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By PEGGY CARLSON
One of my happiest childhood memories is sitting in front of the bookshelves in my grandmother's living room, trying to decide which of my mother's or uncle's old Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys books to read. Years later I watched my daughter on Christmas morning, perched on her new pink and purple bicycle, kickstand down, reading a Nancy Drew book.
Thus I eagerly took the opportunity to review "Girl Sleuth" by Melanie Rehak. The cover, made to look tattered and illustrated with a vintage drawing of Nancy and her magnifying glass, had me feeling nostalgic before I even read a word.
Rehak tells the interwoven stories of Edward Stratemeyer, the literary father of Nancy Drew; the famous Stratemeyer Syndicate; and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams and Mildred Wirt Benson, the two women responsible for writing nearly all the Nancy Drew books under the name of Carolyn Keene. Rehak has packed a lot of material into this book.
She describes the incredible imagination of Edward Stratemeyer, who created countless children's series books, including stories of the Rover Boys, Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Dana Girls, Motor Girls, Bomba the Jungle Boy, Tom Swift, Ruth Fielding, Honey Bunch, Happy Hollisters, Ted Scott Flying Stories and many others.
Rehak tracks and explains the machinations of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, whereby Stratemeyer roughed out a bare outline of a story, then farmed out the actual writing to an author who was paid a flat fee for the work, but received no future royalties.
Shortly before his death in 1930, Stratemeyer dreamed up a storyline and several plots about a girl detective from River Heights who drove a sporty blue roadster, a gift from her adoring father. Her name was Stella Strong. The publishers at Grosset & Dunlap opted for a name change, and Nancy Drew made her debut April 28, 1930, just days before Stratemeyer died.
Writing under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, Mildred Wirt Benson penned the Nancy Drew stories through the mid 1950s. Rehak reveals Benson to have been a most unusual woman for her time, the first woman graduate of the Iowa School of Journalism, where she earned a master's degree in 1927. She married an Associated Press reporter, and while he worked the night shift, she typed many of the early Nancy stories on a typewriter on an overturned orange crate in her tiny kitchen in Cleveland.
From 1954 on, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, eldest daughter of Edward, took over the writing of the Nancy stories. She, along with her sister, had been running the publishing syndicate since her father's death. When he died, she was a young matron with four children. Harriet knew almost nothing about her father's business. Stratemeyer, knowing his daughters had no business experience, had intended for them to sell the syndicate upon his death. This proved impossible in the lean years of the Great Depression. The sisters rose to the occasion, moved the business from New York City to East Orange, N.J., and continued successfully in their father's footsteps.
Harriet and Mildred had haggled for years over what each considered to be fair compensation for writing the Nancy Drew books, plots and characterizations. From 1954 on, Harriet took over the writing of Nancy Drew.
Rehak chronicles a great deal of women's social history in this book, highlighting the suffrage movement, the Flappers of the 1920s, the working mothers of both world wars and the return to domesticity in the postwar years. The careers of both Harriet and Mildred are carefully examined, both of them unusual and atypical for the time.
Rehak also writes about the elaborate efforts of the syndicate for secrecy. Each writer was bound never to reveal their part in the process, although that policy met with mixed success. They fooled the young readers of America, though. In 1942 the favorite author of teen girls was Carolyn Keene. Children wrote regularly to their favorite syndicate authors and Harriet went to great lengths to be sure they never knew there was no Carolyn Keene, Franklin W. Dixon, Victor Appleton or Laura Lee Hope.
Edward Stratemeyer always intended the stories to be timeless, and for that reason even the Great Depression and World War II were never mentioned. From the late 1950s on, though, they were updated, sometimes ruthlessly so. Nancy's clothes, car and language were modernized. Some readers still preferred the original stories. In 2002, more than 150,000 copies of the 1959 version of "The Secret of the Old Clock" were sold.
Melanie Rehak has written a most entertaining book, brimming with anecdotes, details and facts about the writing of Nancy Drew, from the fine line that Ned Nickerson always walked between friend and beau, to the syndicate rules against depicting murder and violence. Any fan of the Nancy Drew books will enjoy this tale of her origin, history and the background of America at the time the books were written. After finishing this book I felt the urge to dig out my old books and step back into that fantasy world where Nancy always solved the case.
