Leslie McFarlane

Leslie McFarlane (1902-1977) was a Canadian journalist, novelist and filmmaker who, writing as Franklin W. Dixon for the Stratemeyer Syndicate, ghostwrote most of the early Hardy Boys mysteries, beginning with The Tower Treasure in 1927.

Charles Leslie McFarlane was born in Carleton Place, Ontario, on 25 October 1902, grew up in Haileybury, Ontario, and died in Oshawa on 6 September 1977. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Sudbury, on a Toronto weekly and on the Springfield Republican in Massachusetts. Answering an advertisement from Edward Stratemeyer's syndicate, he first wrote seven Dave Fearless adventures as Roy Rockwood in 1926 and 1927.

Stratemeyer devised the Hardy Boys in 1926 and placed the series with Grosset & Dunlap, which published The Tower Treasure on 1 June 1927. McFarlane wrote 19 of the first 25 volumes between 1927 and 1946, and 21 in all, for flat fees that fell as low as $85 a book during the Depression. As Carolyn Keene he also wrote the first four Dana Girls mysteries (1934-1935). He later wrote and directed for the National Film Board of Canada, including Royal Journey (1951) and Here's Hockey (1953), and his script for Herring Hunt was nominated for an Academy Award. His memoirs are A Kid in Haileybury (1975) and Ghost of the Hardy Boys (1976).

For collectors. The original 1927 text of The Tower Treasure runs to 216 pages; the syndicate rewrote it in 1959, as part of a revision of the first 38 volumes carried out between 1959 and 1973, and the revised version has 180 pages. Copies of McFarlane's own text are therefore the pre-1959 printings, and the 1927 Grosset & Dunlap first printing is the key book. McFarlane is not credited with any Nancy Drew titles, even though the syndicate used the Carolyn Keene name for that series as well.