Girl Sleuth (26 page)

She was equally admiring of her daughters, who were turning out to be the kind of independent young women she herself had wanted to be. Instead of being confined at home during vacations, they were going out into the world and being encouraged to nurture their interests both as hobbies and professionally. “News from our house includes the fact that Patsy has decided to accept the job offered her by Miss Deucher. Did I tell you or write you that the head of Pathfinder's had asked her to become play director for the summer?” she continued on in her letter to Edna. Then, writing about a family friend, she extolled the virtues of work as a vital organizing force. “Jean is getting pretty discouraged about her play acting part, and I am about to suggest that she plan some form of work, either from the house or a few hours a day away from it. I really think the poor girl needs it. She
is wonderfully fine and brave, but one cannot live pretense forever without a change of scene.”

No matter how busy Harriet was praising her children and working on her series, she always had time to remind a writer that he or she had no rights to a story or even to talking about a story, the latter of which seemed to be happening with increasing frequency. To one writer, who had done a miniature volume in the Tom Swift series for the Syndicate, she displayed an almost paranoiac obsession with the issue: “We feel we should recall to your mind the idea of your work for us being a confidential matter,” she wrote to him. “For this reason, in the future will you please not write on post cards data which might better be kept in a sealed envelope.”

And while it was true that the Syndicate's properties, especially Nancy Drew, were taking on more and more value as they were considered for radio shows, movies, and other merchandise—one agent thought she could get far more than the $10,000 Harriet was requesting for the movie rights to the Rover Boys series, while another thought that advertisers would pay from $1,500 to $1,750 a week for a Nancy Drew radio show—Harriet's impression of the Syndicate's standing in the world at large frequently leaned toward the overblown. This resulted in often comically conflicted letters to interested parties who wrote in to the Syndicate, regardless of how harmless their requests were. One such note went out to the secretary of the University of Arkansas Public Information Bureau in the winter of 1936: “Your letter of January 2 to Grosset and Dunlap, Publishers, requesting information about Miss Carolyn Keene and her book, ‘The Password to Larkspur Lane,' has been forwarded to me,” it began. “In reply, I must bring to your attention the fact that there are many people in official, political, or professional life who have the urge
to write books, especially for young people, but who for various reasons deem it inadvisable to attach their own names to their stories. Owing to a like situation, the real identity of Carolyn Keene must remain a mystery.” This was clear enough, and it was the excuse Harriet had been giving for quite some time about why it was not possible to identify ghostwriters in the media. Never mind that no such people were actually writing for the Syndicate—from her tone, one might have thought that President Roosevelt was penning the Bobbsey Twins in his spare time.

The writer of this letter was none other than “Secretary to Miss Carolyn Keene.” The absurdity of posing as the assistant to a pseudonym, and then having that assistant explain that her boss was not a real person, did not seem to occur to Harriet, who had Agnes Pearson type up the little masterpiece and send it out.

This sort of schizophrenia became the norm as more and more writers had to be kept from telling anyone about their work. No doubt as the series they ghosted became increasingly visible, and interest in them grew, the writers felt it was only fair that they be able to discuss them. They had given away their “right, title and interest” in each story they wrote, as per the release form signed for each one, but nowhere did it say anything about mentioning the books in conversation with friends or potential employers. As it had since Edward's day, it all seemed to come down to how those agreements were interpreted, a problem Harriet would set out to fix in the next few years. For the moment, all she could do was plug the leaks as they occurred.

A big part of the difficulty was that even Harriet and Edna did not have a consistent position on whether or not what the ghostwriters did was of actual creative value. They were willing to write letters to other publishers for their ghosts, praising their writing skills, but at the same time were loath to admit to the writers
themselves that they were providing an invaluable part of the story by returning to the Syndicate a manuscript that could be edited. To do so would have made the release forms each author signed essentially untenable, and so they continued to behave as though the authors were nothing more than glorified stenographers.

The problem took on new dimensions in 1937, when Walter Karig reappeared. He had done no work for the Syndicate since his three Nancy Drews in the early 1930s, but he had continued to tell people about what he had done in spite of Harriet's earlier warnings. When
Publishers Weekly
printed Karig's name as the real author of the books he had, indeed, ghostwritten, Harriet wrote to the editor immediately, falsely claiming that Karig had not only not written any Nancy Drews, but any of the other books he had done for the Syndicate. While the Syndicate had provided outlines for each of his books, as usual, it was also not wholly true to say that the Syndicate had written the books. Unable to explain the complicated process that brought a Stratemeyer book into being, Harriet simply wrote Karig out of the production chain altogether.

Her fury was no doubt inflamed by the fact that Karig had done more than just talk about his role: In direct violation of his agreement with the Syndicate, he had written to the Library of Congress specifically requesting credit for the books he had written. The Library of Congress had in turn assumed he had written all of the books in the series he mentioned, a simple error of magnitude. Harriet may well have avoided telling other ghostwriters about his stunt because she feared they would copy him. “How many times the Stratemeyer Syndicate had rued the day that Walter Karig ever wrote any books for it!” she would later exclaim in a letter to Mildred. But somehow, amazingly, she had
gotten the Library of Congress on board with the Syndicate's plan. Writing to an adult fan who was requesting information after getting confused while doing research on authorship, she explained, “The matter now has been straightened out. The Library of Congress is willing that the identity of Carolyn Keene should not be known.”

