Girl Sleuth (5 page)

Edward was beginning to discover his love for basing tales of crime and derring-do on solid research. It was a practice he would come to refer to as the “difficult task to collect the material I want, a tedious study of reference books, biographies, works of travel and histories,” but that he nonetheless enjoyed and felt he owed his readers. He had held his much-heralded editorial job for only six months before being let go, and was once again writing full-time (Street & Smith had promised to continue using his stories on a regular basis). In 1895, after two years of writing stories, he left Street & Smith behind to become the editor of another short-lived story paper,
Young Sports of America.

But the depression of the 1890s was in full force, brought on by a slowing of investment in the railroad, the main engine of economic expansion in the 1880s, and exacerbated by an agricultural crisis caused by indebted plains farmers and a long stretch of uncooperative weather conditions. It finally culminated in a stock market plunge in 1893, affecting everything from unemployment, which some estimates place as high as 18 percent by the middle of the decade, to advertising. Staying afloat in business, for Stratemeyer as for everyone else, was almost impossible. As one publisher wrote of his trials:

 

Of all the deadly schemes for publishing, that of juvenile publishing is the worst. It is hopeless . . . for as the boys and girls mature they take adult periodicals. It is a question of building new all the while. Then again, the advertiser has no use for such mediums. He wants to talk to money-spenders—not dependents—not children.

 

Before too long, of course, it would be precisely the children whom advertisers and publishers wanted to reach, but for the time being, adults still held sole control over household purchases.

Despite the grim business climate and the arrival of his second daughter, who joined her older sister on May 29, 1895, Edward decided in 1896 to bring out his own story paper. As part of his work for
Good News,
he had become acquainted with his boyhood heroes, William T. Adams and Horatio Alger. Alger, for one, found him to be “an enterprising man, and his stories are attractive and popular. Under favorable circumstances, I think he will win a fine reputation.” With Alger's support, and some reprints of his stories to boot, Edward launched his masterpiece, which he christened with the marvelously optimistic name
Bright Days.

Alas, even a man of such consistency as Stratemeyer could not make a success of
Bright Days
in the imperiled market. It soon became critical to adapt to changing conditions, chief among them the shift from magazines to books for children. Stratemeyer began to cast his eye on the emerging children's book market, for which, with his instinct for both business and the passions of young people, he proved to have a knack. By the end of 1897, he had published twelve books in a series called Bound to Win. Soon thereafter he began what he called “an experiment in historical writing,” offering a book based on the Revolutionary War called
The Minute Boys of Lexington
to the very respectable Boston publishing company Estes & Lauriat. It sold well, and Edward wrote a second one,
The Minute Boys of Bunker Hill,
after which he abandoned the series.

For in that same year, Stratemeyer struck his first juvenile storybook gold in a manner that would have thrilled his forty-niner father. The Spanish-American War was escalating, making publishers loath to take any risk at all as their sales slumped. As one editor told Stratemeyer in a letter, “The people do not seem to have the time to read anything but the newspapers at present.” Not one to be daunted, Stratemeyer decided that if Americans were interested in the news, they would be interested in fiction that was based on it. When Commodore Dewey defeated the Philippine-based Spanish squadron at Manila on May 1, 1898, in one of the United States' great victories of the war, Stratemeyer was ready with the Old Glory Series for Young People.

The first volume was entitled
Under Dewey at Manila; or, The War Fortunes of a Castaway.
Requisitioning the country's top hero of the moment, Dewey's executive officer Charles Gridley—who had let off the first shots of the battle at Dewey's famous command, “You may fire when ready”—the book chronicled the adventures of a boy named Larry Russell who was “lost overboard while on a trip with his folks from Honolulu to Hong Kong. Adrift on a bit of wreckage, he is picked up by the ‘Olympia,' Captain Gridley, Commodore Dewey's flagship.” A publisher bit, and the book came out, with blinding speed, in August of 1898. Its sale price was $1.25, and it was resplendent with a sailor on the cover waving a brightly colored American flag that was three times his size. As one account embellished the event rather grandly, adding to the Stratemeyer legend: “Almost before the smoke of battle had cleared away, Stratemeyer had produced
Under Dewey at Manila.
And as the popularity of the Little Admiral swelled and soared, so the book sold edition upon edition. It established Stratemeyer as a writer of juveniles.” By Christmas of that year,
Dewey
had sold six thousand copies—no mean feat for a wartime publication.

Not one to waste a smash hit, Stratemeyer immediately sent out a proposal for the series that would become his other early success: The Rover Boys Series for Young Americans—affectionately known, in no time at all, as “the Rovers.” The exploits of Dick, the sober eldest brother; Tom, the fun-loving practical joker in the middle; and Sam, the straight man for his brothers, were set at a military school. Their mother was dead and their father was away “exploring in Africa,” so the boys were sent off to boarding school, free from meddling adults once and for all. They (and later their doppelgänger sons) would go on to break sales records for clothbound books. At the peak of their success, according to one reporter, “The Rover Boys broke out upon the country like measles.” As far as their adventures were concerned: “Motivations were of the essence of simplicity. A face at the window, a missing suitcase or the overheard conversation of the enemy was sufficient to send the Rovers off on stirring trips that lasted for 52,000 words.”

It was the first series that bore a resemblance to those that would make Stratemeyer's fortune. In contrast to his historical stories, the Rover Boys were anything but timely; instead, they were ageless, and their “author,” Arthur M. Winfield, was, too. They were also middle class. The familiar Alger story had become outdated, and the Rovers, as one critic put it, “were never embarrassed by a lack of funds . . . they had less to strive for than to protect.” Both boys and girls loved the brothers without reserve and hoped they might come alive right off the page. One young man, Luther Danner of Loudonville, Ohio, received the following gentle letdown from Stratemeyer in response to a passionate fan letter: “Although many of the incidents in the stories are taken from life, the Rover boys are not real individuals, and consequently I cannot send you their address.”

