Girl Sleuth (3 page)

 

In addition to his paycheck, Stratemeyer received something even more valuable: some sage—not to mention prophetic—advice from the editor of
Golden Days.
“I think you would become a good serial writer if you were to know just what was required, always remembering that each ‘to be continued' must mark a holding point in the story.” The young author not only took these words fully to heart, but would incorporate them, practically verbatim, into his own advice to writers for years to come.

Born on October 4, 1862, Edward Stratemeyer was the youngest of six children, three of them half-brothers, and all of them musically or artistically talented. His father, Henry Julius Stratemeyer, had come to the United States from Germany in 1837, along with a wave of German immigrants that only got larger and larger as the nineteenth century progressed. Many of them, including Henry Stratemeyer, headed out to the California coast in search of the shiniest, most tempting American dream of them all: gold. By 1851, though, Henry had mined more fool's gold than the actual metal, and he headed back east to Elizabeth, New Jersey, to visit his brother, George, also an emigré; his brother's wife, Anna; and the couple's three sons. Surrounded by family, Henry decided to stay in Elizabeth and settled into shopkeeping, advertising himself as a “wholesale and retail dealer in tobacco, cigars, snuff and pipes.”

Two years after his brother's arrival in New Jersey, George Stratemeyer was stricken during a cholera epidemic. Knowing death was near, he asked Henry to stay in America and look after his family. Henry agreed, and in 1854, not long after George's death, he married his brother's widow, making his three nephews into his stepsons. Henry and Anna went on to have three more children: Louis Charles, born in 1856; Anna, born in 1859; and Edward, born in 1862. The family was well established in the cultured, comfortable merchant circle of Elizabeth and was barely touched by the War Between the States. Neither a military man nor a willing volunteer, the elder Stratemeyer had no trouble staying out of it.

As they grew, the Stratemeyer boys were put to work in their father's thriving tobacco store, in order that he might teach them the basics of commerce and, especially, entrepreneurship. The children also received musical training. Edward's sister, Anna, who would become an accomplished pianist, received her entire schooling at a prominent conservatory in town. Edward, on the other hand, was educated in the public schools of Elizabeth, and though he had an ear for music, too, preferred language. “You ask when I first wanted to become an author,” he wrote to an acquaintance in 1919. “I think I must have been about six years old when I attempted to write my first story.” He displayed an early interest in publishing, as well, running around his neighborhood with a toy printing press—an accoutrement that was all the rage at the time—turning out items for the pleasure of his friends and family. He would interview local residents about the goings-on in their lives during the week, then print up their answers in a newspaper that he sold back to them, at the price of one cent, on Saturday mornings.

Two chapbooks followed, with the entertaining, inscrutable titles
That Bottle of Vinegar
(1877) and
The Tale of a Lumberman as Told by Himself
(1878). The latter included, in bold black-and-white, the confident statement “
E. STRATEMEYER PUBLISHER
” on its cover. Stratemeyer was just sixteen years old, but he had grown up reading the books of Oliver Optic (the nom de plume of William T. Adams) and Horatio Alger, the two predominant boys' fiction authors of the period, and the adventure-filled, rags-to-riches stories, as well as their action-packed dime-novel counterparts, left an impression on him that lasted well into his adult years. As he recalled fondly in an interview: “I had quite a library, including many of Optic's and Alger's books. At seven or eight, when I was reading them, I said, ‘If only I could write books like that I'd be the happiest person on earth.'”

Stratemeyer graduated from Elizabeth High School, the valedictorian of his class of three. Afterward, as was the norm for even a middle-class boy—only 1 percent of Americans attended college in the 1870s—he received two years of private tutoring in rhetoric, composition, and literature. He continued to combine clerking in a tobacco store—his brother Maurice's this time—with writing, refining his stories, and selling them to the story papers that were appearing all over the country, like the
Penny Magazine
(which paid him $1 for “A Horrible Crime”), the
Experiment,
and the
Boys' Courier.

