The Mystery of the Unpublished George Edward Stanley Books- Part 1

 

Thanks to “The Hardy Boys Digest” blog for finding this link. It looks like the University of Southern Mississippi has a treasure trove of HardyBoys and Nancy Drew related documents under the collection title “George Edward Stanley Papers”.

George Edward Stanley was quite a prolific ghostwriter of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books, having written books in both Digest series, the Clue Crew, Secret Files, and Girl Detective Series. I’ve only read one of them, the Nancy Drew Digest “No Strings Attached”, which I do remember liking.

I do know that he’s infamous for writing two of the worst Hardy Boys books; “The Mystery of the Black Rhino” and “The Case of the Psychic’s Vision”, but I can’t really comment on their quality, because I haven’t read them yet.

Looking at the listings, I noticed multiple things of interest, including a few unpublished books. I’d like to point out, before beginning, that the only thing I have to work from is book names. Without heading to the library myself, which is extremely unlikely to ever happen, I can only guess as to the contents of these unpublished works.

The Hardy Boys: Living with the Blue People

There are three listings on the page for this book:

“The Hardy Boys: Living with Blue People/Desert Danger/Sahara Oil” by George Edward Stanley (unpublished)

“Hardy Boys: Undercover Brothers: Sahara Oil!” by Franklin W. Dixon (George E. Stanley); Simon & Schuster (unpublished)

“Living with the Blue People” by George E. Stanley (unpublished)

Of the three different listings, the first contains the most files, including several summaries. The UB listing only contains research and a summary, and the last one contains only a Proposal.

We do know that the first listing is probably for a Hardy Boys Digest. All the other digests on the page are listed as The Hardy Boys: (Book title). The first listing matches that format.  

If you are wondering who the Blue People the title refers to are, this is the likely answer. 

My guess is that the book never got published because of the cancellation of the Digest series.

The fate of the Undercover Brothers book is hard to guess. Maybe it was too similar to "The Mummy's Curse"? Or maybe they couldn't find a convincing way to get ATAC involved in the plot. 

The last listing has no mention of the Hardy Boys, and it looks like George Edward Stanley tried to get it published as its own book, with the Hardys out of the plot. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were far from his only mystery stories and he wrote plenty of other stories about kid detectives.

 

The Secret of the Skeleton’s Letter

The other interesting unpublished book is listed as Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Skeleton’s Letter/Hardy Boys and the Skeleton’s Letter” by George Edward Stanley (unpublished).  There’s also a listing for Future Changer/The Skeleton’s Letter” by George Edward Stanley (unpublished), though I can only speculate that they are related.

It looks like this book at some point considered for either the Hardy Boys Digests or the Nancy Drew Digests. If the second listing is connected, the book could have had a plot involving a letter that predicted the future.

Much like “Living with the Blue People”, George Edward Stanley appears to have tried to also get the story published without the Hardys or Nancy Drew but didn’t succeed.

 

Other bits of trivia.

-The Nancy Drew Digest “Danger on the Great Lakes” was originally called “Mystery on the Great Lakes”.

-The Bobbsey Twins book “Mystery on the Mississippi” was originally called “Bobbsey Twins and the Riverboat Mystery”.

-The collection also contains writers guidelines for; the Hardy Boys Digests, the Nancy Drew Digests, and the Clue Crew.

-There’s also a bunch of other unpublished books with no relation to the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew. A few of the interesting titles are “My Daddy Robs Banks”, “Murder Goose”, “Dead Bugs Talk”, and “Saving My Ghost Sister’s Reputation.

Update:

I've had to fix some things.