If the Hardy Boys Fought in World War I

The Air Scout by Ross Kay
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I took a chance on an old hardcover from about 1914, and it was an okay read. Nothing to go look up, but still interesting for a couple of reasons.

"The Air Scout" is boys' fiction from the time of World War I, sorta like YA, and reads kinda like The Hardy Boys. It's a brisk read with lots of dialogue and lots of moderately risky action. It's not bloodless; people die here, shot up and shot down, but the reader never has to feel too alarmed, as it all has a kind of Archie comics level of stakes.

It's a weird mix of realistic and unrealistic. This is a war story written while the war was still going on, and the outcome was still uncertain; some of that anxiety comes through. And many of the actual events (according to the author) were extracted from real interviews with soldiers, which gives an unusually immediate feel to the story. However, the style is pure "Boxcar Kids Go to War!" The main character--Leon, a young American visiting Europe who decided to join the French army--almost never talks to anyone but his one particular friend, and the artificial feel of this claustrophobic tunnel vision doesn't stack up well against modern realistic fiction. (He's in the army! It feels like he's just hanging out.) But the author wasn't trying to make it real; this was a book aimed at getting rough-and-tumble, football-playing, motorcycle-riding boys to read.

The patriotic chest-thumping is not unexpected but it is tiresome, I'll admit. And the deaths of enemy soldiers is treated rather lightly, enough that I grimaced a bit. The only part of the drama that affected me was when Leon saw horses killed in battle and genuinely felt bad for them. I agreed with him about that.

Ross Kay wrote a bunch of boys' series, and it's a bit like anthropology to look into one like this. As it wasn't a hard read, it ended up being sufficiently entertaining to plow through, even if it wasn't for the reasons the author intended.

This might make for a good topic for a thesis. Hmmmm. I wonder if anyone has already mined these books for their research.

This is not really recommended, but I wouldn't discourage anyone either. These books are long out of print and hard copies are rare today, but several of them are available on Project Gutenberg if anyone's curious. Don't you wonder what Great Grandpa read when he was a kid?

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