Girl Sleuth (22 page)

It was not to be, however. When Walter Karig handed in his first Doris Force book, in spite of the fact there were “some places where they conversation is perhaps a bit too mannish,” Harriet and Edna decided to give him more work, no doubt at least in part because he was willing to accept a lower payment per manuscript than Mildred. “All in all, the story was so well handled that we are asking you if you will for the same price undertake work on a girls' mystery story,” Harriet wrote to him in October. “You may already know the
NANCY DREW
books.” This latter was a rich display of false modesty if ever there was one, for by the end of 1931, there were very few people, especially people involved in the juvenile book world, who had not heard of Nancy Drew.

T
HE OPENING PAGES
of Nancy Drew Mystery Story number seven,
The Clue in the Diary,
published in 1932, noted that, in addition to all of the teen sleuth's other stellar qualities, “in any crowd, she unconsciously assumed leadership.” Even when her peer group was made up of all the other juvenile series that occupied the ravaged world of book publishing in the early 1930s, she did not disappoint. “Sales are not up to very much,” the series editor at Grosset & Dunlap wrote to Harriet in April of that year. “But
NANCY
is still thumbing her nose at the depression and shows a good increase in the first quarter.”

If anyone could rise above the bad economic climate, it was Nancy Drew. Surely the fact that the Depression did not exist in the well-appointed world of her stories was part of their appeal, but Nancy herself had just as much to do with the books' success. Her adventures provided an escape from the humdrum dailiness of childhood just as surely as her world provided an escape from the Depression. Slouched fashionably against a table as she questioned a dastardly suspect in Russell Tandy's frontispiece drawing for
The Clue in the Diary,
she was unmistakably a girl of great daring and strength. Neither the proper white-collared suit and high heels nor the blond curls that spilled from beneath her beret to frame her lovely, inquisitive face could diminish her force—especially not when the third character in the drawing, the suspect's wife, was frozen for all time with a shrill expression and a gaping mouth. The picture caption attested to the sleuth's powers: “‘Don't give in to Nancy Drew!' his wife screamed.”

The poor swindler, did, of course, give in—on the very next page—just as everyone else had. When an article about the fifty-cent juvenile industry came out in
Publishers Weekly
that summer, it noted that as a general rule “one of the first hard facts which successful publishers of fifty-cent juvenile series learn is that their bestseller boys' series always run into far higher figures than their best-seller girls' series.” This was due to the same basic cause that Stratemeyer had diagnosed some years earlier: “Girls are unashamed readers of boys' books, while boys are notoriously loath to be seen with anything as effeminate as a book whose hero
is a heroine.” But while boys may not have been picking up her stories—she was still a girl, after all, George Fayne's influence notwithstanding—Nancy Drew was thumbing her nose at publishing trends as well as the Depression. The article went on, “Today the Nancy Drews stand as the top-notch sellers of the many best-seller juvenile series published by this firm.”

In record time the teen sleuth had captured the hearts and imaginations of girls as well as the market. She did not even require many expenditures on the part of her publisher, because “boys and girls like them [top-notch sellers] so well that they themselves do the advertising by talking enthusiastically about them with each other,” the
Publishers Weekly
article continued. Had they paid the author—in fact, they did not even know about her before her article came out in June—Harriet and Edna could not have asked for better publicity.

It seemed fortuitous, then, when that same writer, Edna Yost, contacted Harriet to say she was working on a second article on her subject and was hoping for an interview. “They have commissioned me now to do another featuring the personalities of the authors of the various series,” she explained. “Yesterday I talked with Mr. Arthur Leon [of Cupples & Leon, one of the Syndicate's main publishers] and he referred me to you for material on Lester Chadwick, Roy Rockland [Rockwood], Alice B. Swann, and Frank V. Webster.” All of these were Syndicate pen names, a secret so well kept that even the intrepid Ms. Yost was not entirely sure whether or not they were real people. “The Weekly wants only
fact
material—and is not interested in discussing any of the series authors under nom de plume,” she told Harriet. “Will it be possible, then, for me to include material on any of the above list—and if so, will you let me have it and how?” In the event that the answer was no, Harriet could still serve a purpose, which was
to illuminate the readers of
Publishers Weekly
about a great legend who had made it his business to stay out of the limelight. “I also want to write about Mr. Stratemeyer who—Mr. Leon says—was your father.”

Harriet replied immediately, clearly flattered by the attention. She informed Yost that the list of authors she had inquired about were, indeed, all pseudonymous and thus useless to her for “portraying the lives of writers of certain series.” She did not even mention the names of the real ghostwriters, much less offer them up for interviews, lest the secret of the Stratemeyer Syndicate should be revealed. “Because of the credulity of the young reader this fact is never made public,” she wrote with chirpy authority. “Why dispel their illusions!”

If anyone was poised to know something about the credulity of young readers, it was Harriet. For one thing, she was privy to the loads of letters from children that arrived at the Syndicate each month and worried about how best to perpetuate the legendary lives of the adored pseudonymous series writers. “Fan mail is indeed heavy,” she had recently written to Arthur Leon. “ We shall be hard put to it to properly answer these letters so that the juvenile minds in that section will not become suspicious that their beloved authors write under pen names.” She was also living with such minds under her own roof. Practically since the start of her work at the Syndicate, Harriet had become accustomed to consulting her children on some of the details of the books she was working on. “Another phrase where our correction was erased was, ‘Atta boy,'” she once reprimanded Laura Harris, her editor at Grosset & Dunlap, regarding one of the Buck and Larry Baseball stories books, her father's final pet project. “I took the trouble to ask my son about this phrase when I was correcting the manuscripts, and he informed me that it is already obsolete.” On the matter of the title for Nancy Drew number six, she had again consulted with her offspring, this time Camilla. In writing to Harris, she gave her daughter's opinion every bit as much weight as the conversation that had taken place between her, Edna, and Agnes Pearson:

 

We have talked this matter over in this office and really do not favor the name ‘The Red Gate Farm Cavern.' We think the last word a bit grown-up, and it sounds very much like tavern . . . Incidentally, my ten year old daughter, who is also a devotee of the Nancy Drew series, has read this manuscript and prefers the first title mentioned below:

The Plot at Red Gate Farm
The Adventure at Red Gate Farm
The Cave at Red Gate Farm, or, The Red Gate Farm Cave.

