Leslie McFarlane
| Leslie McFarlane | |
|---|---|
| Born | Charles Leslie McFarlane October 25, 1902 Carleton Place, Ontario, Canada |
| Died | September 6, 1977 (aged 74) Oshawa, Ontario, Canda |
| Occupation | novelist, screenwriter, journalist, filmmaker |
| Genre | Young adult adventure fiction |
| Notable works | Hardy Boys series |
Charles Leslie McFarlane (October 25, 1902 in Carleton Place, Ontario – September 6, 1977 in Oshawa, Ontario) was a Canadian journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and filmmaker, who is most famous for ghostwriting many of the early books in the very successful Hardy Boys series, using the pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon.
The son of a school principal, he was raised in the town of Haileybury, Ontario. He became a freelance writer shortly after high school. He and his family moved to Whitby, Ontario, in 1936. This period is described in his 1975 book A Kid in Haileybury.
As a young man he worked in Sudbury, Ontario, as a newspaper reporter, then for a weekly paper in Toronto, before taking a job at the Springfield Republican newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts.
While in the U.S., he replied to a want ad placed by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, publisher of such titles as Nancy Drew, Tom Swift and the Bobbsey Twins. As a result, he freelanced in 1926 and 1927 as one of the authors using the pseudonym Roy Rockwood to write seven of the Dave Fearless serialized mystery novels.
This led to his involvement with the Hardy Boys, a project on which he was a large contributor, writing 19 of the first 25 books between 1927 and 1946, and 21 overall. He also wrote books in several other juvenile series, published in pulp magazines, novellas or novels over his fifty-year career, at one point writing six novels in one year. McFarlane earned as little as $85 per book during the Great Depression, yet he continued because he had a growing family.
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