Girl Sleuth (24 page)

Fortune,
the brainchild of Henry Luce, was only a few years old at this point, and the story Brinser was working on was a perfect example of the hybrid journalism the magazine was printing. It was, first off, a tale of business that went behind the scenes and included all the nuts and bolts of the series book publishing game. But it was also a story about the colorful series themselves, which Brinser described at several spots in the piece with obvious glee: “It has few literary pretensions; it is a flat-footed account of the superhuman exploits of adolescent
Ubermenschen
. . . Holding each volume together are the threads of some hair-raising adventure. Poverty empties the pockets of dastards only . . . Virtue and success are synonymous . . . In order to hold the reader breathless, the fifty-cent plot whirls lickety-split from the first to the last chapter like an express train.” Last but certainly not least, his piece attempted to delve into the real issue, the identities of the writers responsible for the endless perpetuation of these two-dimensional yet somehow utterly compelling characters. This made it precisely the kind of story that put Harriet and Edna on the defensive. They agreed to help Brinser to a certain degree—aid that consisted, in the end, largely of them refusing to answer any of his more intrusive questions—and then asked to see a copy of the article before it went to press, thinking they could change it at that point.

Brinser complied with this last request, though it turned out to be no more than an empty gesture. His article came out in the April 1934 issue of
Fortune
under the portentous title “For It Was Indeed He.” (“He” was Edward Stratemeyer, of whom Brinser wrote: “As oil had its Rockefeller, literature had its Stratemeyer.”) It included not only a photo of Edward Stratemeyer but a photo of the Stratemeyer home and a general exposé of how fifty-cent series books came into being. He had not included any of Harriet and Edna's suggestions, but instead supplied readers with a prominent description of their work habits, which, while it paid them a compliment or two, had a gently mocking tone about it:

 

. . . the Stratemeyer daughters have inherited from their father not only that genius particular to fifty-cent juveniles, but his business acumen. After his death they moved the office from New York City to the top of East Orange's Hale Building. There they sit today at their ponderous roll-top desks dispatching the affairs of fifty-cent juveniles with a sincerity and belief in their work equal to that of the most serious adult novelist. Obscured in a fern-filled corner is a secretary. The only other occupants of the office are immortal: Tom Swift, The Motor Boys, The Rover Boys, Dave Dashaway and dozens of others who exist in the 800 fifty-centers that line the wall.

 

Brinser could not resist taking a jab at their dramatic flair for secrecy, either, continuing on, “One . . . might readily mistake the Stratemeyer Syndicate for a private detective's office. As a source of open-handed information about fifty-cent juveniles, it might just as well be that. Miss Edna, who always stays at home managing affairs, waggles her bobbed gray head emphatically and says that their business is their business. Mrs. Adams, who takes care of personal contacts with New York publishers, smiles graciously and says the same . . . So greatly do they feel the need of maintaining the illusion of these fictitious literati [the pseudonymous authors] that, in spite of the great veneration in which they hold
their father, they have refused to authorize any of the many attempts to write his life history.”

Harriet and Edna were both offended and bewildered by Brinser's product. For all his insouciance, however, Ayers Brinser did do the Stratemeyer Syndicate several favors. In addition to placing its books squarely at the top of the juvenile heap, he confirmed the status of the Syndicate's star detective in no uncertain terms.

 

Nancy is the greatest phenomenon among all the fifty-centers. She is a best seller. How she crashed a Valhalla that had been rigidly restricted to the male of her species is a mystery even to her publishers—for “Tomboy” rings like praise in the adolescent female ear, but “Sissy” is the anathema of anathemas to a boy . . . Nancy Drew tops even Bomba, the most popular of modern male heroes. The speed with which the public consumes this fabulous series is shown by the sales figures of one of the larger retailers, R.H. Macy & Co. In the six weeks of the last Christmas season Macy's sold 6,000 of the ten titles of Nancy Drew compared with 6,750 for the runner-up, Bomba, which has fifteen titles to choose from.

