The Hardy Boys were written by nobody

You weren't supposed to get the existential shits from reading the Hardy Boys books - they were safe adventure yarns for little kids - but it still happened to me anyway.

One of the very first series of anything that I collected wasn't comic books or movies, it was the Hardy Boys paperbacks. Those things were addictive.  I had dozens and dozens of them, and couldn't tell you a single thing about the stories. 

I still remember that Frank was the responsible one, and Joe was a bit more reckless, and that they ran into a surprising amount of smugglers in their personal lives (I'm a little disappointed that I've never ever met a smuggler in real life - like quicksand, I really underestimated how much I didn't need to worry about them as a kid).

But the Hardy Boys were everywhere, and there was a TV show that played on Sunday afternoons and you only watched if it was raining, and the little books were in all the bookstores, and it was so easy to build up a quick collection. 

The Biggles books were always too straight-laced, and Willard Price's Adventures books were way more inert than the Hardy's, and Enid Blyton's novels were charming and horribly old fashioned, so I was a Franklin W Dixon fan all the way.

And then some smartarse older kid told me that Franklin W Dixon wasn't even a real person, just a pseudonym for a bunch of different people, and all these stories of fake ghosts and swarthy foreigners were made by somebody who doesn't even exist.

That blew my mind way more than anything Frank or Joe ever did.

I moved onto Doctor Who books after that, at least Terrence Dicks was a real person who actually showed a bit of personality. But I've never felt the kind of hero worship towards my later favourite authors that I did when I was reading The Mystery of the Melted Coins, because they might not real either.