Great Detectives

by Otto Penzler

  “What else?”

  “He laughs when he’s happy and weeps when he’s sad. And complains like the devil if he hurts. He also has a nasty temper, which the cold, calculating investigators in fiction are not supposed to have. When his cousin Nestor was killed, I recall watching him interrogate a waiter at the restaurant where the killing took place. The waiter had some information that Zé wanted, but he was a little slow in giving it. Zé damn near beat his head off.”

  “You mean,” I said, “that he’s human.”

  “Unfortunately,” Wilson said, and drained his drink.

  Well, that conversation at Dona Beatriz’s lovely home in Santa Teresa took place many years ago. Since that time the beach at Copacabana has been doubled in size and the Avenida Atlantica more than doubled, and Mario’s now has room for more tables before it on the patterned sidewalk. The capital of the country has been moved to Brasilia, and Wilson is now working out of the American consulate rather than the embassy, a step down in rank, perhaps, but I am sure he would never have been happy very far from his apartment on the Lagoa. Captain Da Silva remains a captain, although he is now attached to the federal police rather than to the local police; he, too, remains in his beloved Rio de Janeiro, and the price of his remaining has been the promotions he has refused.

  But the captain still has his same battered, souped-up taxi with the two-way radio in the horn ring, and the engine under the dented hood that is capable of over one hundred fifty miles an hour. And the little exercise he takes—because Da Silva still abhors exercise—is still in the form of capoeira, that form of fighting with the feet that is considered hooliganism by the upper classes in Brazilian society.

  Both Wilson and Da Silva are getting older, but they are still far from through. I still manage to see them from time to time, either at Mario’s or the Santos Dumont restaurant for lunch, and between the two they have given me the plots of ten books covering their joint adventures. Da Silva has suggested I stop before I report his tottering into the old-folks’ home, but I know eventually there will have to be at least one more. I was accused of murdering one of my best friends, and the fact that I wasn’t even in Rio at the time—or even in the country—did little to convince the local police of my innocence. Were it not for Zé Da Silva, I might well have been in serious trouble, for Zé found the real criminal.

  We sit around Mario’s at times and laugh at the idiocy of the first detectives assigned to the case, but for me it was no laughing matter. And Captain José Maria Carvalho Santos Da Silva took on a new dimension for me in that affair. Someday I hope to be able to properly translate the captain’s skill in that case for his reading fans …

  Nancy Drew

  Carolyn Keene

  ASIDE FROM ALL THE other inconveniences, it must be an acute embarrassment for the many master criminals of literature to be caught by the inspired genius of the amateur detective, or by the methodical attention to detail of the stodgy policeman. But consider the ego-shattering plight of the archvillain who is unmasked by a slender teenage girl. Still, it happens with regularity. Nancy Drew, the most successful of adolescent sleuths, has solved fifty-five cases and shows no sign of slowing down. Although she appears younger, Nancy is, in fact, 18—and has been for nearly a half-century.

  Carolyn Keene is one of the many pseudonyms of Edward Stratemeyer, founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1906. He created virtually every popular series of children’s books in America, personally writing about 400 books and supplying plots for an additional 700. When he died in 1930, the Syndicate was run by his two daughters until one retired in 1942; since then, it has been headed by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. Mrs. Adams, now 84 has rewritten or updated the early Nancy Drew books, the first three of which were written by her father. Among the other popular series characters created by Stratemeyer and subsequently produced by the Syndicate are Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, and the Rover Boys. No one can accurately compute the total number of books sold by the Syndicate, but estimates place the number in excess of 100 million copies since 1930. A new television anthology series featuring Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys in four of every five episodes made its debut on ABC on January 30, 1911. Mrs. Adams claims that many story incidents in her books are based on personal experiences. Small wonder! The resident of New Jersey has four children, eleven grandchildren, and a great-grandson.

  Nancy Drew

  by Carolyn Keene

  PERHAPS IT WAS BECAUSE Nancy Drew was created by someone who understood but did not admire weepy women, ’fraidy cats, and overfeminine girls, that she became a levelheaded, logical-thinking teenage detective. Perhaps her readers were drawn to her with a subconscious sympathy because Nancy had been motherless since she was three years old. But this omission in her growing up period was well filled by her father, a prosperous lawyer, and Mrs. Hannah Gruen, the lovable housekeeper. With Mr. Drew giving Nancy the mystery end of some of his cases and Hannah worrying about the young sleuth’s exploits, Nancy is kept busy, and protected most of the time. As her fame spread, people with strange mysteries began to request the girl sleuth to solve them. Right now she is working on her fifty-fifth case.

  Nancy remains eighteen, though a humorous reporter came out with the headline, “Nancy Drew, eighteen going on forty.” Physiologically this is no doubt true, but the wonderful world of science fiction has permitted me to keep her and her friends at a static age. Nancy has a boyfriend but I do not intend to have them marry. Why? Immediately her fans will put their beloved sleuth in a class with their parents. And what little girl wants to read about mommy’s and daddy’s problems when she can become engrossed in a mystery her teenage Nancy is solving?