 

The super-sleuth was flying higher than ever, and even the continued publication of articles that disparaged her and her kind made no difference. “The cat is out of the bag at last,” one critic announced smugly (apparently not realizing that it had been out since Edward's books were banned from the Newark Public Library in 1901). “Series books are the menace to good reading.” Still, as even its librarian author had to admit, it was essentially hopeless to try to stop them. “There are always aunts and uncles and cousins, who give books for Christmas and birthdays,” she
practically sneered, “to say nothing of the underground library by which children obtain almost anything they want to read and into whose workings we should do well not to inquire too closely.” Alarmism aside, there was no going back. By the end of the decade, inquiries about using Nancy on everything from children's clothing to radio would flow into the Syndicate, and she would become a movie star as well. In a few short years, Nancy had gone from being a girl detective to being a commodity. Complaining about the jacket art for
Broken Locket
in a 1934 letter to Grosset & Dunlap, Harriet displayed a shrewd understanding of the brand she was helping to create: “The picture should have had a more mysterious atmosphere, which might have been portrayed by a less bland look on the face of Nancy . . . Is the picture finished? If so, let us hope that the names Nancy Drew and Carolyn Keene, together with the title, will make sales for this volume rather than the picture itself.” Then, with some of that business acumen Brinser had noted, she told her editor, “I really do intend to come soon to have a long chat with you about next year's Syndicate output for your concern, and also to discuss shop in general, that we may make some plans to help the unsuspecting public to use some of its money on fifty cent juveniles.”

Nancy had become the Syndicate's most important asset, and Harriet and Edna—but especially Harriet—guarded every aspect of her development, from her clothes to her circle of friends. Fine-tuning her appearance and manners was as important to them as plotting the mysterious cases she solved. When Mildred sent in her manuscript for
Broken Locket,
for example, Edna was generally pleased, but the few minor tweaks she did mention in her return letter were all for the sake of making the book more girlish and formal. “Among the changes we were forced to make,
was to soften the boyish glibness and swagger of George Fayne,” she wrote, as well as to “round out a personal description of the characters; smooth out abrupt sentence endings, and delete a number of colloquialisms.”

Under Harriet and Edna's guidance—which had perhaps grown more forceful during the period when Walter Karig's manuscripts for the Nancys had created a good deal of extra work for them—the books were evolving in a way that Mildred seemed, however subtly, to disagree with. “I am sorry you did not like the way I handled George Fayne,” she responded, “but in the early volumes of the series she was the ‘slangy' type, and thinking that her character had been changed in the latter volumes, I tried to represent her as she was in the beginning.” Though she was writing from outlines, Mildred had, at least on the subject of the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, a longer institutional memory than the Syndicate's current owners. She clearly felt proprietary about the series on some level, as well as believing that she had the right to at least be heard, if not agreed with, on the subject of George's character.

Times had changed, however. Harriet and Edna had taken to writing much longer outlines for their ghostwriters than their father had, a practice they claimed was a response to writers' complaints about doing the same work for less pay, but one that also gave them greater control over plots and characterizations. When Mildred requested that her fee for the next book, a Kay Tracey, be raised to $100, Harriet wrote, “We have tried to equalize depression prices by sending outlines which are much more detailed than those which you formerly received. We have felt that in this way you would not be required to spend as much time as if you had to plan all the fillers yourself.” It soon became clear
that what Mildred wanted was more freedom, not more prescribed action, in her stories. Contrary to being helpful, the longer outlines were precisely the problem. “I do think that the last Kay Tracey story had a slightly hurried and abrupt tone, although I spent fully as much time and thought on the manuscript as usual,” she agreed in a reply to some criticism from Harriet. “Recent plots seem to be running somewhat long in detail, and . . . I had difficulty in getting all of the scenes into the story even by cutting many of them short . . . I think I could give you a much better story if you would grant permission for me to eliminate minor or filler scenes if I find the material running long for a chapter. This will give me an opportunity to enlarge and emphasize the more important points of the story, and I believe make for a smoother, more powerful tale.”

