Girl, So Detective

The first Nancy Drew book came out in 1930. Written by Caroline Keene, and redone in 1959, "The Secret of the Old Clock," is still read today, although usually in its reprinted format. The Stratemeyer Syndicate began these revisions in 1959, in order to update the outdated aspects of the female sleuth's character, speech, and activities. Although Carolyne Keene is not a real person, and is the creation of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the history behind the "author" is fascinating, and contextualizes the tensions that female fiction detectives face, even today in literature.

Carolyne Keene, an apparition with flesh and blood people behind her, just like the kind she so often wrote about in the Nancy Drew Stories, was created by Edward Stratemeyer. After he tragically died only shortly after the publication of "The Secret of the Old Clock," his daughters inherited his business, and, of course, Nancy Drew herself. Harriet Stratemeyer was the one who controlled much of the business, and she decided who would ghost write the novels, and what the creative direction of them would be. Mildred Benson was the first ghost writer hired by Harriet Stratemeyer, but regrettably, Stratemeyer and Benson fell out over the revisions to the books which took place in 1959. One controversial element of the books that required they be revised was the sometimes racist undertones and stereotypes found within the stories. Although the removal of these plot points was beneficial to both Stratemeyer and to the young readers who would encounter them, the revisions often left behind many troubling racist elements, and sometimes cut out good plot points, while muddying the flow of the novel.

Zooming out from Ms. Drew herself, Mildred Benson was a force to be reckoned with. An eclectic young girl, an award winning xylophone player, published for the first time at 13 years old in the children's magazine, St. Nicholas Magazine, Benson had distinctive goals in her life. She was a bit of a Jo March type. She earned her pilot's license at the age of 59, was the first female reporter hired by the Times, and testified in the infamous Grosset & Dunlap v Simon & Schuster court case. She lived a full life, possibly fuller than the life of Nancy Drew, her most well remembered heroine.

So, that was a lot of backstory, but I think it remains important to comprehend the fraught and fictitious nature of authorship in the case of Nancy Drew. Some of the edits made to the original books were frustrating to Benson due to their change in Nancy's personality. They made her into more of a traditional type of woman, according to Benson. There is a difficulty here. Benson wrote Drew books with a main character who often interacted with racially stereotyped villains, but when confronted with the stereo-typification of her own lead, she recoiled. How are we to interpret this mixed message?