Girl Sleuth

by Melanie Rehak

  It was into this world that Miss Nancy Drew, well-to-do plucky girl of the twenties, arrived on April 28, 1930, dressed to the nines in smart tweed suits, cloche hats, and fancy dresses—including “a party frock of blue crepe which matched her eyes.” From the very first moments of her life on the page, it was obvious that she knew how to keep her head above water in any kind of situation. Even the Great Depression would prove to be no match for her. Pretty enough to be exceptional, but not so pretty that she would alienate readers, she was also in possession of not only an admirable intellect, but a shiny blue roadster, the latter a birthday gift from her devoted father. Her mother had died when she was three, and so she was the sole wise mistress of her charming upper-class household, which she ran superbly with the help of a grandmotherly servant named Hannah Gruen. The blond, blue-eyed teenager, affectionately called “Curly Locks” by her father, was an all-around knockout, “the kind of girl who is capable of accomplishing a great many things in a comparatively short length of time. She enjoyed sports of all kinds and she found time for clubs and parties. At school, Nancy had been very popular and she boasted many friends. People declared that she had a way of taking life very seriously without impressing one as being the least bit serious herself.” As Mildred Wirt later confessed, she was everything her author—or any girl, in fact—wanted to be, and then some.

  As in so many of Stratemeyer’s books, there was nothing in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories that might break the spell of this new fictitious world. The sixteen-year-old sleuth did not attend school (she had graduated some time in the recent past and did not plan to go to college) and had no worries about money, career, or marriage. She did not even have a boyfriend yet (though Ned Nickerson would show up before too long). Her wardrobe expanded to fit whatever sleuthing or social occasion befell her, and she was free to do exactly as she pleased, even if it meant getting tied up or kidnapped in pursuit of a thief. Her father’s faith in her was unshakable. River Heights, Nancy’s attractive midwestern town, was hermetically sealed off from the unemployment and hard times that were crashing like tidal waves over the country. Even as Eleanor Roosevelt began serving seven-cent meals in the White House to show her solidarity with her husband’s citizens, Nancy Drew was shopping at a posh department store in downtown River Heights for “a frock suitable for the afternoon party she had been invited to.” She reminded everyone that the good old days, the days of frills and festivities, of tea parties and a maid to do the cooking, were not so far gone and thus, perhaps, not too far off, either.

  As for moral character, Nancy’s was established from her very first sentences, written for her by Stratemeyer himself. “It would be a shame if all that money went to the Tophams! They will fly higher than ever!” she cries out to her father, who is reading his evening paper by lamplight, the epitome of cozy authority. By the end of her first adventure, the inheritance in question has been removed from the greedy, already-wealthy Tophams and restored to the deserving Horner girls. To achieve this result, Nancy endures, among other mishaps, near death while driving through a “rain[storm] blinding in its violence”; “a paralysis of fear” when trapped in a deserted summerhouse with a “rough-looking man”; and being tied up and thrown in a closet by this man and his dastardly henchmen. “Left to Starve” (the less-than-subtle title of chapter 16 of the book), she panics, then reminds herself, with awe-inspiring pragmatism, that it is unproductive. “She began to think of her father, of Helen Corning, and other dear friends. Would she ever see them again? As despondency claimed Nancy she was dangerously near tears. Resolutely, she tried to shake off the mood. ‘This will never do,’ she told herself sternly. ‘Surely, there is a way to get out of here. I must keep my head and try to think of something.’” Moments later, fueled anew by her own optimism, she uses the hanger rod, which she’s managed to tear down in spite of her high heels and narrow skirt, as a lever to break the door hinges.

  Underneath her matching sweater sets, Nancy, as her decisive last name implies, was a force unto herself from the first, all action, and it prevented her from being an unredeemable goody-goody. She was also not beyond a petty moment or a petty crime if either should be called for. Encountering the Topham girls while on her downtown outing at the beginning of the story, she passes judgment with a confidence born of the spiritual high ground: “‘Snobs!’ Nancy told herself. ‘The next time I won’t even bother to speak to them!’” Later on, in mad pursuit of the solution to her mystery, she steals the all-important clock of the title and endures a harrowing ride in her blue roadster with a police officer next to her and the contraband on the floor in the backseat. Spurred on by adversity, Nancy Drew can make even cattiness and thievery seem brave and right.

