13 books like The Hardy Boys: Undercover Brothers

When Prudence Emery and I set out to collaborate on our first mystery novel, we searched around for inspiration.

I found it rereading Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe. Published in 1976, it cleverly dealt with food and the murder of—you guessed it—Europe’s great chefs. But what most appealed to me was its entertaining mix of humor, sex, and suspense.

The perfect recipe, Prudence and I decided, for our mysteries—with a little Charade and To Catch a Thief thrown in for good measure. 

Dr. No was the sixth James Bond novel Fleming wrote but it was the first one I was finally able to read in paperback when I was about twelve years old.

It transfixed me. I had never read anything quite like it, transporting a boy trapped in small-town Ontario into a wider world of sophistication, sex, and violence.

I devoured the other Bond adventures as fast as I could get my hands on them. If any books made me hunger for faraway glamorous places, it was the Bond novels.

If you can’t imagine the influence Fleming’s worldly writing had on me, you have only to read one of the Priscilla Tempest mysteries.

I could have chosen any Raymond Chandler novel for this list; he is such a brilliant stylist, one of the best in the language.

His lugubrious, heavy-drinking, first-person detective Philip Marlowe is my kind of fictional hero, a genre-defining character, perpetually alone though he yearns for the glamorous women he meets.

I was immediately drawn to the suspense of this book. The novel begins at the Berlin Wall, where British intelligence agent Alec Leamas helplessly watches as East German guards murder his colleague.

As I followed the elaborate British plan to get revenge on an East German official, I had the nagging feeling that I was missing something. When I finally got to the end, I realized that I had been duped—much like many of the characters in the novel. 

Before I was an author, I was primarily a national magazine copy editor, a job I finally scored after eight years of climbing up the magazine journalism ladder.

I wrote once in a while, but this mostly meant TV recaps by the time I was entrenched in magazines. But one day, an article about a safe-driving activist crossed my desk, and soon I was speaking with him in high schools.

Around the time I checked off “swim the width of a river” from my father’s bucket list, I also read Huckleberry Finn, as the setting seemed only right. I wrote a tribute to it in the second chapter of my book. My dad’s favorite author was Twain, but what I appreciated about him was that he wrote the novel as veiled propaganda. It’s a book that professes Twain’s anti-racism perspective. He just put his cause into a novel.

I… show more.

Okay, I’ll just say it: I’m a sucker for mysteries. Probably one of the reasons I write my own. But here’s the thing. Before I could drive, Frank and Joe could... cars, motorcycles, motorboats, and they put me behind the wheel. They turned me into a short-wave and citizen’s band radio nut, for a while, and first introduced me to girls who could be adventure buddies, when I couldn’t even talk to one. Truth: I’ve read about fifty of them, Nancy Drew, too. They do begin to repeat. But the first ten felt like a fresh, new adventure. As my other favorite, Sherlock Holmes might have said: “Come Watson, Frank, and Joe, make all haste, the game is afoot.” And I am right behind them. 

Where I grew up there was a rotting old gristmill at the end of the road on the corner.

I remember like it was yesterday reading the Hardy Boys Secret of the Old Mill and invited to see the inside of the old mill and my imagination reliving the experience the boys had in coming upon the counterfeiters and ultimately causing their demise.

To me the thrill of that chase was trying never to be caught. I was so enamored with my tour of both floors of the old mill I accepted the offer to kiss my guide, the three-year older neighbor—following which my right foot went through the rotted second floor, my shoe fell below into a vat and one of my tales in my first novel was born.

Hardy Boys books taught comradery—the spirit that helped win the war. They taught me never to give up.

I heard Marilyn Monroe in everything Holly Golightly said. I heard her witticisms. Turned out Truman Capote wrote it using Marilyn’s voice.

Holly, a hooker, her protagonist (apartment neighbor) was an in-the-closet gay man. Holly would climb the fire escape and crawl into his room and snuggle in bed with him as if they were lovers. She never denied she was a hooker – but never hid that she had standards and would expect fifty-dollar tips for washroom attendants.

This novella, as does Grapes and Old Man, demonstrates to me the stage play of life we choose to be in is in acts—we know our assets, limitations and to survive we follow them—in Grapes pickers followed a dream to orange groves—in Old Man—a fisher needed to prove he could get his luck back—and in Tiffany—if she could find playgrounds of the rich, she’d survive.

“To the youth of the world in whose spirit and courage rest the hope of eventual freedom for all mankind.” Thus begins Disney’s film version of this novel. Like Walt himself, this novel inspired a love of the history of our revolution in me at a young age.

Did you know that Liberty Square in the Magic Kingdom is from this story? Johnny learns early in the story that “pride cometh before a fall,” but his personal struggles become subsumed in a cause greater than himself.

The author comes from an old Yankee family with ties to the revolution, and so do I.  The commission of James Churchill as a Captain in the Massachusetts militia, signed by John Hancock, still hangs in the farmhouse where I grew up. It’s in her blood, and that comes through in this timeless classic. 

Sometimes a book ends too soon for a reader, or in a way that doesn’t sit right. When that happened to author, Gary Paulsen, he did something about it. He extended the original Hatchet tale in a new book, Brian’s Winter, as if Brian didn’t make it out in autumn and had to winter over. 

If you haven’t read Hatchet, you’re missing a wilderness treat. A real adventure, making you feel like Brian, crash-landed in northern Canada, utterly on your own with one tool. Reading the book, I admit shivering, holding my breath, feeling my hopes rise and fall with his... really not wanting to stop reading and go do my chores.

He survives with some luck, and with guts and brains. I like feeling I could be that guy.