Leslie McFarlane
Charles Leslie McFarlane. who dropped the first forename for his writing career, was a Canadian journalist, novelist, screenwriter and filmmaker. McFarlane 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, McFarlane 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 Hailebury'.
He was also a reporter for various Canadian and American newspapers. From 1943 to 1957 he was a producer for the National Film Board of Canada in Ottawa.
In 1959/60 he was the Chief Editor for the CBC television drama for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He wrote and directed numerous films and wrote more than 70 plays.
He lived in Whitby from 1936 to 1943 and from 1961 to 1976. He was a member of the Whitby Public School Board and the Whitby Public Library Board in the 1960s, and in 1987 a public school on Garden Street was named after him.
He died in Oshawa on September 6, 1977. His ashes were spread on the Ottawa River.
“Sound the tocsin of national peril and hordes of well-meaning folk with nothing much to do always materialize from nowhere. They itch to meddle in great matters of which their comprehension is usually pretty dim, and have no objection to getting their names and pictures in the papers.”