The base assumption throughout the internet, and on every site with otherwise relevant information, is that an artist was commissioned to paint the cover art, and threw in the internal illustrations. For the initial run of original texts, this was undoubtably the case. Many of the early illustrations are signed, and when not, easily identified by the style. For the first 33 titles in the series, this meant producing a cover image, and a frontispiece.
The covers and frontispieces for the first fourteen books were done as paintings, with a full color printing of the cover image made for the dust jacket, and a black ink halftone used for the coated stock of frontispiece. Beginning in 1936, the frontispieces were created as black line art and reproduced on plain paper, like the text. Revised frontispieces were drawn in this style to replace the halftone images in 1944 and 45, and all subsequent internal artwork was done as line art on plain paper.
Some of these replacement frontispieces were not made by the same artist as the cover in use for that title, but if you look at who painted the covers for those two years during which they were replaced... you find Stricker and Scott. It's very likely that the practice of having the cover artist provide the frontispiece continued through 1949 and title #28, The Sign of the Crooked Arrow. Numbers 27 and 28 were both produced and signed by Russell Tandy. The covers for numbers 29-31 were painted by William S. Gillies, but the frontispieces are another story, as are the first two Rudy Nappi covers for numbers 32-33.
There is no credit on the frontispiece artwork for #29, The Secret of the Lost Tunnel, and #30, The Wailing Siren Mystery. They both look to be drawn by the same hand, and logic would presume that it was Gillies himself. It's hard to say for certain from looking at them. The covers seem very different - flat and two dimensional, like cut-outs set up in a diorama, then photographed. The colors are cartoonish, but I think the reality is that photographs were staged, then the covers painted from them. There is a realism in the features that make them look like they were painted from photos.
Curiously, the frontispieces for The Secret of Wildcat Swamp (Gillies) and The Crisscross Shadow (Nappi) are both drawn and signed by Roy Pellington. There is no signature for the frontispiece used in the original text printing of The Yellow Feather Mystery, and it's hard to be certain who drew it. It is similar in ways to the Pellington art, but also looks like it could be Nappi.
From this point on in the series, it becomes difficult to identify the illustrator with any certainty. Nappi is responsible for all the covers going forward in the series, and all but three of the covers for the revised texts of the books. Yet there are at least three distinctive styles used in the books produced in the 1960s and 70s, with George Wilson responsible for almost half of the titles.
The last seven titles published before they began the revisions in earnest are hard to label. I would say that #37-40 were drawn by Nappi, but the others differ too much to classify. #34 and #35 are similar to #33, but clearly different, as evidenced by these two strikingly similar images of Joe slugging a villain.
The image on the left is from #34, The Hooded Hawk Mystery. The image on the right is from #35, The Clue in the Embers. In the latter, Joe is a little boy. Some of the poses in the Hawk artwork reminds me of Nappi, but his covers feature iconic representations of Frank and Joe, and these drawings seem very different. The other possibility is that the artist was instructed to make the brothers more boyish from one book to the next.
The other oddball title here is #36, The Secret of Pirate's Hill. Nappi painted the cover, but certainly did not draw the internal art. Compare Frank and Joe in the image to the right with the artwork above, or any of the painted covers... They are done by a separate artists. Fortunately, all of the internal illustrations appear to have been done by the same artist, and the frontispiece is signed!
Unfortunately, the signature doesn't seem to reveal itself very clearly, as seen on the left. The author of #36 was John Almquist, which is tantalizingly close to the signature, but doesn't appear to be it, just the same. It appears to end in "-oyler", but the initial letters are written over each other making it difficult to separate them unless you have some names to consider.So, I've been searching for information on who the Stratemeyer Syndicate used for illustrators. In the process of doing this, I found a copy of the decision rendered in the 1980 lawsuit between Grosset & Dunlap and the parent company of Simon & Schuster over who held the right to print old and new titles. In it, the judge mentions that Grosset & Dunlap contracted the illustrators for the internal art, but that didn't grant them joint copyright over the books since they weren't essential to the story. Apparently, the Syndicate gave them direction on what they wanted for the art, but Grosset & Dunlap commissioned and included the artwork as part of the printing process. That was new to me, will require a different tack to track down names for the artists.
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