Girl Sleuth (2 page)

By now there are countless examples of Nancy Drew as the very embodiment of all things industrious, intrepid, and truthful in a world where such role models are too few. She's still the one we turn to as a representative of our best interests—even our national ones. Global terrorism? It's not too tough for the girl detective, who, at least in the opinions of some people, might be an improvement over the officials actually in charge of gathering evidence. Writing in the
New York Times
about the intelligence failures before September 11 and then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's complaints that intelligence reports “don't tell us where, they don't tell us who, and they don't tell us how,” Maureen Dowd retorted with a three-word answer: “Paging Nancy Drew.” From the moment I began working on this book, it seemed someone, somewhere, was calling me at least once a week to tell me about a Nancy sighting, and newspaper clippings from around the country that mentioned her appeared in my mailbox regularly. The spontaneous gasps of pleasure that her name evoked at first amazed me, and then became routine (though they still pleased me). Her name (or, appropriately less often, Ned Nickerson's) is often the only solution to a crossword clue that frustrated puzzlers can figure out.

All of this attests to the enduring presence of Nancy Drew, but none of it answers the question of
why
she has endured. Certainly she taught all her readers many things that are useful no matter what the era or circumstances. We learned from her how to think for ourselves, how to jump eagerly into adventure and then get out of the scrapes it inevitably involves, how to get to the truth, and, perhaps most importantly, how to spin into action when things are not right. We also learned how to dress properly for the events at hand, to make tea sandwiches and carry on polite conversation, and to be good friends to both those we love and those in need. All of these things remained constant, even when the details surrounding them—the clothes, the location, the slang—shifted with the times.

Nancy's great appeal and strength, we all assumed, flowed directly from her author, the famous Carolyn Keene. Beloved as quickly and completely as the detective she wrote about, she was the woman every little girl imagined as the prototype for Nancy herself, a woman who had not only been as daring and clever as Nancy when she was a child, but had grown up to write about it. From the beginning, readers sent letters to “Miss Keene” by the hundreds, asking her to help them with problems, offering plot suggestions, telling her about their attempts to solve mysteries of their own, and expressing their undying love of both her and Nancy Drew.

There was no Carolyn Keene. She was simply a pen name,
one of many dreamed up by Edward Stratemeyer in his crowded Manhattan office. Nevertheless, we were not wrong in our assumptions about where Nancy got her power—we just didn't realize we were getting two trailblazers rolled into one. Their names were Harriet Stratemeyer Adams and Mildred Wirt Benson.

Along with her sister, Edna, Harriet Adams inherited her father's children's book company, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, at the time of his death in 1930. A graduate of Wellesley College with no business experience and four young children at home, she became that rarity even today, a female CEO, during the early years of the Depression. She thought more of honoring the family name than going against tradition, and she ignored, among other things, the comments of people who thought her children would be ruined by her career. She stood firm against the men in publishing who she felt treated her like a little girl and worried about how to take care of her family while also running a company long before there were any resources for working mothers, or even much sympathy. She also loved to throw a good party and routinely opened her New Jersey farm and summerhouse, Birdhaven, for everything from weddings to office picnics to Easter egg hunts. From the mid-1950s on, Harriet, in addition to being a mother, wife, and businesswoman, was Carolyn Keene, a role she embraced completely, never once dwelling on the inconvenient fact that someone else had filled it before her.

That someone was Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson, Nancy Drew's original author. Benson grew up in a small town in rural Iowa, and, in addition to being a diving champion, was the first woman to get a master's degree in journalism from the University of Iowa. She was a quick, determined reporter both before and after the women's pages—a section for which she refused to write as long as she lived, referring to it with characteristic disdain as “jams and jellies”—became a regular feature of American newspapers. Like so many women, the fictional character she most admired as a young girl was stalwart, intelligent, and slightly obstreperous Jo March of Louisa May Alcott's
Little Women,
whom she found reassuringly “at odds with so many of the day's domestic-type fictional heroines.” Though she was just slightly taller than five feet, Benson had such force of character that at the age of ninety-three she was described by a cowed fellow reporter as having “a tangle of white curls and the dismissive air of Robert De Niro.”

Like the woman each of us imagined Carolyn Keene to be, Harriet and Mildred were modern—ahead of their times, even. Outwardly very different, they had a fierce determination in common. More than that, though, they were pioneers during periods of both great progress and great regression for women in this country, examples of persistence and strength and a reminder that even at moments in history—the turn of the century, the late 1920s, the 1950s—that we tend to think of as sorry times for women's rights, there were always women who simply refused to be held back. Both Carolyn Keenes were tough when they needed to be, adventurous, and utterly unwilling to bend to the will of others. And while they disagreed with one another on the particulars of Nancy's behavior, both Harriet and Mildred envisioned her as a girl who could do what she wanted in a world that was largely the province of men, just as each of them had done.

In their stories lie not only the details of women's progress in America over the last century, but the secrets behind the character who inspired the pioneers of that progress to keep going forward in the face of adversity. Like Nancy Drew's, Harriet's and Mildred's histories have remained untold until now, but once you've delved into them, you'll never again be able to think of the girl sleuth without thinking of the women behind her. It's as impossible to imagine Nancy without their influence as it is to imagine American women without Nancy's. A role model for millions of girls, she has always been that most elusive, more essential thing as well: a trusted companion. One grateful adult appreciator wrote in the early 1980s: “As a 9-year-old, I felt that Nancy Drew was as much my friend as Ellen Kreloff down the block or Denise Walker around the corner.” There is no higher praise, really. Governed as it is by the wild and mysterious inner lives of little girls, the neighborhood club has always been one of the toughest gangs to crack—even for a detective.

