New Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Titles for 2017

Simon & Schuster, the publisher of all Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series since 1979, has announced more new titles for its four series, to be published throughout 2017:

Nancy Drew Diaries: Riverboat Roulette (January), The Professor and the Puzzle (August)

Hardy Boys Adventures: Attack of the Bayport Beast (February), A Con Artist in Paris (September)

Nancy Drew Clue Book: Candy Kingdom Chaos (March), World Record Mystery (October)

Hardy Boys Clue Book: Scavenger Hunt Heist (April), A Skateboard Cat-astrophe (November)

In addition, Grosset & Dunlap, publishers of the classic Hardy Boys Mystery Stories and Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series, has announced plans to rerelease the revised versions of Hardy Boys books five through eight—Hunting for Hidden Gold, The Shore Road Mystery, The Secret of the Caves, and The Mystery of Cabin Island—with revamped covers in October 2017. There do not appear to be plans to release a box set of the first four titles, like they did with the Nancy Drew titles.

Reboot of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Archive

In 2004, while I was working on a Ph.D. in English at McMaster University in Ontario, I launched the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Archive as a subset of my personal website (along with a site devoted to another interest of mine, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books). Although there were (and are still) many excellent Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew resources on the web, what I found to be missing was a site that considered academic scholarship and that looked at all the iterations of these characters since they first appeared in 1927 and 1930, respectively. And so, while my website has been limited to lists of titles and while my blog posts have been infrequent, I kept those lists up to date since I continue to enjoy collecting books in these series.

Current Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series continue to do well, appearing in both paperback and jacketed hardcover formats simultaneously: Simon & Schuster has been adding an average of three titles a year to its Nancy Drew Diaries and Hardy Boys Adventures series for middle readers since 2013, and to its series for younger readers, Nancy Drew Clue Book and Hardy Boys Clue Book. And as evidence that the classic series continue to appeal to readers in the twenty-first century, Grosset & Dunlap has reissued the first eight Nancy Drew titles and the first four Hardy Boys titles (revised texts) with bold new covers.

Next year will mark the ninetieth anniversary of the Hardy Boys, so I hope that publishers of its series will be planning something to mark the occasion. Stay tuned!