Oh, well, he started before I was born. He started about 1928, writing the Hardy Boys, I was born in '31 so by the time I was 9 or 10 I was reading them. Not knowing that he had written them. He was sworn to secrecy, actually, the publisher Stratemeyer didn't want him revealing that he was one of the writers. Eventually I got it out of him. He says I walked into his study one day and said, "Well, you know, look everybody's reading those books, are you reading them too?" He said, "I wrote them." He admonished me, he said "don't tell your friends I wrote that nonsense." I said to him that ' we were all reading them, Dad.' He never took any claim, he was loathe to say that they were great literature. They weren't. He knew that. They were just a way of making money. He was so skilled at writing, he could write so much better stuff. And I think that his CBC plays and his movie scripts and going to write for Bonanza, some of his other works were so much better written. I think he should be very proud of what he's done, though, getting all these millions of kids hooked on reading. Writing adventure stories for them.

No, I didn't have a favourite. I just read them all. I just remember any time I had to stay home school, if I had a stomach upset or something, when I was allowed to stay home… It wasn't often. We could devour one of those books in about an hour.

Occasionally, but I tend to ignore them. If I ask at a used bookstore if they have any Hardy Boys, they always say yes, right over here, sir, but they're all the new ones. If they don't have a red or a brown cover, I'm not interested. I've got probably over a hundred books, for the grandchildren. I'm trying to slowly acquire a complete collection. I don't work very hard at it. I don't order them off the Internet or anything. I'm always surprised by the prices that some of them go. I don't see them around like I used to at garage sales and used bookstores.

Simon and Schuster is currently revising the Hardy Boys series, with the results being published next year. If you were asked, what changes would you make to the current-day Hardy Boys?

I don't think I would make any changes. I wouldn't have them packing guns. I think that they should just let them stand as they are. I always feel that my dad was always a better writer, so I wouldn't try to correct him.

Not my mom. My sister and I agree on that. We can't understand why her name is associated with it. This came as a very big surprise in the past few years, where suddenly it's saying that Amy McFarlane wrote the book. My sister and I have talked on the phone about it and we say it's impossible. She would never have written it. Only thing, Nora, my sister could say was that there must have been a tax reason or something, where he might have wanted to put her name on it, but I guess that will go unanswered. 

Another one, you may have seen it on the internet. My cousin said that his Uncle Les wrote the Ted Scott series. Impossible. I don't know where he got that idea. Nowhere does that ever show up in his records and he was meticulous in making a list of all the things he wrote, how much he got paid. There's nothing in there about Ted Scott. [My cousin's] passed away now and I never got a chance to tell him. I'm angry that he would put that misinformation on the internet. So if you ever see that, you heard it from me, he did not write Ted Scott and my mother did not write the Phantom Freighter.

Maybe Aunt Alva. I can remember as a young boy whenever when Aunt Alva came it was a big occasion. She was always packing chocolate bars for us. She was quite a boisterous, talkative lady. It's possible that my dad might have written Aunt Gertrude after her. More likely, he just invented her because he was bored with the Hardy Boys brats, as he called them from time to time, and I think it was to escape the Stratemeyer outline. They'd give them the two-page outline to write the book and he'd say I've got to invent better characters than what I've been given here. So out came Aunt Gertrude. I credit my dad with creating her. I'll bet that Stratemeyer had some concerns about her. Whether she should be in those books. Of course she should.

Yes, my sister is glowing in her praise for Marilyn's work. She said she got it right. And I echo those sentiments. I feel that Marilyn did a lot of research into this subject matter and I think "why? Why would she take my dad and spend four years of her life tracing his history, chronicling it in a very professional manner. Both my sister and I are very proud of the work that Marilyn has done. There are some surprises in there. I'm reading some of this thing and thinking that she's got a perspective on my dad that is fresh and different. Memory plays tricks on you and sometimes you go through your life and your parents are just there, but she's dissected the whole situation in a very professional way. We thank Marilyn all the time for taking the time out of her life to devote to my dad's life. It's something my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have as a treasure… I was delighted with what I read.

I started one, but I didn't want to trespass on Marilyn's work. I realize now that she was willing to spend so much more time on it than I was willing to spend. I would have written probably a more superficial biography using materials that he had covered in Ghost of the Hardy Boys. I may pursue that eventually, but I feel that hers is the definitive biography and mine would have suffered by comparison, perhaps. So it's on hold.

If you can call a two-page outline that, [then] I guess she can claim that. I think we know that a book isn't a two-page outline. It takes a special skill to make it come to life and to follow a plotline.

They weren't all that generous with their authors at $100 a book. Even if they had given them a modest royalty or percent that would have been helpful. Or a bonus. I think my dad got a $50 bonus when he got married. A gift. They made millions on these books. But my dad would say, "Hey, I knew what the deal was." I often heard him use that expression. "I'm not going to go whining and complaining now." I often used to ask him why he didn't sue them for an unfair contract. Surely there was a legal ground. He'd just shrug and say "No, I knew what the deal was."