The Hardy Boys shows us how childhood has changed

It has been said that the reason women join book clubs is to be able to drink a few gallons of Chardonnay with some close friends. That may be so. But men, at least men my age, join a book club to grumble and complain and grouch about stuff. The actual book, which for the women is merely an excuse to twist open another bottle, is for us the touchstone to a litany of grievances about the way things are these days.My book club is made up of five college friends, all in our 60s. This summer, though, we took a break from rage bait. We decided we wanted something light. No sensitive coming-of-age memoirs, no incendiary political tracts — what we wanted was adventure. Guns, danger, feats of courage, and wits. You know what I mean: boy stuff.Our choices were John Buchan’s Greenmantle, and — this was the master stroke — the Hardy Boys mystery Hunting for Hidden Gold. We loved them. (Of course we did.) Five men in their 60s, reading about dangerous escapades and narrow escapes? It was intoxicating. But somewhere around the fourth chapter of Hunting for Hidden Gold, in the 1928 edition, one of us noticed that Frank and Joe Hardy, junior detectives, chasers of criminals, survivors of gunfire and shipwreck and at least one runaway motorcycle, were described as 15 and 16 years old. (Getty Images) Fifteen and sixteen. Today, that’s someone who needs a permission slip to go on a field trip to the aquarium or who wears a helmet to a walk in the park. But in 1928, apparently, it was old enough to get shot at by adults and race around the Badlands alone.In Buchan’s Greenmantle, published about a decade earlier in the thick of World War I, Richard Hannay and his friends are charging across a collapsing continent — Berlin, Constantinople, the Turkish front — doing very much the same kind of thing the Hardy boys do, except Hannay is closer to 30. Of course, in Greenmantle, Buchan wasn’t imagining an adventure. He was more or less describing real life. The men doing that kind of work in 1916 war-ravaged Europe were adults, because the war had made them adults, whether they, or we, liked it or not.Greenmantle was written and published, and that was the end of it. The Hardy Boys series of mysteries, on the other hand, has been rewritten and updated many, many times over the decades. One of us discovered that there’s a later edition of Hunting for Hidden Gold, revised in the early 1960s, in which some adjustments were made.In the first place, some of the more jarring dialogue written in nonwhite dialect — I’m being delicate here, but you know exactly what I’m talking about — was scrubbed clean. That’s a good thing. But here’s a more curious change: In the later version, Frank and Joe are 17 and 18. Somebody, at some point, decided the boys needed to be a little older to do the same things they’d always done. Childhood, in fiction at least, got a two-year extension.Oh, how we grumbled at that! How we complained! How we railed against the woke-safety, Nazi-coddling, anti-fun mob that denies us boys any adventure time. We spent a good portion of our book club remembering all of the dangerous stuff we got up to when we were young — nothing even close to what Frank and Joe experienced in Hunting for Hidden Gold, it must be said — but it was a delicious segue to an extended rant about how soft and useless young people are these days, which is the whole point of a book club.THE IRRESISTIBLE LURE OF DUTY-FREE SHOPPINGBut then we did some math. Frank and Joe Hardy, in the 1928 version, were 15 and 16. By the time World War II arrived, they would have been 28 and 29. Old enough to have been standing on a beach in Normandy or slogging through a jungle on some island nobody back home could pronounce. Old enough to have seen exactly the things their own readers were seeing, in uniform, for real.So maybe the softening wasn’t softening at all. Maybe a generation that had just sent its actual sons off at 18 and 20, and gotten back what it got back, decided, without ever quite saying so, that fictional boys, at least, deserved a little more boyhood before the world came for them, too. Hard to grumble at that.Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.