The Karig fiasco fell on Harriet alone. Edna was increasingly absent from the office as, at the age of forty-two (long past the age at which women were considered marriageable in those days), she had gotten married to a man named Wesley Squier. In the summer of 1937, while Harriet toiled in New Jersey, she was on her honeymoon. And she was pregnant. She gave birth to a baby girl in January of 1938 and, in spite of Harriet's having already used the name for her second daughter, named her Camilla.

Edna was back at the office by the fall of 1938, relishing her dual roles for the time being. “My lovely baby girl is now nine and one half months old and weighs twenty-two pounds,” she wrote to one of the Syndicate authors. “She looks like her daddy, as girls so often do, though we both have dark hair and dark eyes. My sister's older boy is in his third year at Princeton and her three other children are most active in sports and school affairs. Between home and business we find life very exciting, with new problems to be solved every day.” An admiring article that came out the following year in a local paper, the
East Orange Record,
confirmed her report, though it also made clear who was really running things over at the Hale Building:

 

The two sisters now running the Stratemeyer Syndicate, Mrs. Russell V. Adams of 48 North Terrace, Maplewood, and Mrs. C. Wesley Squier of Summit, have a full working day, watching the juvenile market, plotting stories, contacting writers, and buying and selling manuscripts. Mrs. Adams is especially well known in the local suburbs by reason of a boundless appetite for living which has made it impossible for her to follow the ordinary routine of bridges and teas which seem to comprise the daily lives of most housewives, and has instead set her feet on the road to high adventure pursued by the Rover Boys and their allies of the printed page . . . We don't see how she does it, but then people never could understand the inexhaustible energy of the Stratemeyer clan.

 

Along with the glowing press—the sisters seemed to have realized they could control it better if it was local—there was another reason to celebrate in the Adams household. Seventeen-year-old Patsy, who was touring England with a group of girls and a chaperone for the summer, received this joyful missive from her mother in mid-July: “Dear Patsy: By this time you have received the cable telling you that you are being admitted to the Freshman class at Wellesley College. Hurrah! Your worries are over.” Harriet was almost as excited about her daughter's entry to Wellesley as she had been about her own. “Your course of study must reach the Dean's office by August 20. I notice that English Composition and Hygiene are the only two subjects required. You decided, did you not, that you would take Mediaeval History and French. We spoke of Speech as the extra elective. I notice from the catalog that the course which is given three hours a week comes only the second semester.”

Thrilled as she was about her daughter's future, Harriet was living happily in her own present, too busy with work and the ongoing pleasure she took in her marriage to Russell to pine for her college days. “Aunt Edna is still at the shore, and I am busy not only with book matters, but with remodelling the office. By the
time she will have returned, I expect to have most of the old furniture sold and the place looking modern and attractive. I am hoping that she will not cut me up into small pieces for my bravery!” she continued in her note to Patsy. “We trust you are having a splendid vacation, and are awaiting eagerly your first letter. Lots of love.”

Dear Carolin Keene. I am 4 and a half yrs. old and I liced your fasson [crossed out] fasin [crossed out] fastinate [crossed out] wonderful book about the haunted bridge. it was a corker, ex-peshly the mistery parts. My daddy sez to never cross yor bridges untill you come to them, but I notis he is allways in a stoo about bizness. Wen I get big my mama sez I can rite stores like you rite Carolin Keen. I rote a story for teacher last Wensdy that she said it was exslent . . . Pleze rite more books soon, my mama and daddy will by them for me rite away when they cum out down to Katzes drug store wer they hav A library and mama sets and smokes buts and reeds all the gunk they have there. With all my luve, Virginia Cook

 

Thanks to the ongoing enthusiasm—fan mail for Nancy and her creator continued to pour in—Harriet had been able to make a deal with Warner Brothers to do a series of Nancy Drew pictures. She had sold them the rights for $6,000, and in addition to high hopes for exposure for the series and more money, the deal had given her the opportunity to change the release forms that Mildred and other writers signed. Now, instead of just right, title, and interest, the writers released their rights to all possible further use and resale of the stories and confirmed, once again, that the signee had done them “from complete working outlines.” Because the Nancy Drew stories had an actual buyer,
as opposed to just a theoretical one, Mildred had to sign a special letter worked up by Warner Brothers, giving up her right to any royalties and assuring the company that she would not sue. This she did, happily, and in late 1938,
Nancy Drew: Detective
hit theaters around the country.

With scripts written by Warner Brothers employees, all of the films starred saucy fifteen-year-old Bonita Granville as Nancy and Frankie Thomas as “trusted friend” Ted Nickerson (a name change that appears to have been completely superfluous).
Nancy Drew: Detective,
which took some of its plot from
The Password to Larkspur Lane,
was a flimsy kidnapping story involving a wealthy elderly woman, secret messages delivered by carrier pigeon, and a bogus nursing home. In it, Nancy comes off as both bossier and yet somehow more traditionally feminine than she does in her books. She has none of the gracious elegance that defines her in print and often makes faces to get a point across. She's mean to Ted, who enters the picture by destroying her flower beds during a practice football tackle, and spouts endless maxims about women's intuition and being strong that don't quite add up with her behavior. In one of the early scenes of the movie, which takes place at the Brinwood School for Young Ladies—Nancy is a student there despite the fact that she never sets foot in its building again—she announces, “I think every intelligent woman should have a career.” But every time she gets excited, she talks so quickly, and with such babyish breathless-ness, that it's hard to take her seriously.