Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 4, 1991 TAG: 9104040074
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN/ LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Swiftly.
Ingenuity rides again!
Tom Swift, all-American boy and inventor extraordinaire, returns from literary limbo April 1 to star in a new series of high-tech adventure stories for young people.
Here comes "The Black Dragon," a $2.95 Archway Paperback from Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster.
"Look at that sucker go!" Rick yelled as Tom flashed past.
Call it "Tom Swift and His Electromagnetic Surfboard."
And not only is our hero as ahead of his time as ever, today's Tom has added yet another sterling quality to his incomparable profile:
Fiscal responsibility.
"I need cost projections," Tom said. "Costs versus benefits for using my superconductor for power cables. You know - materials, manufacturing, how much money we'd have to make to break even, against the energy savings."
Blond, unspoiled and still 18, Tom ignores the siren songs of colleges like Harvard and MIT.
He's too busy.
"We've had several series we continued that have been successful," said Archway executive editor Anne Greenberg in New York, "and this one was another strong contender."
Which series? The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.
What success? Fifty new titles for the Hardys, with 7 million copies in print, and 57 new titles for Nancy, with 12 million copies in print.
There's gold in them thar pages.
"Tom is very much a contemporary character, which is part of his appeal to the young adult market," said Greenberg. "We've moved him more into a teen world, with emphasis on the concerns of adolescence - girls, fun activities with friends."
Tom hanging out at the mall.
Tom hanging out at the beach.
"Part of our marketing strategy is putting these stories in an adult-sized paperback format," said Greenberg. "They look like adult books. They fit in a pocket or a backpack."
And new titles will appear bimonthly.
Who writes them?
"Different people," said Greenberg.
Thank you, Victor Appletons.
Son of Stratemeyer
The first "Victor Appleton" was Edward Stratemeyer, a one-man fiction factory who cranked out 200 children's books before his death in 1930 and outlined plots for hundreds more. He started as a stationer in Newark, N.J., scribbling stories on brown wrapping paper between customers.
The prolific clerk sold his first one in 1889, parlaying his productivity into the Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1906, when Horatio Alger Jr. asked him to edit pulps about youthful heroes who rose from rags to riches saving various bosses' daughters from mad dogs and runaway horses. He created scores of series, including the Rover Boys, the Motion Picture Girls and the Bobbsey Twins.
Also the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.
Tom Swift began in 1910, with "Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle," the hero's streamlined name borrowed from an 1894 Stratemeyer serial titled "Shorthand Tom." But certainly another contemporarily canny Tom, name of Edison, was influential. The next 31 years saw 38 titles, which sold 14 million copies.
When Stratemeyer died at 68, his daughter Harriet Stratemeyer Adams (Wellesley, 1914) became senior partner to the stable of writers who put her father's creative conceptions to paper. And she ran the show straight through to her death at 89 in 1982. Adams, who as "Carolyn Keene" dictated most of the Nancy Drews herself, resisted suggestions to modernize the series or allude to current events.
"I call 'em safe and sane books for young people," she said.
The Stratemeyer world was typically set in Tom Swift's Shopton (or the Hardy Boys' Bayport or Nancy Drew's River Heights), a solid family spot like the scrubbed middle-American towns in old Disney movies. This imprecision of moment made the locales easily imprintable on the imaginations of readers as homesteads not unlike their own. It also enabled the publisher to recycle the stories endlessly, absolved of anachronism.
But Tom's inventions would date.
As motorcycles and airships became old hat, the boy inventor had to hustle into tomorrow with flying boats (1923), television (1928) and giant magnets designed to summon shipwrecks from the ocean floor (1932).
World War II overtook the ability of the series to stay ahead of the times, and Harriet stopped the Swift books in 1941. But they started up again in 1954 to exploit the atomic era; villains moved from teen bullies and businessmen to sinister Eastern Europeans.
The post-war Tom Swift Jr. books sold 6 million copies.
Tom terrific
In 1984 Simon & Schuster purchased the Stratemeyer Syndicate, and "good, wholesome books about real children" were reinvented again.
By 1987, Joe Hardy's nice, reliable girlfriend Iola Morton was blown to smithereens with plastic explosives wired to the ignition of her car. Older brother Frank learned karate. And Nancy Drew traded in her blue roadster for a Mustang and began to thrill to the touch of heartthrobs.
Now Tom has moved to the West Coast, Swift Enterprises employs 300 people, and his industrial complex in Central Hills boasts a "brightly colored nursery that provides day care for their children."
The boy inventor is hip to Duran Duran, worries about girls and watches his weight.
Not to worry. Some things don't change. Just as Tom is off to do battle with his evil archenemy Xavier Mace in a convertible jet aircraft/ground vehicle of his own invention, the lab door slides open to reveal Tom's father, carrying a duffel bag.
"Your mother packed this for you," he said. "Clean socks and things. She knows you're busy, but. . . . "
No racial stereotypes. Gone is Tom's embarrassing black cohort Eradicate Sampson and his pet mule Boomerang. And the girls have smartened up, in keeping with women's lib: the inventor's love interest, Mandy Coster, "takes an active part in Tom's adventures, while his sister Sandra is a gifted inventor in her own right."
Still, Tom retains a firm grasp on the obvious.
From "Tom Swift and His Television Detector" (1933):
"Hark!" interrupted the young inventor. "Someone is coming!"
Footsteps sounded in the corridor outside the laboratory. As it was late at night and as orders had been given that he was not to be disturbed, Tom felt the presence of an intruder might mean danger.
From ` `The Black Dragon" (1991):
Something blazing hot flew down the hallway over their heads, smashing the swinging doors to splinters before disappearing into the smoke beyond.
"Well, I don't think we'll be going that way," Tom said. . . .
He has always been at his best in the lab, anyway, dreaming up those wonderful electric runabouts, sky trains and magnetic silencers. Bright ideas are his beat. And young Tom Swift is the American Dream.
by CNB