1

These suggestions are for a new series for girls verging on novels. 224 pages, to retail at fifty cents. I have called this line the “Stella Strong Stories,” but they might also be called “Diana Drew Stories,” “Diana Dare Stories,” “Nan Nelson Stories,” “Nan Drew Stories” or “Helen Hale Stories” . . .

Stella Strong, a girl of sixteen, is the daughter of a District Attorney of many years standing. He is a widower and often talks over his affairs with Stella and the girl was present during many interviews her father had with noted detectives and at the solving of many intricate mysteries. Then, quite unexpectedly, Stella plunged into some mysteries of her own and found herself wound up in a series of exciting situations. An up-to-date American girl at her best, bright, clever, resourceful and full of energy.

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
of 1929 children's book mogul Edward Stratemeyer sent one of his inimitable typed memos to Grosset &
Dunlap, his longtime publisher, describing a new line of books he hoped they would launch the following spring. Though he proved to have an uncharacteristically tin ear when it came to choosing a name for his heroine—any other option on his list of possibilities had a better ring to it than “Stella”—his sense of her life and her intrepid personality were flawless. While they had no way of knowing that Stratemeyer's girl detective would eventually become a celebrity not only in the children's book world but in the world at large, Grosset & Dunlap's editors certainly knew a good thing when they saw it. They accepted Stratemeyer's series on the basis of his memo, which also included brief plotlines for the first five books in the series, and his reputation, which, by the time “Nan Drew” burst on to the scene with her fashionable outfits and boundless intelligence, had been the source of admiration and envy—and a great fortune for Stratemeyer—for several decades. When his latest proposal reached their Manhattan office, he had been writing for children for more than forty years and was so steeped in the idiom of his chosen genre that he had given even the events of his own life—which were rather straightforward and businesslike when it came down to it—the sheen and thrill of a juvenile story.

This transformation had begun at the moment of his first serious publication in a children's story paper in November of 1889. It was a fanciful tale called “Victor Horton's Idea,” and it told of a boy who went out into the world to live life—unsuccessfully, it would transpire—like the characters in his favorite dime novels.

 

Victor was fifteen years old, naturally bright and lively, and if he had not held so high of an opinion of himself, he would have been a first-rate lad.

Besides being conceited, Victor was dissatisfied with the quietness of country life. He longed to go forth into the great world and achieve fame and fortune.

Now, though this idea is often a very laudable one, it was not so in the present instance. Victor's idea upon the subject had been gathered wholly from the pages of numerous dime novels and disreputable story papers loaned him by his particular crony, Sam Wilson, and was, therefore, of a deceptive and unsubstantial nature, and likely to do more harm than good.

 

The details of Victor's exploits appeared in installments over five weeks, crammed into the narrow columns of a richly illustrated black-and-white children's broadsheet out of Philadelphia called
Golden Days for Boys and Girls
(subscription price $3 per annum). Alongside them ran informative articles with titles like “How to Make a Guitar” (“Those who have read the articles on ‘Violin Making' and have succeeded in making one would, perhaps, like to make a guitar if they knew what a simple matter it is”); interesting trivia; and true stories about heroic rescues of humans by dogs.

Stratemeyer was twenty-six years old, tall, slender, and bespectacled, with a brushy mustache, dark hair combed back off a high forehead, and a preternatural instinct for the arc of a good tale for young people. He had, according to one news report, “a scholarly appearance . . . and his eyes are a trifle contracted from constant application to his work.” Indeed, in person, Stratemeyer betrayed no signs of the flights of fancy that had produced Victor and would go on to invent countless other young scalawags, heroes, and heroines over the next forty years. As one reporter would later describe him, he was “a tranquil-faced man, with kind, good-humored eyes . . . [and] a curiously deliberate manner of speaking. One doubts if he has ever been hurried into a decision or ever given an answer to a question without earnest consideration.” He also had a healthy sense of perspective on his chosen field. By the end of Victor Horton's travails, the young man announces to his hapless friend Sam: “Dime novels are a first-class fraud!”

Nonetheless, they were the field that Stratemeyer aimed to get into. Myth had it that he had written “Victor Horton's Idea” on a sheet of brown package paper during quiet moments while clerking at his brother's tobacco store in Newark, New Jersey. In spite of having recorded very clearly in his own notes that he had written the story at home, Stratemeyer, knowing better than most the value of a good yarn, repeated the entertaining falsehood about its conception whenever he was asked to. As one news feature of the era printed it, complete with the final triumph of will and self-knowledge over discouragement:

 

His initial long story—18,000 words—was written on store wrapping paper and later copied onto white paper. The author, who was then twenty-five, was not satisfied with it so he laid it aside. After a year . . . he revised the manuscript carefully and sent it to
Golden Days.
The check for $75 he received Stratemeyer bore proudly to his father, Henry J. Stratemeyer. “Look at this,” he said. The father, who had told him he was wasting his time writing the tale and might be better engaged in a more useful activity, regarded the check, then jerked up his glasses. “Why, it's a check made out to you!” he exclaimed. Stratemeyer explained he had received it for the story the parent had tried to discourage. “Paid you that for writing a story?” his father repeated. “Well, you'd better write a lot more of them.”