In 1927, the Stratemeyer Syndicate launched a series about two brothers, sons of a famous detective, who solved mysteries in a small bayside town. You almost certainly know the series. Your father read it. So did his.
What most readers don’t know is that the books they remember are not the books that were written.
The Rewriting of an American Classic
The original volumes were ghostwritten under a house pseudonym, most of the early ones by Leslie McFarlane, a Canadian newspaperman who brought genuine wit and craft to a fifty-cent series. His originals run longer, the prose is sharper, the humor is drier, and the boys are notably more independent.
Beginning in 1959, the publisher systematically revised the entire series. Chapters were cut, plots were simplified, the prose was flattened, and in many volumes the story was replaced wholesale under the same title. Nearly every copy sold in the last sixty years, and nearly every copy sitting in a used bookstore, is a revised text. Those revisions remain under copyright for decades to come.
The originals are another matter. United States copyright now expires on everything published before 1931, which means the first volumes of the series, published 1927 through 1930, have entered the public domain in their original, unrevised form. The real books are free.
What’s Available
Project Gutenberg has digitized the first eight original texts, published 1927 through 1929. The full set is catalogued under the series’ original house pseudonym here on Project Gutenberg:
- The Tower Treasure (1927) — The one that started it all: a dying carnival man’s confession and a stolen fortune hidden in an old tower.
- The House on the Cliff (1927) — Smugglers, a haunted house above the bay, and the brothers’ father gone missing.
- The Secret of the Old Mill (1927) — Counterfeit bills and a mill that isn’t grinding grain.
- The Missing Chums (1928) — Two friends vanish on a motorboat trip.
- Hunting for Hidden Gold (1928) — Out west to a Montana mining camp in midwinter.
- The Shore Road Mystery (1928) — Cars are vanishing from the Shore Road, and the boys set a trap.
- The Secret of the Caves (1929) — A missing professor and honeycombed sea caves.
- The Mystery of Cabin Island (1929) — A winter mystery on an island in the bay, widely considered the best of the early run.
The ninth volume, published in 1930, entered the public domain this past January and hasn’t been digitized yet. It will be linked here the moment a free copy exists.
Original or Revised: Does It Matter?
For a young reader meeting these mysteries fresh, honestly, either works. The revised versions are shorter and simpler, which suits some readers.
But if you remember these books fondly and want to know what the series actually was, or you want your son reading the stronger prose, the originals are the ones to read, and they now cost nothing. Comparing an original against its 1959 revision side by side is a small education in what publishing does to books. McFarlane himself, late in life, expressed pride in the originals and little affection for what became of them.
A note on names: because the series title remains an active trademark of its current publisher, this page refers to the books descriptively. The free editions linked above are the original texts as published, under their original titles and original house pseudonym.
The brothers of 1927 solved their mysteries with a jalopy, a motorboat, and nerve. The Adventures of Leo & Henry gives today’s boys a mystery of their own, in the same spirit, written for them.