 

Fully confident in her children as arbiters of taste, Harriet was also not beyond using them as a kind of litmus test when she was in an argument with a publisher over the content of a book. “In regard to the first Doris Force book, we feel that perhaps we are putting too much stress on the opinion of one [editor],” she wrote with some annoyance to the publisher. “Two other series approved by her have been written by the same author, and we do not feel that this author would have put anything into the Doris Force books which girls 12 to 14 should not read. Acting upon your suggestion we have carefully gone over various approved series, and are really at a loss to understand how your critic can find this story so different from the others. I, myself, have a daughter nearly 10, and I should not hesitate one moment to let her read this book, and I have a reputation for being perhaps over-careful in the selection of reading for my children.”

Harriet was, indeed, a conscientious, generous mother. Her
letters to Edna and Lenna through the 1930s are filled with details from her children's lives that make it abundantly clear that in spite of her heavy workload, she found the time to attend the recitals, parties, and various festivities that were part of their happy upper-class childhoods and took great pleasure in doing so. “We are wondering whether your Fourth of July was mostly spoiled by rain as ours was,” she wrote to her sister in 1932. “The school races were held in the morning and Camilla went through her part drenched to the skin, and along with several others made a mud slide for home run.” Rarely, however, did a letter get mailed with only family news. Even on the sidelines of her children's sporting events, Harriet was always thinking of new series book scenarios. “I had an idea for a Betty Gordon plot,” she continued in the same note, “but in order to write it up I have had to go through some of the former volumes, so I have been very busy reading today.”

Her devotion to both home and family eventually delivered Harriet into a crisis very familiar to her modern counterparts—she lost her child care. “Tomorrow I have a Scotch-Irish woman of 36 years coming to try the position for a week,” she told Edna. “She comes highly recommended, and seemed to like the place and want to come. While I expect to be in the office part of tomorrow, I hardly feel it wise for me to go off to New York and leave her there, even though I am keeping Swanee on for a week, so that if the new lady and I do not agree at the end of that time I will still have somebody able to carry on.”

Harriet was in unfamiliar territory and probably had no one in her immediate social circle with whom she could discuss it. Instead, she confessed to a fellow working woman, her editor Laura Harris at G&D. “I am sorry I could not accept the luncheon invitation for some day this week,” she wrote, “but several matters
have come up in the office to keep me here. Furthermore, I am changing servants at my home, a mighty difficult and frightening procedure for anyone who has to go away from the house each day, and often all day.” There were no support groups for working mothers and no friends with full-time jobs she could turn to. Harriet was essentially a CEO, but she was still responsible for every element of running her home. There was no question that she wanted to run the Syndicate as well, but the worry she felt about leaving her family was just as real as her desire to work, and the pressure she must have felt from her peers, who had already made their opinions about her choices clear, as well as the overwhelmingly male world in which she worked—the all-female Syndicate staff was still receiving letters that addressed them, routinely, as “Gentlemen”—must have been enormous. “When I took over the Syndicate from my father, was it harder for me to get along with the outside world than it was for him? The answer definitely is yes,” she admitted many decades later. “For years and years I felt as if publishers were treating me as if I were the little girl in the country.” True to form, however, she was determined to fight this prejudice and resolve her situation no matter what it took. Her letter to Laura Harris ended on a note of optimism that, if it did not quite cover her nervousness, nonetheless showed her characteristic determination to make things come out right. “However, I am pinning my faith on a Scotch-Irish lady who, I trust, will be as efficient as Nancy Drew's housekeeper, Hannah Gruen!”

She employed the same upbeat attitude at the Syndicate and sought it out in others, too. “I enjoyed my few hours with you and Mr. Reed the other day,” she wrote to Laura Harris on another occasion. “It is a real pleasure as well as a mental uplift to meet and talk with people who can smile and be optimistic despite a
depression, and, as Mrs. Easy Ace says on the Radio, ‘Be willing to take the bitter with the better.'”

But despite Harriet's efforts to stay positive and hide her concern, reality kept encroaching on the little office in East Orange. Sales of many Syndicate series slowed down, and publishers canceled orders—Doris Force, as suspected, did not last past 1932, and the Outdoor Girls, the Blythe Girls, and Perry Pierce, among others, were gone by 1933. Many of the Syndicate's writers were looking desperately for work: “This year, like every other writer I know, I have experienced a disastrous setback,” wrote Leslie McFarlane in the summer of 1932. “My markets have been wrecked. Having lost my old newspaper contacts it is impossible to get a job. It is a straight bread-and-butter struggle.” As financial matters worsened, Harriet let down her cheerful guard. “We have heard so much lately about all of us having turned the corner that somehow or other the phrase has become ridiculous,” she wrote to one of her authors in the spring of 1933. “Don't you think so?” He, like many others, was looking for work and had just accepted her offer of $85 a book. “Although we try to be optimistic,” she finished, “it does seem either that we have turned the wrong corner or that so many of us turned it at once that there is a traffic jam.”