The very existence of so many papers for children was a relatively new phenomenon. Most of the early nineteenth-century children's magazines had been connected to religious orders of one sort or another—the
Children's Magazine
was Episcopal, the
Encourager
was Methodist, and so on—and all of them had a tendency to be didactic and somewhat dull. But by the middle of the century, secular papers that took as their task merely the amusement of children were beginning to make their presence felt. One of them,
Our Young Folks,
printed the work of Longfellow and Whittier among others, until in 1874 it was subsumed into what would become one of the most enduring children's magazines in the country,
St. Nicholas.
Just prior to its launch, Mary Mapes Dodge—
St. Nicholas's
editor and the author of the international children's bestseller
Hans Brinker; or, The Silver Skates
(1865)—announced that, in something of a departure, the magazine would contain “no sermonizing . . . no wearisome spinning out of facts, nor rattling of the dry bones of history . . . the ideal child's magazine is a pleasure ground.” Over the course of its run, she was able to attract to her pages literary luminaries who were more accustomed to writing for adults, among them Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Christina Rossetti, and Jack London.

Edward had been publishing his work, for the most part, in magazines that made up the other category of children's papers—the “penny dreadfuls,” as they were known in some circles. At last, with the publication of “Victor Horton's Idea” in
Golden Days
in 1889, Edward crossed “the gap between the ‘respectable' juveniles and the blood-and-thunder bang-bang-bang type of cheap weekly for boys.” He had also formulated the first pseudonym that would go on to become a household name. Though the story was eventually published under his real name, he had originally thought, with his mother's encouragement, to submit “Victor Horton's Idea” under the name “Arthur M. Winfield.” She apparently felt that the last name would make him a shoo-in for success—“to win in his field”—and he added the middle initial himself, prompting her to remark: “M is for millions. Perhaps some day you'll sell a million of your books.” In 1899 Stratemeyer would recycle the Winfield pseudonym for his first successful series, the Rover Boys. By 1926, when the final volume of the series was published—there were thirty in all—it had sold not one but five million copies. As one hometown newspaper boasted: “
NEWARKER WHO WRITES FOR THE MOST CRITICAL OF AN READERS HAS FAR EXCEEDED STANDARD OF SUCCESS HIS MOTHER SET
.”

Following the sale of “Victor Horton's Idea,” Stratemeyer began to publish more and more, first stories and then dime novels. He also moved from his family's home in Elizabeth to Broad Street in downtown Newark, some six miles away, and bought a stationery store, which he ran with the help of a clerk in order to earn a good living while he continued to write. In the spring of 1891, he married Magdalene Van Camp, or Lenna as he called her, the youngest daughter of a local businessman. She encouraged her husband in his literary pursuits and was by all counts a devoted wife who considered her marriage to Edward “the only great act of her life.” A bookkeeper by training, she gave up her job when the couple married.

Lenna had a wicked sense of humor and a lively intellect—she and her husband shared an abiding interest in music and theater—but she was also something of an invalid, a trait she would pass on to her younger daughter, Edna. Though she suffered frequently from migraines and a heart condition, she was nonetheless deeply interested in Edward's work and helped him on occasion with publicizing his books and even editing them. Thanks to Edward's tireless writing and some wise investments, by the time his children were born, the family could afford household help, including a nanny for the girls. Nevertheless, Lenna was an involved parent when it came to decisions about education and how her daughters would be raised. To Edward she was simply “the best wife a man could have.” He referred to her frequently and affectionately in letters to his friends and business acquaintances, alluding to the fact that she, like his daughters, was a frequent test audience not only for manuscripts he got in from his writers, but for books being published by rival companies that he thought it best to get a handle on. “Mrs. S has read about half of the ‘Gringo' tale and liked it,” he wrote to one of his authors, “and my two young daughters, Edna and Harriet, are interested in the other volume not only because of the story but also because you have an Edna and Hattie in it.”

Soon after his marriage, Edward began to do freelance work for Street & Smith, a New York–based publishing house that was one of the most prolific sources of both story papers and dime novels. Street & Smith employed writers to produce “formula fiction”—including detective novels, comic novels, adventures, and sports stories—and came down with a heavy hand on anyone they thought deviated too much from their guidelines. Edward, who would later adapt many of their practices when he formed his own company, was no exception. The first story he submitted was criticized as “altogether too much of a burlesque, and it offends in the particular of morals. We believe a rollicking story along humorous lines can be written for juvenile readers without anything that would tend to make the parents frown.” But Street & Smith's editors recognized his talent, telling him, “We feel certain that you will be able to please us when you fully appreciate our wants.”