  Although there are now three generations of readers, among whom is a large sprinkling of boys, I continually update or rewrite any stories which no longer are in line with customs and language of today, but rather of some twenty-five or thirty years ago. Nancy’s little blue roadster had to go when everyone else’s had to. Dialects had to be removed so Nancy Drew stories would not offend any ethnic group. The ethnic groups of subteen and teenage children are now fans of Nancy Drew. Overenthusiastic artists from time to time picture the characters in the stories as black, Indian, or Asiatic. Fortunately I see these sketches and insist that Nancy and her family and friends be pictured as they always have been.

  That is, with one exception. Nancy was always described as a blonde. To my consternation an artist had given her bright red hair! When I asked why, he told me that the book cover called for three girls. Two were blondes, one a brunette. He felt that a contrast would help the picture. I finally compromised and let him make her a strawberry blonde. I think a hairdresser could have done better, but unfortunately such coiffeurs are not permitted to tamper with book-cover hair.

  Minor changes have taken place in Nancy’s acquaintanceship with Ned Nickerson during the past twenty years. In the early stories about her adventures there was no romance. Her life was strictly the business of solving mysteries. Gradually Ned and his college friends have appeared more often “with affectionate greetings” and au revoirs that included some hugs and kisses. Now the boys often help solve the mysteries. Their visits to Nancy and her two chums include at least one hair-raising adventure for them and of course they come through manfully. Critics used to complain that Ned was an ineffectual partner, so I have made him more virile and at times he rescues Nancy just in time from a near fatal predicament. Yes, in her zeal to get a clue or track down a suspect, she tries to be cautious but inadvertently throws caution to the wind and becomes trapped. On the other hand, she often manages to extricate herself, proving she is a real and very well informed and quick-thinking detective, as she did when locked up with a poisonous spider.

  Nancy has great respect for the truly supernatural, but none for man-made ghosts, masks, spooks, superstitions, phantoms, or haunted castles and ships. She delves persistently into these mysteries until she uncovers the instigator or the natural cause of the rumor. Most of he
r adversaries are human, but in The Crooked Banister story there is an incredibly strong robot programmed to attack or to embrace, whichever the occasion calls for. But its embraces are never the result of admiration or affection; rather they are of the boa constrictor type. Nancy was a near-victim and it took all her ingenuity and some help to extricate herself from the situation. From the experience, however, she picked up a valuable clue to the mystery of a strange house whose owner was missing.

  Like me, Nancy enjoys traveling and she is rarely out of my mind when I am on a trip. From the notes and photographs I have taken all over the world, episodes are woven into Nancy’s adventures. Of course many of them are exaggerated for dramatic reasons. In Africa I saw a baboon about to pluck off a woman’s wig and yelled to stop him. In The Spider Sapphire Mystery I let the baboon lift the wig from an unpleasant and annoying, appearance-conscious young woman. Through this adventure Nancy and her two girl companions were able to change the young woman’s whole outlook on life. Suddenly she became attractive without the excessive use of makeup and a wig, and began to have dates at once.

  Probably the most challenging puzzles that come to Nancy are the seemingly unfathomable code messages upon which she often stumbles. For instance, what should she do with “Blue bells will be singing horses?” When the young sleuth finally deciphers the message, she is able to make a daring rescue of victims held illegally in a nursing home. A puzzling note and the sketch of an oversized eye with Greek letters under it send Nancy after a bizarre scientific criminal. Of course, after some harrowing experiences she catches him! Once she communicated with a ghostlike intruder by tap dancing in Morse Code.

  In The Secret of the Forgotten City the girl detective is shown an ancient stone tablet with petroglyphs on it. After deciphering them, she joins a dig to hunt for gold reputed to be buried under the Nevada desert. My favorite of Nancy’s clever deductions of decoding appears in The Clue in the Crossword Cipher, which I consider the most ingenious of all her mystery solving. It takes her to romantic Peru, from sea level to the mountain where Machu Picchu stands in skyline ruins, to the unexplained Nascan site lines, those gigantic figures of beasts and birds carved into the mammoth gravelly plain. The monkey clue, in Spanish, gives Nancy the key.

  Nancy has no illusions about the superiority of the police over her work as an amateur, and consults and confides in them at all times. Naturally, she never asks them to solve her cases, but is delighted to alert them to be present at the denouement and make the arrests. Captain McGinnis of River Heights, her hometown, is one of her best friends. The officer has sung the praises of the lawyer Drew and his daughter over a wide area so that they are well known and if in need of assistance in other towns or cities are recognized at once from their exploits. Nancy, however, has been stopped in her car and at airports and steamship docks with a possibility of arrest before proving her innocence to some charge spread by the very people she is accusing of a crime. Tense moments probably start the young reader biting her nails for a few minutes—for which I am apologetically sorry.

