MYSTERY GIRL
Uncovering the hidden history of a pre-feminist icon

Jennie Yabroff, Special to The Chronicle

Sunday, September 18, 2005

"Dear Carolin Keene ... Wen I get big my mama sez I can rite stores like you rite..." So began a 1938 fan letter to the author of the hugely popular series of children's mysteries starring an amateur sleuth named Nancy Drew. But Carolyn Keene is as fictional as the plucky blond sleuth herself. Dreamed up by children's book magnate Edward Stratemeyer, Keene was the pseudonym of two women: first, a no-nonsense Iowa journalist named Mildred Wirt Benson, and then Edward's daughter, a suburban mother of four named Harriet Stratemeyer Adams.

"In Nancy Drew's world people take sides - either you're a Mildred person or a Harriet person, because until now a lot hasn't been known about what happened," says Brooklyn writer Melanie Rehak, whose book, "Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her," examines the cultural history of the beloved young detective. Rehak combed through the more than 350 boxes in the Stratemeyer archives at the New York Public Library, where she had a yearlong fellowship, to research the book. "Unless you have the time I did, to go through it all is impossible, so people read the box they need and don't have full continuum of the story," she said, discussing the book in her sunny brownstone in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood.

Mildred and Harriet were as opposite as Betty and Veronica, and their personalities are reflected in the changing tone of the books over the decades. The early mysteries, penned by Mildred in the '30s and '40s, feature a sassy, straightforward Nancy, who isn't above passing judgment on her peers or bending the law by exceeding the speed limit in her trusty blue roadster in the name of solving a mystery. When Harriet took over the series in the '50s, Nancy became more demure, less inclined to use slang or talk back, and more concerned with the affections of her perennial boyfriend, Ned Nickerson.

"There's a cult of personality based on which books you liked," says Rehak. For many years Harriet took credit as the sole creator of Nancy Drew. It wasn't until Mildred went public in the early '70s about her turn as Carolyn Keene that she won her own group of supporters. But rather than come out in favor of one woman or the other, Rehak says she felt "duty-bound to give each of them their due." She believes the women deserve equal credit. "Without either one of them the character wouldn't exist," she says.

If Harriet and Mildred share maternity of Nancy, paternity belongs solely to Harriet's father, Edward Stratemeyer. As Rehak describes him in "Girl Sleuth," Edward was a combination of Horatio Alger and P.T. Barnum, with a gift for intuiting the taste of young readers. As a young man he sold stories to the publishers of "50-cent serials," but soon began farming out the actual writing to a stable of ghostwriters who turned his two-page synopses into 250 page children's books. His company, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, created the Rover Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys and many more series featuring wholesome, adventure-seeking boys and girls.

In 1929, Edward wrote a treatment for a series about a high-school-aged amateur sleuth, who he suggested might be named Stella Strong, Diana Dare or Nan Drew. The books were to be "bright, vigorous stories for older girls having to do with the solving of several mysteries." They would sell for 50 cents a piece, and their writer would be paid $125 for each book. He sent the treatment to a young Iowan named Mildred Wirt. A few weeks later she sent back the manuscript for "The Secret of the Old Clock," and Nancy Drew was born.

Rehak was driving one day when she heard an obituary of Mildred Wirt Benson on National Public Radio and became fascinated with her story. "Initially, my sympathies were with Mildred, because she was portrayed as the real Nancy Drew, who Nancy Drew would be if she was a real person," she says. Edward Stratemeyer died shortly after the first book was published, and his daughters, Harriet and her younger sister Edna, took over the syndicate themselves, with Harriet assuming most of the burden despite her lack of business experience.

As Rehak read the letters in the Stratemeyer archive between Harriet, Edna, Mildred and other business associates, it "became clear that Harriet had done this incredible thing" in taking over the syndicate, she says. "She had not been prepared for it, but she saw her chance and took it. I began to love Harriet, as I thought about what that must have been like for a 1930s wealthy suburban woman. In the letters, she talked about how all her friends said her children would be ruined, male publishers looked askance at her and I related to that because the same pressures are out there -- should I work, should I have kids, how am I going to figure it all out," she says.

Rehak sees the story of Nancy Drew and her creators as a way to talk about the women's movement over the course of the 20th century. Though neither Mildred nor Harriet (nor, most likely, Nancy) considered herself a feminist, all three were simultaneously of their times and years ahead. Nancy is "both a reflection of Harriet and Mildred's different personalities and changing pressures of society. They both invested her with who they thought she should be."

"Mildred's approach was to be very aggressive. That was her generation's way of dealing with being female in a man's world," Rehak says. In 1953, Mildred decided to focus on her job as a reporter for the Toledo Blade, so Harriet took over as Carolyn Keene and Nancy learned to bite her tongue. "Harriet's Nancy is a regression to what Harriet had learned being married in the 1950s - you should be sweet and nice, and that was the way to get what you wanted in a man's world," Rehak says.

Rehak grew up in Manhattan and first became acquainted with Nancy Drew by reading her mother's collection of mysteries from the '50s, which seemed quite exotic. She went to University of Pennsylvania, then got her master of fine arts in poetry from Boston University. After graduate school she worked as literary editor of the New Republic, where she now serves as poetry editor.

She moved back to New York in the late '90s, and wrote poetry and literary criticism and profiles. Though she agrees that a biography of a poet would seem a more natural choice for her first book, she hesitates to make a distinction between the sort of "literature" she normally reads and writes about, and Nancy Drew. "I don't pass judgments on the books for not being good writing, they don't need to be good writing," she says. "There's a lot to be said for books that suck you in. And they're not as entirely without merit as we think of them. That was the great lesson of going back and re-reading them, especially the early ones -- Nancy is a lot more complicated than we remember her being, she experiences a whole range of emotions."

As for Nancy herself, she lives on in a contemporary series published by Simon and Schuster, who bought the syndicate in 1984, two years after Harriet's death. This new, modernized Nancy does not interest Rehak. "For me, the Nancy Drew we all think about, the one in the national consciousness, ended with the Stratemeyer Syndicate," she says. And though Nancy's approach to the world may have evolved and regressed according to the sensibilities of the times and her creators, Rehak believes her essential spirit endures. "The books change," she says, "but Nancy stays the same."

Jennie Yabroff is a freelance writer based in New York.

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