Girl Sleuth (28 page)

Mildred, however, had a good deal more to worry about than Nancy's response to current events. In late 1940 Asa Wirt had become ill, succumbing to the first of what would eventually be a long, debilitating series of strokes. Harriet's characteristic generosity and patience kicked in during what she recognized to be a rough situation—Peggy was only four years old, and Mildred was working as relentlessly as ever—but it became undeniable that Mildred's writing was suffering. Once again, Harriet and Edna tried to help her by writing extremely full outlines, so that she would, in their words, “be able to write the story with ease.” When it came to Nancy Drew, especially, the sisters did not want any variation from their winning formula, which, by 1941, had been set out to the last blue frock and polite phrase.

So Mildred, unable to let her imagination run wild in the Syndicate books, invented Penny Parker, daughter of a newspaper editor, champion swimmer and diver, sophomore at Riverview High, and all-around wit. Penny would soon become Mildred's favorite of her characters, perhaps because she bore more than a little resemblance to her creator, and not just in the swimming pool, where she was an ace diver. She was more flippant than Nancy Drew, and because Mildred, not the Syndicate, was responsible for her adventures, the plots of the Penny Parker Mystery Series, which ran from 1939 to 1947, were a good deal more varied and spooky than the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories. They moved faster than Stratemeyer books and tended to be a bit more on the dark side than a Nancy Drew mystery. For one thing, reality was always hovering somewhere nearby. Not only did Penny have numerous car problems—no magical blue roadster for
her—but the war was a presence as well. As one fan has noted, “Few books of that era dealt with black market sales, mine detection services, and brass and gold hoarding. Penny Parker encountered them all.” When a friend of Penny's went off to war, it was stated explicitly, no fooling around.

Back in the real world, Americans were eager to do all they could to help the war effort. They gladly paid the enormous income tax increases that Roosevelt initiated in 1942 in order to help pay for the war. Until then, only about 5 percent of Americans had paid the income tax, with the highest rate, 75 percent, applying to people with wealth in excess of $5 million. Now anyone who made more than $624 a year was subject to a 5 percent “Victory Tax.” In 1943 the payroll tax—or the “pay as you go” plan—was instituted for millions of middle-class Americans, who had no choice but to pay it even as they saved scrap metal and paper and did everything else their government asked of them. Even the Syndicate was forced to give up all its old book plates as scrap metal, and the Nancy Drews were printed with a new motto on the title page: “This book, while produced under wartime conditions, in full compliance with government regulations for the conservation of paper and other essential materials, is
COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED
.” Even if the war was not happening in River Heights, the girl sleuth, like everyone else, was making her contribution.

For the Adams family, the sacrifice was especially bitter. In early 1942 Sunny was killed in an accident that took place during a flight training mission in Florida. Harriet and the rest of the family had just been down to spend the holidays with him. The blow was devastating. The Syndicate office closed immediately, and it was Edna who took up all correspondence when it reopened, informing publishers and other work associates of the
reason for the delay in replying. “Our office has been closed for several days because of the death of my sister's older son, Ensign R. V. Adams, Jr.,” she wrote to one editor. “He is the first one in the family to die in the Service. Had my father been alive, he would have been exceedingly proud to have had his first grandson give his life for his country.”

It was March before Harriet resumed her work at the Syndicate. Like many mothers who lost sons in World War II, she kept herself going by reminding herself of the reason for the grievous turn of events. “I appreciate very much your words of comfort sent in your note last week,” she wrote to a sympathetic author. “As you suggest, we should feel proud to look upon our sacrifice as a patriotic one, and this we are trying to do. It is a tragedy beyond explanation that young men must give up their lives for a cause, when madmen are rampant in the world. Yet this has happened from time immemorial, and we can only hope that this war truly will be the last one.”

A
S A BALM OF SORTS
, Harriet spent more and more time at the Syndicate, working on her outlines and gathering what she called “source material” to burnish the authenticity of her tales. Even when her daughter Camilla decided to get married in a hurry in the fall of 1943 (her husband-to-be was an ensign in the navy), leaving Harriet to plan a wedding at home for two hundred guests, there was time to get after Mildred about her writing style. “In commenting on your manuscript, I am going to make a very unusual criticism,” she wrote to Mildred about a Dana Girls story. “You worked too hard! We find the English too perfect for a little girls' book. The sentences seem to be long and full of big words. Since we intend to simplify the manuscript a good bit,
we are sorry that you went to so much trouble to make it such a perfect specimen from point of view of synonyms and descriptive phraseology.” Still, she was acutely aware of the pressure under which Mildred was operating, and she made a point of saying so. Asa was still very ill, and Harriet was too kindhearted not to send wishes for a brighter new year. “Thank you for getting the manuscript to us so promptly under trying conditions,” she wrote in closing. “And may 1943 hold good things in store for you.”

But 1943, unfortunately, marked the beginning of the period in Mildred's life she would remember forever as the most exhausting and difficult. She was taking care of Peggy and, as Asa was too ill to work, writing overtime to bring in extra money. “I had to write all the time,” she remembered. “I had no choice on writing, it wasn't a leisurely thing at all. It was a hard deadline and I was usually three or four books behind on orders. I put my typewriter up beside my husband's bed and I'd take care of him at night and typewrite right by the bedside . . . I just wrote as long as I could write each day and night.” Still, she endeavored to do her very best work under all circumstances, even when her idea of what that was clashed with Harriet's.

