Answer to A Question Nobody Would Feel A Compelling need to Ask

Q: Just how phoned-in ARE the Hardy Boys?
A: Way phoned-in. I picked up four of them off the shelf in the compound rec room/library (perverse nostalgia, my most notable perversity), and read The Crisscross Shadow. Look, even not getting to writerly things like plot, dialogue, logic, padding-to-a-set-length and all that, if Frank is the quarterback, HE throws the passes in the football game, not halfback Joe.

Also noted: The cover of The Clue of the Screeching Owl, the first Hardy Boys book I bought and read in elementary school en route to devouring about half of the series, shows the boys looking over their shoulders at head of a mile-wide owl looming over a darkened forest. Needless to say, no such owl of unearthly size appears in the actual book. Although the other elements of HB kept me reading, it's interesting that my first impulse was toward the fantastic, a taste that dominated my reading as soon as I found actual science fiction and fantasy with Andre Norton a couple of years later.