THE HARDY BOYS THE FINAL CHAPTER. . .

"It won't be the same without the Hardy Boys," returned Chet.

Dispiritedly, I leafed through other volumes. They all read the same. The dialogue is as wooden as an Eberhard Faber, the characters as thin as a sneer, the plots as forced as a laugh at the boss's joke, the style as overwrought as this sentence. Adjectives are flogged to within an inch of their lives: "Frank was electrified with astonishment." Drama is milked dry, until the teat is sore and bleeding: "The Hardy boys were tense with a realization of their peril." Seventeen words seldom suffice when 71 will do:

"Mrs. Hardy viewed their passion for detective work with considerable apprehension, preferring that they plan to go to a university and direct their energies toward entering one of the professions; but the success of the lads had been so marked in the cases on which they had been engaged that she had by now almost resigned herself to seeing them destined for careers as private detectives when they should grow older."

Physical descriptions are so perfunctory that the characters practically disappear. In 15 volumes we learn little more than this about 16-year-old Frank: He is dark-haired. And this about 15-year-old Joe: He is blond.

These may be the worst books ever written.

I felt betrayed. Or, as Franklin W. Dixon might have said: I thought to myself, "Golly," assailed as I was in that moment by a dismayingly uncomfortable feeling that I had been jolted with an unfairness that was profoundly extreme.

Thomas Wolfe warned: You can't go home again.

But shouldn't you be able to saunter past the old neighborhood without throwing up?

The Hardy Boys are still published -- all the old titles and dozens of new ones. They sell by the millions, still troweling gluey prose into the brains of America's preadolescent boys.

It is too late for me, but what of them?

I felt I had to do something.

Writing is an exercise in power. You wield the words, shape events. You are God. You can make anything happen. You are bound by no laws but your own.