Mystery Brain: An Interview with Daniel Lefferts

“I tend to be interested in subjects that confound me or strike me as enticingly improbable—I guess you could call them mysteries.”

credit: Nina Subin

Last year the right-wing Passage Publishing, whose mission—“to push forward new ideas and ways of thinking that can break us out of our cultural and political cul-de-sac and open up new possibilities for art and publishing”—has led primarily to the production of texts by Internet intellectuals like Curtis Yarvin and the pseudonymous Raw Egg Nationalist, added a curious title to its booklist: The Hardy Boys. “Why would a publisher as selective as Passage take interest in these hokey detective stories?” asks Daniel Lefferts this month in the NYR Online. “To find out, I read the Passage editions of the first three Hardy Boys books alongside the standard revised versions published by Grosset and Dunlap. Much like Frank and Joe Hardy at the start of every book, I sensed trouble in the air, a mystery, and I returned to their idyllic world to try to solve it.”

Lefferts’s debut novel, Ways and Means (2024), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, is also something of a grown-up riff on the Hardy Boys, following a young striver who stumbles into a mystery centered on a sinister billionaire and the crumbling of American institutions. Lefferts’s other writing, including fiction, criticism, and reporting, has appeared in, among other magazines, GQ, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review. He is currently at work on a second novel.

Last week, I wrote to Lefferts to ask him about mysteries, reprints, and the study of the right wing.

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Daniel Drake: Where in the evolution of your literary taste did the Hardy Boys fall? Were they, for example, some of your first “chapter books,” or did they introduce you to genre, or how might you say they fit into the larger picture of your reading life?

Daniel Lefferts: I started reading the books when I was probably seven or eight. I have a very vivid sense memory of those bright blue Grosset and Dunlap hardbacks, and they were certainly some of the first “real” books—with chapters, suspenseful plots, full narrative arcs, etc.—that I can remember reading. They were absolutely foundational for me. I don’t know that I had the sophistication at the time to grasp that they belonged to the mystery genre, which is maybe a way of saying that I initially thought all novels were mysteries, and perhaps they are.

As I grew older I found myself drawn to the basic scenario that animates the Hardy Boys—a menacing force lurking under a seemingly idyllic surface—in other things I read and watched, particularly the films of David Lynch (who described his 1986 Blue Velvet as “the Hardy Boys go to hell”). I even came to find something Hardyesque in the novels of Henry James, with their fresh-faced, curious, naive American heroes losing their innocence in encounters with sinister and seductive elements. And there are aspects of the mystery genre, and arguably shades of the Hardy Boys, in some of my own fiction. At one point I even started writing a kind of contemporary, literary retelling of the Hardy Boys, but I quickly (and I think wisely) abandoned it. I can’t escape them.

One of Passage’s stated motives for their reissues of the Hardy Boys books was to restore the original editions, which had been abridged in the 1950s to, among other things, remove offensive, occasionally racist language. How do you think publishers ought deal with reprints of older books that contain outmoded language or views? It seems like Passage explicitly presents one option—trumpeting the return of slurs—while an earlier reprint of the Hardy Boys opted to include a proto “trigger warning,” but I wonder if there might be still more interesting or careful ways to think about when or how to recontextualize reprints.

I think the first point to make is that a publisher conveys a lot about its motivations for reissuing books by the very nature of its overall operation. Passage is expressly focused on publishing right-wing literature, which tells us something about how it views the Hardy Boys novels and their place in its overall mission. The other publisher, Applewood Books, simply specializes in reissuing historical texts without any political objective. So the circumstances around the publication of a text already do a lot to frame that text and shape its audience.

I’m generally a supporter of keeping texts alive, warts and all, and I agree with Passage (and with Applewood) that the original Hardy Boys books are worth reading as artistic and historical artifacts. In my essay I reference an article, “Returning to the Hardy Boys,” by the literary scholar Tim Morris, and as Morris says, the novels “are sources for sophisticated understanding of narratology and plot convention, as well as primary sources that offer a rich sense of American cultural history.”

When it comes to books that contain outmoded depictions of women or racial or ethnic minorities—to say nothing of outright slurs—things get trickier when those books are intended for children. The job of how to present such reissued texts falls mostly to parents, and Passage-patronizing parents may present them differently from Applewood-patronizing ones. But I also suspect a large part of the audience for the original Hardy Boys novels is made up of adults who remember reading them as kids or who simply see them as literary curiosities, and for those readers some kind of ancillary critical material (in the form of an introductory essay or a collection of short scholarly analyses) would be welcome. Ideally, that material would avoid edgelordish celebration of offense on the one hand and nervous pearl-clutching on the other. I’d love to see these books issued with that kind of treatment.

In addition to this investigation into the operations of a right-wing press, you’ve previously written about gay men who voted for Donald Trump and gay men who work in finance. What about this anthropological mode appeals to you? What larger question might you be trying to approach, in your investigations into people from perhaps similar class or professional backgrounds or “identities” who nonetheless seem to reject some of your values?

I tend to be interested in subjects that confound me or strike me as enticingly improbable—I guess you could call them mysteries. The idea of a press publishing anodyne children’s novels alongside Bronze Age Pervert confounded me, as did the idea of gay men supporting a political party that has done much to militate against their interests. In the case of my essay on men in finance the central conundrum, really, was why I found them interesting in the first place. In each of these subjects I felt a tension between familiarity and strangeness. I’m gay—and so are these Trump supporters. I love the Hardy Boys—and so does this far-right publisher. I find finance boring at best and evil at worst—and yet I’m always closely observing men who work in it. When I look at these people, do I see something I recognize? And if so, what does that say about them, and about me?

You’re working on another novel right now. Do you find that your nonfiction work ends up overlapping with your fiction work? That is, have you noticed ideas or details generated in one form sneaking into the other?

There’s definitely some cross-genre sneaking, and I would say that, so far at least, my process has involved investigating a question first in fiction and then in nonfiction. My first novel concerned a gay finance student and featured a subplot about a gay MAGA art project, and then after it was published I wrote my essay on men in finance and my article on gay Trump supporters. Maybe I need to tackle a subject in the relative freedom of fiction before I can address it in fact. When it comes to my current fiction project, I’m hesitant to share too much, but let’s just say my interest in the contemporary far right that I explore in the Hardy Boys essay didn’t come out of nowhere.

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