  The trick to this is that she does it all in the name of rising to a challenge, a quality most people wish they had but can only hope to approximate. Nancy is never better than when she’s in trouble. Trapped in a spooky barn with a band of quarreling robbers approaching, she reacts with the calm of a true professional: “While Nancy Drew hesitated, uncertain which way to turn, her mind worked more clearly than ever before.” Under pressure, she relies entirely on herself, a trait developed perhaps in reaction to her lack of a mother to guide her. The absence of that role model is not only sympathetic but serves her well in some senses. There is no one to nag her about chores or clothes or to worry about her gallivanting around; her brilliant, charismatic father dotes on her. Most importantly, Nancy never runs the risk, as so many girls did in her day (including the dreaded Isabel Topham of Old Clock), of having a mother whose “ambition [was] that some day she marry into a wealthy family.” She would never betray her readers as Dorothy Dale and the Outdoor Girls had by getting hitched. She would never, like Ruth Fielding, worry over the feelings of a fiancé or agree to wear his ring.

  The combination of Stratemeyer’s outline and editing with Mildred’s efforts had produced a fantasy girl with a few touches of the real—possibly touches of the Mildred, who had added some of Nancy’s bolder moves and snappier dialogue to Stratemeyer’s outline. Together, they had created a star, and Stratemeyer knew it. Though it would later become a part of Mildred’s lore that he had disapproved of her first rendition of Nancy, thinking her too “flip,” no evidence of this reaction exists. In fact, Edward had no problem with Mildred’s interpretation of his outline. He was especially pleased with the second half of Mildred’s manuscript for Old Clock, and, after giving her some pointers and telling her he would go ahead and fix up the first half himself, he sent off the outline for Nancy Drew Mystery Story number two.

  The plot of this book, The Hidden Staircase, involved a creepy haunted mansion inhabited by two rich, elderly sisters who need Nancy’s help. Mildred, fresh off a fishing trip in Canada with Asa, dug right in, and when Stratemeyer read over her manuscript, he found, to his delight, that she had gotten the tone just right. “Dear Mrs. Wirt,” he wrote to her just before Christmas of 1929. “I have received the manuscript of The Hidden Staircase and read it with much satisfaction. It seems to me it ought to interest any girl who likes mystery stories. I shall make only a few changes and those of small importance . . . I think the new outline [for The Bungalow Mystery, the third book in the series] will appeal to you, as it is full of action and with many good holding points. Of course, keep the girlish part girlish and don’t get the dramatic part too melodramatic. The second story was very well handled in this respect.”

  In addition to providing the requisite thrills, the final book in Stratemeyer’s breeder set also had to fulfill a very specific function: making every girl who finished it desperate to buy Nancy’s next adventure. At the end of The Bungalow Mystery, after Nancy has escaped sinking boats, lightning, a near miss with a falling tree, and being knocked out by “the butt of a revolver” and tied up in a dank basement (“You’re a smart detective, but your smartness won’t do you any good this time!” the villain sneers at her, of course encouraging Nancy to prove him wrong within a few pages), a tantalizing prom
ise is dangled before readers. “It was written in the annals of the future that before many months had elapsed she would be engrossed in a problem as puzzling as the bungalow mystery—a problem which would tax her mental powers and ingenuity to the limit.” In other words, dear reader, stay tuned.

  As it turned out, no manufactured temptation to read The Mystery at Lilac Inn and The Secret at Shadow Ranch, books four and five, would be necessary. The first three volumes did the job nicely all on their own. Nancy’s clever, privileged ways struck a chord instantly with little girls. The blue-and-orange volumes, with their brightly colored dust jackets featuring America’s first full-time girl detective mid-adventure and in gorgeous attire, sold out of stores by the thousands. Less than a year later, other publishers were looking enviously at Nancy Drew as a model for bestsellers—the books were, in the words of one competitor, “selling like hot cakes.”