No doubt part of the reason for her chafing was her growing experience writing her own books from start to finish. In the same letter in which Harriet gave her reasoning about the longer outlines, she also congratulated Mildred, working woman to working woman, on the recent acceptance of several other books by publishers. “There is so much competition in the juvenile field today,” she wrote, “that one may feel justifiably pleased to have stories accepted.”

At last, Harriet had gotten a firm grasp on the business world. While she remained utterly devoted to her family, she was also taking no small amount of pleasure in her status as a woman in full command of her intelligence and power in the world. Her enjoyment also pervaded aspects of her life that had nothing to do with the Syndicate. In a letter to Edna describing a riotous family outing to Manhattan, complete with trips to the NBC Studio and Chinatown, she also included the details of a meeting
about the Sunday school curriculum she was writing for her church. “My conference with the minister, the paid head of our young people's activities, the head of the Sunday School, and one of the Senior department teachers last Friday evening was very satisfactory,” she told her sister proudly. “There were several times during the evening when I could hardly keep from laughing aloud as I realized that I, lone female, was ‘sitting in' with these church dignitaries and discussing points in psychology, child education, theology and a long list of other subjects.”

In addition to being a happy mother and a businesswoman, Harriet was also still very much the dutiful daughter. She wrote frequently to her invalid mother—and had Agnes Pearson type up the letters—to tell her of the doings at the Adams house. Filled with details about the children and the garden and all the rest, these missives rarely mentioned her hard work at the Syndicate office. She was also devoted to her other, lost parent. “Yesterday Russell and I went first to the cemetery at Elizabeth,” she wrote to Edna in May of 1934. “We thought that a coinciding date of Mother's Day and another May anniversary [was] an appropriate time for flowers.” Four years after her father's death, she was still unable to articulate her feelings about it, referring to it obliquely even to her sister.

She was soon to have another gloomy date to mark in May. Just a year later, in 1935, Lenna died. “Mrs. Adams and I gratefully acknowledge your kind letter of sympathy,” Edna wrote to Harriet Otis Smith, who had dropped the sisters a note on hearing of the news about her former employer's widow. “We try to be reconciled to our mother's passing, as she had been an invalid for seven years, and within the last six weeks she suffered severely from her serious heart condition, so we should not wish her back. Did you realize that it is exactly five years since my father passed
away? They were both born in the month of October and they both passed away in the month of May. These have been five busy and swift years with all our responsibilities.”

Harriet took a few days off from Syndicate work, but then got right back to the next Kay Tracey book. The new series was selling well, and the Syndicate remained solvent, so there was plenty to do. Work was also a panacea for the new Kay Tracey's author, who had recently finished the next Nancy Drew under equally difficult circumstances. “Dear Miss Stratemeyer,” Mildred wrote. “I was very sorry to learn of your sad bereavement. I realize what a grievous loss you have suffered and I wish to extend my heartfelt sympathy to you and Mrs. Adams. I am glad that you like ‘The Message in the Hollow Oak,' for it was written under somewhat trying conditions. My father has been in very poor health of late, and it was largely on this account that I made my recent trip to Iowa.” She had asked specifically that the outline for the book be mailed to her in Ladora, no doubt so that she could escape into her work when the going got especially rough with her father, who, after several years of illness, would eventually die in 1937. Still, her writing was so good that Harriet and Edna decided to put her on to the Dana Girls books as well. For the next five years, she would be responsible for writing every book in the Syndicate's three biggest girls' mystery series, a staggering workload she combined with a number of other books written under her own name.

While she might not have admitted it to everyone, Harriet's ambition was neither less fervent nor any less tied to personal satisfaction than Mildred's. When writing to Wellesley to thank them for refusing to give Ayers Brinser her yearbook photo as an illustration for his
Fortune
article after she had refused him one herself, she had passed off her demanding job with a quick throwaway
phrase: “Fortune is publishing an article in the near future . . . in which some work I am doing will be mentioned,” she wrote on a piece of “Mrs. Russell Vroom Adams” stationery.