For a while, though, there was no time for conflict. Harriet had recently withstood another loss, the second within a year, and it had left her busier than ever. “Thank you for getting the recent manuscript to us so promptly. I am sorry about the delay in getting the check to you, but I have been working literally nights and days to keep up with our schedule,” she wrote to Mildred. The main cause of her suddenly overwhelming workload was that in the fall of 1942, Edna had decamped to Florida with her husband and daughter for good, becoming a silent partner in the Syndicate. Though she would split Syndicate profits with Harriet forty/sixty, she was no longer involved in the day-to-day
business at the office. Harriet was now fully in charge of all outlines and character development, which meant, among other things, that she had to deal on her own with changes in the juvenile book world wrought by the war.

Unlike the Syndicate, many authors and publishers had decided that children's books should address matters overseas, and Harriet eventually felt forced to join them. She did so, in her fashion, in
The Secret in the Old Attic,
a Nancy Drew title that she assigned to Mildred in the spring of 1943. “Two subjects are introduced into this story which never have been dealt with to any great extent before,” she wrote in her letter accompanying an extremely detailed outline. “One of these is military life. We do not wish to date our books, and therefore cannot say that characters are fighting in the present war. In order to have the story timely, however, we have introduced a grandfather who was in World War I, and his deceased son, who had joined the American army and had lost his life. In telling this, please do not give the idea he was in the line of battle. Leave it indefinite enough, so that in years to come the story will not be dated.” With this character, Harriet immortalized her hero son. When the book came out in 1944, the fictional son, just like Sunny, had “lost his life four years ago on a routine training mission.”

The other subject, Nancy's love life, was more difficult to resolve. Certainly Harriet was not going to spill the details of her own romantic history for use as plot fodder, so she passed to Mildred the task of trying to make modest Nancy's interest in the opposite sex a bit more overt, and rather vaguely at that. “We have had a good bit of fan mail, asking for more romance in the Nancy stories, so we have inculcated some in this one. Please give a modern twist to the conversation and actions which have to do with this angle of the plot.” Alas, as Mildred put it shortly thereafter, “Romance has never been my strong point, else I should have shifted to adult writing long ago.” Though Harriet was pleased with Mildred's handling of the mystery aspects of
Old Attic,
she wrote, “We are somewhat disappointed in the romantic side of Nancy's life. The treatment of this seems to belong to the ideas of a somewhat older generation than that of the modern girl.” Then, admitting her own ignorance on the matter at hand, she confessed that, as in the old days, she would turn to her most trusted aides for some help. “In making some changes in this, I believe I shall have to get the assistance of my own daughters, one newly married. These youngsters are so brave and hold their heads so high these days, that it is quite a different approach to the subject of romance from that of a few years ago.”

So, presumably thanks to the help of her children, the courtship of Ned and Nancy took on new and serious proportions in
Old Attic.
Nancy, who previously could not have been bothered to put anything off for Ned, spends a considerable amount of time hoping he'll invite her to the “big dance” at Emerson College, showing some uncharacteristic signs of insecurity in the process. “Maybe Ned has asked another girl,” she meditated. “He has a perfect right to, of course.” Though Nancy does not know it, one of River Heights' meanest girls, Diane Dight, has intercepted Ned's invitation, forcing Nancy not only to put off another suitor—“If you really can't find anyone, let me know. I'll see then what I'll do,” she tells him coyly—but to wonder if her romance with Ned has gone south. When she gets the mistaken information that he has invited her nemesis Diane to the dance, “the news [comes] as a distinct shock to her.” After a terrifying scene involving a spider in the attic, Nancy has a girlish moment in which she faints in Ned's “strong arms,” then mystery and romance are duly resolved. “‘I was pretty scared for a
while, I admit, but when you came—Ned, maybe you don't know it, but you saved my life! I shall always be thankful to you' . . . ‘It would have been my very great loss if I hadn't,' he said fervently, and again she flushed crimson.” Alive and well and in love, the handsome pair dances the night away at Emerson, locked in chaste happiness.

In spite of her sympathy with Mildred's inability to write such scenes, however, Harriet was growing increasingly frustrated by trying to manage her ghostwriters. Mildred was hard to handle, she confessed in a letter to Edna the following year, and Leslie McFarlane, who was still writing the Hardy Boys books, wanted more money for his efforts. Edna, who was removed from the fray down in St. Petersburg, where she and Wesley were happily buying and selling real estate, came to both of their defenses via the post. “I believe we actually need him and Mrs. Wirt because of their particular style,” she wrote to her sister, “and I couldn't vote to have the Hardy or Nancy done by any one else. Everything is too critical just now—to see what does happen at the close of the war may be an eye opener.”

Harriet also harbored a soft spot for the two longtime ghostwriters, and, in a rare moment of candor, wrote to Leslie McFarlane about the general state of her life in the spring of 1944. Letting down her professional guard for a few pages, she told him of her sorrows and trials, and what it felt like to be the happily married mother of grown children who were not necessarily doing what she thought they should be doing:

 

I promised to tell you something of my family, and I wish it might sound as happy as yours. A few years ago the story might have been the same. I had four children. The older boy, a Princeton graduate, became a Naval aviator but the war took his life two years ago. I now have another boy in the service. He was only eighteen in September. He joined the Navy a little while before he became of draft age. Unfortunately he is partially colorblind and the only branch which would accept him was the Seabees. It was a great surprise to us that he was shipped out so soon after enlisting. He is now at Pearl Harbor learning more about construction. You do know, don't you, that our Seabees are the Navy Construction Battalion? It seems strange that Edward, named for my father, should have inherited his grandfather's color-blindness, but unlike him is six feet, two inches tall, and very blond. According to his sisters, he is “smooth.
”