  Indeed, if the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories became essential to girls almost immediately, they became critical to Grosset & Dunlap just as quickly. In a market weakened by the Depression, the publisher soon counted on the girl sleuth to bring in money just as faithfully as the needy characters in her books did. They knew that if a Nancy Drew was in their catalog, they might be assured at least of survival, if not huge profit. “We expect to publish a few juveniles in September and would like to have a Nancy Drew to feature on this list,” Laura Harris, the series editor at Grosset, wrote to the Syndicate in May of 1931. “Can you let us have the manuscript as soon as possible, and no later than July 10? There will only be three or four titles brought out then and the Nancy Drew is one of the most important.” By Christmas of 1933 they were outselling most other series books, even the Syndicate’s other big winner of the moment, Bomba the Jungle Boy.

  NO DOUBT STRATEMEYER would have been as thrilled as his publishers with his instant success, had he only lived to witness Nancy’s ascent. He was home sick in bed for most of the winter of 1930 with pneumonia, and even through the final editing of the first three Nancy Drew books, he had relied heavily on Harriet Otis Smith. Letters flew back and forth between the Stratemeyer home, where Edna was caring for her father, and the office in Manhattan. “Dear Miss Stratemeyer, and poor Miss Stratemeyer, nurse, housekeeper, and business woman,” Otis Smith wrote in January, upset over the slow pace of a ghostwriter’s work. “I am in my first real jam over here, and will turn to you to know how much I can ask of your father, for I do not wish to throw worry on him that may impede his recovery.” It was she, not Stratemeyer, who had read Mildred’s manuscript for The Bungalow Mystery, the third Nancy Drew book, and made the final decisions about it with her employer’s blessing. Stratemeyer was confined to bed and to dictating letters to his daughter, who bore her burden, if not lightly, then at least with a certain amount of humor. Lenna was by this time an invalid, and Harriet had four young children, as well as a host of club and Sunday school responsibilities that took up her time, so it was Edna who sat with her father daily, bringing him food and serving as his secretary. “This is all Dad has to say, Miss Smith, and now he will eat his orange and be a good patient,” she added on to one of her father’s letters that January. “Think he is tired of this kind of life and much prefers the office. Think I need a course in shorthand in order to keep up with his messages, besides a nurses’ uniform when doing the other jobs.”

  By March Edward was back in the office happily dealing with his series again. But his health did not hold. Sending the outline for The Mystery at Lilac Inn to Mildred in late April was to be one of his final acts as head of the Stratemeyer Syndicate. By the following week, he was too ill to even look at illustrations for a book that was about to be published. Harriet Otis Smith wrote to one of his editors, “It is a question—as always in pneumonia—as to how long an already weakened heart can stand the strain.”

  The answer turned out to be not very long at all. On May 10, 1930, just twelve days after the launching of Nancy Drew, Edward Stratemeyer succumbed to pneumonia at his home in Newark at the age of sixty-seven. The response was immediate and passionate. “Your Husband and Father was every inch a man, and deeply admired and respected by all his friends and business acquaintances,” wrote one publisher to the Stratemeyer family. The newspapers weighed in, too. “Now Mr. Stratemeyer . . . has laid down his pen,” mourned the New York Times in their second piece within a week about his death. “Who is to write tales of adventure for the boys of the airplane and television age?” Letters of condolence poured into the Syndicate offices in Manhattan, from authors, publishers, magazines, and the charities toward which Stratemeyer had been uncommonly generous. Everyone who came into contact with him seemed to have been changed for the better by the experience. “He was the ‘grand old man’ of the Juvenile book world,” Alexander Grosset wrote to Magdalene Stratemeyer, “and his passing will leave a place that will be difficult to fill.”

  In particular, many of the young writers he had nurtured with his patient comments and kind soul wrote in to pay their respects. Leslie McFarlane, author of the Hardy Boys, wrote to Harriet Otis Smith, “Although I had never met him personally I felt that I knew him as a real friend by reason of my five years’ association with him in the writing of the books he assigned to me. His kindness to Mrs. McFarlane and myself at the time of our marriage and on the occasion of the birth of our daughter betokened a personal interest that we appreciated more than he possibly imagined. I think he must have been a very kindly and warm-hearted man . . . My work for Mr. Stratemeyer helped me so much in days of my literary apprenticeship that you may be sure this letter is no hollow and conventional expression.”

