The Tower Treasure

Franklin W. Dixon
1959
Rating: 4.5

We moved at the end of February, and the disruption wreaked havoc with my reading habit. I stopped reading books, for the most part, although I seem to have gotten back into it again.

I picked up 3 Hardy Boys books maybe a year and a half ago in Cold Spring, because I devoured every book in the series when I was young, and I was very curious about what, exactly, I had read.

I have to say I enjoyed reading The Tower Treasure more than I expected to. Reading it as an adult, its flaws were obviously more apparent: a total lack of character development, chiefly. But I also appreciated things about the book that I would not have as a 10-year-old. It was interesting just to read a young adult book written in the 1950s. They say “swell” unironically.

I noted that the lack of character development did not prevent me from being pulled along through the story in a way that was somewhat entertaining.

There were no passages in the book that I remembered reading as a kid, which is not surprising because I probably read that book 40 years ago, or more.

The book reminded me a bit of two other franchises: Leave It to Beaver, and Scooby Doo. Scooby Doo in particular owes basically everything except its outfits to The Hardy Boys, it seems to me.

I had read somewhere that the Hardy Boys series doesn’t do race very well, also unsurprising. The first book in the series fared better in this regard than I anticipated, however. There are no people of color in the story, but there is an Italian immigrant, a shopkeeper in Bayport. One character in the story, Oscar Smuff, expresses anti-immigrant views, and Smuff is a bad guy. So, Dixon seems to be pro-immigration, or at least pro Italian immigration.

Where the book did run into some problems was with class. I was surprised by the extent to which the book focused on the socio-economic damage to Mr. Robinson and his family caused by his being wrongly blamed for the book’s central crime, a burglary.

It makes sense from a narrative perspective to wade into the harm brought onto the family due to the false accusation, but their descent from barely middle class into prospective (and presumably temporary) poverty is treated as a major catastrophe.

Characters are shocked and horrified that the Robinsons have to live in (gasp) the poor part of town. Tellingly, people are not freaked out by this part of town because of violent crime — there is no mention of crime in this part of town — it is the poverty itself that is horrifying and to be avoided at all costs.

The book embraces a fear of and a subtle contempt for economically disadvantaged communities that seemed toxic. The Robinsons, in the book, differentiate themselves from their neighbors in the story by trying to keep their place tidy and presentable. Maybe this is a back door espousal of racist attitudes, although the racial backgrounds of the poor folks are never mentioned.

The day that I bought the first installment, I picked up two other titles in the series. I’m glad I re-read The Two Towers and have no regrets, but I don’t think I will bother with the other two titles.