For the next five years, Stratemeyer turned out series after series. He was by now firmly established, and expectations were that he would stay that way. One critic wrote, “Mr. Stratemeyer thoroughly deserves his popularity, and he drives his typewriter without becoming careless or indolent as a result of the remarkable success he has attained.”

Proving the point, in 1904 Stratemeyer dreamed up another wildly successful series of stories about a group of well-off children who had adventures all over the world and always remembered their manners. Their names were Bert, Nan, Freddie, and Flossie, otherwise known as the Bobbsey Twins. Stratemeyer wrote the first book himself, under the pen name Laura Lee Hope (he later assigned the series to Howard Garis, one of his first “employees” and the author of the Uncle Wiggily books). Their first adventure,
The Bobbsey Twins; or, Merry Days Indoors and Out,
appeared in the fall of that year. The two sets of twins, aged eight and four (they would later grow up to twelve and eight), were the epitome of simple, cozy stability, right down to their perfectly complementary personalities and physical attributes: “Nan was a tall and slender girl, with a dark face and red cheeks. Her eyes were a deep brown and so were the curls that clustered around her head. Bert was indeed a twin, not only because he was the same age as Nan, but because he looked so very much like her . . . Freddie and Flossie were just the opposite of their larger brother and sister. Each was short and stout, with a fair, round face, light-blue eyes and fluffy golden hair.” With this jolly band, Stratemeyer tapped in to the kind of world that was to become the mainstay of juvenile books for the next fifty years. It was real enough to be recognizable to readers, but everything in it was improved upon. Parents were generous, punishments rare, and everything always seemed to work out in the end.

These were also the first books by Stratemeyer that took into account not only a younger age group, but female readers. It was not yet popularly believed that little girls were worth catering to as an audience, as they had shown themselves to be perfectly happy to borrow books from their brothers to get their adventure fix. As Stratemeyer sized it up, “Almost as many girls write to me as boys and all say they like to read boys' books (but it's pretty hard to get a boy to read a girl's book, I think).”

Furthermore, there was competition for girls once they reached a certain age in a way that there was not for boy readers, and publishers—and Stratemeyer—believed it made the investment of both time and money in too many girls' series unwise. In an interview around this time, Stratemeyer displayed his admirable grasp of both publishing and human nature: “The little girl begins at perhaps 7 years of age to read girls' books written for her. By the time she is 12, she is ready for the [adult] ‘best seller' and will have nothing else. A boy will cling to the boys' book till he is 15 or 16, often older.”

Still, the success of the Bobbsey Twins could not fail to affect Stratemeyer. He began to expand his winning formula to include the opposite sex, taking into account another, more personal reason for doing so. As he noted in a letter to a successful girls' book author: “I have two little girls growing up fast, so I presume I'll have to wake up on girls' books ere long.”

By 1905 Edward was easily the most successful juvenile writer in the country, and he had even more ideas than he could keep up with: As he had confessed in 1903, he had “the plots and outlines of a score of books in [his desk].” He had also begun to recognize that his pseudonymous works, written under the names of Arthur M. Winfield and Laura Lee Hope, were earning him more money than books by Edward Stratemeyer, such as the Old Glory series. The market would never be saturated, he reasoned, as long as he could think up another pen name. As he wrote to one publisher: “A book brought out under another name would, I feel satisfied, do better than another Stratemeyer book. If this was brought out under my own name, the trade on new Stratemeyer books would simply be cut into four parts instead of three.” He was also “neck deep in contracts on books” and could barely keep up with himself.

So he decided to act on a consolidation scheme he had been thinking over for some time. He intended to model his new company on the Street & Smith plan, writing outlines for series and handing them out to ghostwriters, who would work under the pen name assigned to each series. This way, no one would ever be the wiser about who was actually doing the writing, and if it became necessary to change authors, there would be no risk of alienating readers. He himself would edit all the manuscripts for consistency, so that even if volumes in the same series were written by more than one person, the final product would be of apiece with the entire series. By controlling all of his characters, pen names, and manuscripts, and more or less renting them out to publishers for royalties, he would be able to sell different books to different houses, thereby grabbing a larger share of the market and putting his many idle story ideas to use. He would pay his ghostwriters, whom he hired from local newspapers and by placing ads in trade publications like the
Editor,
a flat fee for each manuscript, usually ranging from $75 to $150 depending upon their effort and experience. The amount of work done by the ghostwriter versus the amount of work done by Stratemeyer on any given book could not be determined, though Stratemeyer always had the last word. In addition, he required that his authors not tell anyone which books they wrote and under which pen names—they gave up “all right, title and interest” to their stories in every release form they signed and further agreed that they would “not use such pen name in any manner whatsoever”—though they were allowed to say they worked for the Syndicate, and Stratemeyer did not prevent them from writing elsewhere.

The Stratemeyer Syndicate, in essentially the form in which it would remain for the next three decades, had been launched. In 1905, the first year of its existence, Edward Stratemeyer earned $6,757.74, triple his earnings just a few years earlier. The following year, he earned $8,757.18 and paid out $2,267.00 for manuscripts and advertising, leaving him with $6,490.18. It was almost the same amount of money for less work on his part; his business idea had been a sound one. “The syndicate idea is booming, and I am now negotiating for sixteen copyrights of A No. 1 stories,” he wrote to Mershon Company, one of his New Jersey publishers. “I think when all is in shape I shall have the best line of juveniles on the market, written by those who know exactly what is wanted.” Edward Stratemeyer was on his way to becoming, as one magazine would later anoint him, “the father of . . . fifty-cent literature.”