Their “wants,” it turned out, ran to the true crime—as long as it was tasteful, apparently—or at least to the idea that truth is stranger and more compelling than fiction. As one dazzled reporter for
Publishers Weekly
described the operation:

 

[Street & Smith] employs over thirty people, mostly girls and women . . . It is their duty to read all the daily and weekly periodicals in the land . . . Any unusual story of city life—mostly the misdoings of the city people—is marked by these girls and turned over to one of three managers. These managers, who are men, select the best of these marked articles, and turn over such as are available to one of a corps of five and transform it to a skeleton or an outline for a story. This shell, if it may be so called, is then referred to the chief manager, who turns to a large address-book and adapts the skeleton to some one of the hundred or more writers on his book.

 

Young single women—at least those in the lower class—were entering the workforce in significant numbers by this time. In 1890 roughly 60 percent of them were employed in the kind of relatively unskilled jobs Street & Smith offered, and mostly in the large cities of the Midwest and the East. In the decades to come, these veterans of the workplace would be at the forefront of the long fight for women's rights, but for the moment they were simply in great demand, especially at a place like Street & Smith,
which was at the apex of its success. Urban dime novels, which had first begun to appear in the 1860s and '70s, exploded into the marketplace in the '90s. The houses that published them, of which Street & Smith was one of the most successful, had a limitless need for copy to fill the pages of these cheap, staple-bound “books” with gaudy cover pictures and promises of lurid detail inside. In keeping with the rapidly changing country, the dime genre, which had once been concerned with the likes of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, turned into a refuge for criminals and gangsters and tales of city woe; Edward was happy to supply their exploits. He churned out tales for the Nick Carter Library (The
Gold Brick Swindlers; or, Nick Carter's Great Exposure! The Dalton Gang Wiped Out; or, Nick Carter's Deadly Rifle!
screamed the titles, like so many dramatic headlines) and the New York Five Cent Library, “a brand-new library of thrilling stories written to the very hour,” according to Street & Smith. None of this, however, prevented Stratemeyer from focusing on his other work.

The “Literary Account Book of Edward Stratemeyer 1889–1900; Being a complete list of all the original manuscripts written and printed, with the amounts received for the same” shows just how much copy its owner was capable of turning out, as well as how good he was at peddling it:

 

“True to Himself; Or, Robert Strong's Struggle for Place.” Written in my store in Newark, N.J. 427 Broad St. Jan. 1891. Accepted by Frank A. Munsey Apr. 1891 Price $120.00 Printed. Note given. Paid.

 

“Beyond the Edge of the World, a Pre-Historical Romance.” Written at Waterville, N.Y. June & July 1891. First work on the typewriter.

 

“Mayor Liedenkranz of Hoboken; Or, The Gallant Captain of the Pretzel Schnetzen Corps” Written at Roricks on order for Street & Smith, N.Y. Price $50. Printed. Paid For.

 

“The Monmouth Track Mystery; Or, Dash Dare's Solution for a Remarkable Case,” written at home, June 1 to 10, 1892. Sold to R.L. Munsey, N.Y. price 60.00. Paid for. Printed.

 

The list rolled on and on, interrupted only once, late in 1892, by the record of two occasions even more momentous than selling a piece of writing. On December 12, 1892, a small hand drawn in the margin of the notebook pointed, with one weighty finger, to an entry reading: “Went to work on Street & Smith's editorial staff at Forty dollars per week.” The next line read, simply: “Baby girl
Harriet
born Sunday, December 11 1892, at 8:40
A.M.
weight 8¾ pounds.” In one fell swoop, Edward became a salaried writer and a father. He was pleased about his professional advancement and exuberant about his daughter. As he wrote to a friend a few days later: “This week, I sold a book. Today, unto us was born a baby girl.”