  Mildred, too, wrote Harriet and Edna a heartfelt note to say how sorry she was to lose him. In a letter to Otis Smith, though, after brief condolences, she was all business. Bringing up the looming issue on everyone’s minds, she wrote, “Dear Miss Smith: It was with the deepest regret that I learned of Mr. Stratemeyer’s sudden death . . . As you requested, I will forward the Nancy Drew volume as soon as completed, which should be sometime this month. As soon as you know what is to be done about future work, I will appreciate being notified.”

  What was to be done about future work? With Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and all the offspring of the Stratemeyer empire? With no sons to inherit the family business, Edward had made provisions in his will for it to go to his wife, with the idea that it could be sold (it was valued at some half a million dollars) and the proceeds used to support her (to each of his daughters he had left the sum of $20,000). But he had not counted on the Depression, and suddenly the odds that anyone would have the cash or inclination to buy the company were questionable. Then there was the matter of secrecy. Other than Harriet Otis Smith, there was no one, not even Edward’s own family, who really understood the workings of his Syndicate or its history. He had planned it that way, though he also understood the trouble it might create. As Edna wrote to Harriet many years later, “His one complaint was that at his death everything would die with him.” Anyone taking it on would have an enormous job just understanding it, much less trying to keep it going into the future under such difficult economic circumstances and without its founder’s genius for plot and character creation. Everything was suddenly in question, including the fate of his final contribution, the teenaged detective with blue eyes and gumption to spare.

  7

  Syndicate for Sale

  AUTHOR, JUVENILE. Executors will consider bona fide purchaser for nationally known and prosperous syndicate of boys’ and girls’ books, including rights in many well known series. Reply, E.C.S., care of Publishers Weekly.

  THE FIRST DAYS after Edward’s death were, for his family, an odd combination of grief and urgency. Given the economic conditions of both the Stratemeyers and the country, the future direction of the Syndicate had to be charted as quickly as possible. Neither Lenna nor Edna had any earning power, and though Harriet was well-off thanks to Russell’s work as a stockbroker and her inheritance, she could not afford to support her mother an
d sister in their current lifestyle. Nor, with four children of her own, could she be expected to do so. The first order of business was to transfer the task of executor from Lenna, who was in no position to make decisions, to her daughters. Newly in charge, Edna and Harriet soon found themselves awash in information about their father’s work and world that was entirely unfamiliar and often overwhelming. As Edna exclaimed less than a week after his death, “I never dreamed of so much red tape before.” The legal matters involved in a business that employed writers-for-hire and had all of its revenues tied up in rights and royalties as opposed to actual book publishing were maddeningly intricate. In addition, Edward had begun to sell radio and movie rights to some of his stories, adding another complication.

  With Harriet Otis Smith as their only guide—she had agreed to stay on in her current role for the foreseeable future, saying that “Mr. Stratemeyer was far too kind to permit of any other course”—Edward’s loyal daughters began to wade through the papers in the Madison Square Park office in order to determine how best to consolidate and sell the business. No other course of action seemed possible. Neither sister had any business experience, nor had they participated in the work of the Syndicate in any serious way for years. Certainly they knew nothing of the day-to-day details involved in bringing a series from inspired idea to finished book. Nevertheless, they were committed to making the most informed decision possible about the future of their father’s brainchild. While Edna tackled some of the accounting at home, such as paying salaries and money owed to ghostwriters, Harriet took it upon herself to become the public face of the Syndicate. For Edward’s publishers were not only saddened but unnerved by his death. They counted on the Stratemeyer series as a big part of their business and were panicked at the thought of either a great delay in their production or a cessation altogether. As Otis Smith knew well, “If these publishers suddenly lose the right to bring out not only new volumes in their big paying series, but the right to issue any new book at all by their very popular ‘authors,’ it will be a serious loss to them of both money and prestige.” Someone had to take on the responsibility of assuring them that the house of Stratemeyer would not go dim, even if that someone was not entirely sure of it herself.