The word for today is 'inguinal'

 ... as in 'The fungi in our inguinal crease are not the same ones on our heel pad or behind our ear'

All to the what now?

 Chapter VI of Hardy Boys book 10, What Happened at Midnight, begins like this:

"WELL, I guess we're ready to go," Chet announced as he gave his hands a final wipe in an effort to rid them of some of the grime and grease that stuck after the repair job.

"Will she run?" questioned Frank.

"Like a sewing machine!  Step on the starter and see."

Frank did so.

"All to the Worcestershire sauce," he announced.  "Let's go!"

"Gresham?" questioned Chet.

"Where else?"

What in the hell does that mean? Googling the exact phrase 'all to the worcestershire sauce' turns up four references, all quoting this book.

The fuck, Leslie?

Hal Rockland

Gay-for-pay 1990s porn heart- and cock-throb Hal Rockland marks a half century on earth today.

Hardy Hard Hard: A Disclaimer

As you might have noticed by now (for the exactly zero valid values of 'you' that are not also 'me'). I am on a project to rewrite the Hardy Boys books as erotica. Various folks have pointed out this is a risky business, especially inasmuch as the original books (from 1927 to 1959[?])—at least those by Leslie McFarlane—gave Frank Hardy's age as 16 and Joe Hardy's as 15. Despite there being every possibility that two boys in their mid-teens should be well adjusted and mature in their experience of lust—enough to seize sexual agency where and when and with whom they want—it is obviously not legally ok to write pornography about a 15 year old.

By 1959 when the Stratemeyer Syndicate began a systematic 'update' of the original novels (including a number of complete rewrite with new plots), the brothers' aged had been upped 2 years, to 18 and 17. 

I personally feel it is more obscene to insist a 17-year-old is necessarily 'a child'—and that any sex shared with that 17-year-old by someone above 18 is necessarily molestation—than it is to write fiction that includes and celebrates that kind of sex. But I also maintain I have no interest, as I plod along from middle age to old age, in having sex with youngsters. 

What does continue to interest me is the years in my own life roughly between 13 and almost 18 when I was burning for sexual activity and had no idea how to initiate it. In my freshman year of high school (14–15), I spent every second of second period wishing, with exquisite, feverish, horned-up self-torture, that I could figure out a way to get my mouth on Coach Treen. I had never seen a more beautiful pair of thighs in my life. They were like double-wide trailers, only for legs. And had I had the wherewithal to attempt that contact—and had Coach Treen agreed, which seems unlikely—then it would have been an unforgivable insult to me, my agency, and my rights as a thinking human being to arrest him for having had sex with a minor. (A minor in his charge as a teacher—yes, ok, that's valid: he definitely should not have agreed even if I had gotten up the gumption to proposition him.) 

But the point is, that's one of any number of persons/occasions throughout my teen years where I wish to this day I had had some sort of mentor—a slutty older brother, a gay uncle, whatever—that could have advised me on the art of getting my dick wet. Because holy fuck I woulda. That being the case, what right have I to deny Frank and Joe Hardy their own sexual enlightenment, fulfillment, apotheosis?

Anyway, told you that to tell you this: What I'm writing is parody, so it doesn't matter what ages Mr. McFarlane or any of the rest of the Franklin W. Dixon brigade assigned to these two youngsters: for my purposes, Frank and Joe Hardy are of the legal age of consent.

Oh, by the way: when the first episode of the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries series aired on ABC on 19770130, Parker Stevenson, who played Frank Hardy, was 24, and Shaun Cassidy, who played Joe, was 18. 

Hardy Hijinx

Dislaimer: For all literary purposes related to this post, Frank and Joe Hardy are both of the legal age of consent.

I finished book 5 this morning, Hunting for Hidden Gold.  

Book 3, The Secret of the Old Mill, barely lent itself to smuttification: the best thing about it is Lester, a boy around Frank and Joe's age who is rescued, first from drowning in the mill race, then from the gang of counterfeiters who are book's bad guys; and whom the Hardys promise in the last chapter to take on as a new chum—only he's never heard from again in the canon. 

Book 4, The Missing Chums, was a bit more fun to corrupt, with Chet and Biff, and then Frank and Joe, captured by a criminal gang and chained up naked. I got to develop Joe's increasing aversion to wearing clothes and his deep attractions to Tony Prito's dad and to big black... snakes. The 'girlfriends' of the series, Callie Shaw and Iola Morton, are fully complicit as beards for Frank and Joe (but still regret that said manflesh is not for them). Also, Chet bags a federal Revenue officer. 

But with Hidden Gold, I feel like I've hit a stride. It was an easy lob of a pitch—I mean, the majority of the plot takes place in Lucky Bottom, Montana, so we begin on page 1 with Joe's driving need to go be a lucky bottom in Lucky Bottom. The boys' dad Fenton is laid up with some broken ribs in Lucky Bottom whilst his 'friend' Hank Shale nurses him back to health (and offers to be the new Mrs. Hardy). The boys accidentally stay at a gay bathhouse in Chicago and have a fun foursome in a car with a couple farmers. Joe flirts with all the help, sniffs outlaw underwear, and just never lets up on his extreme horniness (Frank calls him 'satyriasical'). And Frank gets Grizzled Prospector Syndrome—or at least is about to as the book ends. 

I've also cranked up the silly factor, with characters meta-commenting on the book's (and their own and each other's) virtues and faults, random cultural references (e.g., Venture Bros., Francis Poulenc, MST3K), and various non-sequiturs and absurdities. I have realized I need to abandon a steady temporal setting; these original novels were written in the late 1920s and it's fun playing with the cultural and linguistic markers ('I'll say it is!') but just as the rewrites sought to update those markers by a few decades, I need a bit of leeway, e.g., to situate a modern gay bathhouse in jazz age Chicago. 

Anyway, I'm really happy with this one. Next step is to create counterfeits out of copies of the 1960s picture cover hardback. And the first step of that is finding a reasonably close paper stock. 

Sim, é verdade