That they included “blackface comedians from the American stage” like Amos and Andy brings us to bad nostalgia. Which opens up Pandora’s Box resonating the same racial and ethnic stereotyping complaints in children’s literature still seen today. Numerous websites discuss the racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, and derogatory language in the original series.

When Canadian journalist Bob Stall asks him how he felt about his books being “completely rewritten” (beginning in 1959), McFarlane knows they “aren’t the same books” (see here and here). He doesn’t say anything about the offensive prose. Rather, he discusses how “the old books were written for a literate generation,” pre-technology when kids had more time to entertain themselves, including reading versus the dumbing down of makeovers.

How to approach these sensitive issues in reviewing this charming memoir? Look for evidence of inflammatory language based on what’s written in the memoir. This is not a review, then, of the language of the actual Hardy Boys books.

Here’s what I found: McFarlane lived near mining camps and railway towns that attracted immigrants: “Finns, Ukrainians, Russians, Italians, Poles, and French-Canadians.” When he says immigrants need to learn English if they don’t want to be “an object of mirth,” he’s speaking to the importance of a key aspect to assimilation versus anti-immigrant sentiment viewing immigrants as objects of hatred and violence. When you come upon the word Swastika, your hairs stand up until you realize that’s actually the name of a real town in Canada. Why hasn’t the name been changed? When he says, “No popular magazine editor would go for a Good Guy who wasn’t a white man,” it’s a disturbing commentary but historically realistic. The most egregious depictions were his comments on dialogue excerpts a la Keystone Cops poking fun at the police. Not at all funny today, dangerous, though his intention was to show young people that it’s okay to question authority. These days, how we speak about law enforcement necessitates handling with care. 

McFarlane’s lamentations on the loss of reams of defunct newspapers, weeklies, and magazines take center stage. He’s nostalgic for the days when you could pick up pulp fiction for a nickel or a dime.

“No ghost is irreplaceable,” he writes. You have to wonder if that’s true since Leslie McFarlane brought his small town boy’s sense of wonderment, adventure, humor, and attachment to a place from his early-20^th century childhood into his books.

To Bob Stall, he says about his extensively remade mysteries: “Even a ghost has feelings.”

Lorraine