The Hardy Boys - Premise

Premise

The Hardy Boys are fictional teenage brothers and amateur detectives. They live in the city of Bayport on Barmet Bay with their father, detective Fenton Hardy, their mother, Laura Hardy, and their Aunt Gertrude. Frank, the older brother, is eighteen (sixteen in earlier versions), and his younger brother Joe is seventeen (fifteen in earlier versions). The brothers nominally attend high school in Bayport, where they are in the same grade, but school is rarely mentioned in the books and never hinders the Hardys in solving mysteries. In the older stories, the Hardy Boys' cases often are linked to the confidential cases their detective father is working on. He sometimes asks them for help, while at other times they stumble upon villains and incidents that are connected to his cases. In the Undercover Brothers series, begun in 2005, the Hardys are members of an organization known as American Teens Against Crime, which assigns them to cases. The Hardy Boys are sometimes assisted in solving mysteries by their friends Chet Morton, Phil Cohen, Biff Hooper, Jerry Gilroy, and Tony Prito, and, less frequently, by their platonic girlfriends Callie Shaw and Iola Morton (Chet's sister).

The Hardy Boys are constantly involved in adventure and action. Despite frequent danger, the boys "never lose their nerve ... They are hardy boys, luckier and more clever than anyone around them." They live in an atmosphere of mystery and intrigue: "Never were so many assorted felonies committed in a simple American small town. Murder, drug peddling, race horse kidnapping, diamond smuggling, medical malpractice, big-time auto theft, even (in the 1940s) the hijacking of strategic materials and espionage, all were conducted with Bayport as a nucleus." With so much in common, the boys are so little differentiated that one commentator facetiously describes them thus: "The boys' characters basically broke down this way – Frank had dark hair; Joe was blond." In general, however, "Frank was the thinker while Joe was more impulsive, and perhaps a little more athletic." The two boys are infallibly on good terms with each other and never engage in sibling rivalry.

Frank and Joe do not lack for money and they travel frequently to far-away locations, including Mexico in The Mark on the Door (1934), Scotland in The Secret Agent on Flight 101 (1967), Iceland in The Arctic Patrol Mystery (1969), Egypt in The Mummy Case (1980), and Kenya in The Mystery of the Black Rhino (2003). The Hardys also travel freely within the United States by motorcycle, motor boat, iceboat, and airplane, as well as their own car.