  I am often asked how I regard slender, attractive Nancy Drew—just as a fictional character or as someone alive and vibrant. Actually I think of her as a third lovely daughter. The two who are mine by birth have advanced in age, married, and have children. Being forthright individuals, we had our moments of disagreement. I adopted Nancy, who, unlike them, does and says exactly what I tell her to, or rather let her do. She never disagrees and together we get the job accomplished and the mystery solved. Nancy is a believable type of girl, even though she is independent and much admired for her perspicacity. Nancy is a blue-eyed sportswoman, proficient in horsemanship, even to circus bareback stunt riding. She plays tennis, and used her golf game to help solve the mystery of The Haunted Bridge from which superstitious caddies stayed away. To solve the Mystery at the Ski Jump Nancy uses her ability as a skier and a skater. Incidentally, my children and grandchildren are proficient at all these sports. (This includes a son.) They could not let Nancy Drew beat them in the athletic line, even though Mother can do what she wishes with her pen and dictating machine.

  Nancy has many friends, but confides her mysteries to only a few. Bess Marvin and George Fayne (a girl) are her constant companions and often are a great help when Nancy is trying to extricate herself from a tight spot like the one in The Moonstone Castle Mystery. The powerful muscles of the footballers Ned, Burt, and Dave come in handy when Nancy is dangling on one-half of a broken bridge. Incidentally, all of them lend humor to the conversations, and there is a lot of good-natured teasing.

  While Nancy does her share of this, she is more apt to be figuring out how she can crack the case on which she is working. One thought is never out of her mind—to help other people, but never to ask others to help her just for herself. I am a graduate of Wellesley College, whose motto is Non ministrari sed ministrare, which has become my own motto also and which I have instilled into Nancy Drew’s character.

  Librarians and teachers wonder why the impact of this series is so great. I believe that basically young people want to admire their fictional heroes and heroines. They look forward to reading another and yet another adventure ad infinitum about a character or group of characters whose exploits are exciting but where the contents of the story are safe and sane in any analysis—moral, correct, and geared to the reader’s age, not the character’s age. Nancy remains a lovable girl, somewhat above the average in ability and acumen, but why not?

  The 87th Precinct

  Ed McBain

  PITY ED MCBAIN. IT must be tough for a writer to accept the fact that his readers think they know more about his books than he does. McBain, for example, writes about Isola, a fictional city which he states is not—emphatically not—New York City. But everyone knows the action takes place in Manhattan. McBain succeeded in making a series character—and one of the most successful in the history of detective fiction—out of a squad. Not a man, not a woman, but an entire police precinct squad. And he knew that no single member of that squad was essential to its success; no one was indispensable. So he killed Steve Carella. Who, naturally, refused to stay dead and was immediately resurrected from his premature grave. That miraculous event has delighted the many fans of the Eight-Seven ever since. Carella is healthy and still strong after thirty-two books, several films, and a television series (which ran for the 1961 and 1962 seasons, starring Robert Lansing as Carella and Gena Rowlands as Teddy, his wife).

  McBain is both prolific and versatile, his voluminous police procedural novels and other crime books ranging from stark terror to frenzied slapstick. He has also written books under the pseudonyms Curt Cannon, Hunt Collins, and Richard Marsten, but his most famous, The Blackboard Jungle, appeared under his real name: Evan Hunter. He has also written screenplays for television and motion pictures, most notably Fuzz (based on his own book) and The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller. A native New Yorker, McBain, 51, now lives in Connecticut.

  The 87th Precinct

  by Ed McBain

  THEY KEEP TELLING ME Carella is the hero of the series.

  I keep telling them it isn’t supposed to be that way. In fact, and hardly anyone will believe this, I actually killed Carella in the third book of the series. Not I, personally, but someone named Gonzo who, on page 116 of Permabooks’ edition of The Pusher (in 1956, the series was published only in paperback), had the audacity to shoot Carella three times in the chest:

  The only warning was the tightening of Gonzo’s eyes. Carella saw them squinch up, and he tried to move sideways, but the gun was already speaking. He did not see it buck in the boy’s fist. He felt searing pain lash at his chest, and he heard the shocking declaration of three explosions and then he was falling, and he felt very warm, and he also felt very ridiculous because his legs simply would not hold him up, how silly, how very silly, and his chest was on fire, and the sky was tilting to meet the earth … He opened his mouth, but no sound came from it. And then the waves of blackness came at hi
m, and he fought to keep them away, unaware that Gonzo was running off through the trees, aware only of the engulfing blackness, and suddenly sure that he was about to die.

  There is no self-respecting mystery writer who would dare write those words—“and suddenly sure that he was about to die”—unless he was using them to foreshadow an event in the pages ahead. Those words almost constituted a contract with the reader; and so (of course) I paid off the marker at the end of the book. At least, at the end of the book as it was delivered to my publishers.

  The original scene took place in the hospital where Carella had been on the critical list since the shooting. Lieutenant Byrnes was there to visit him. Teddy Carella was coming down the corridor toward Byrnes.

  At first she was only a small figure at the end of the corridor, and then she walked closer and he watched her. Her hands were wrung together at her waist, and her head was bent, and Byrnes watched her and felt a new dread, a dread that attacked his stomach and his mind. There was defeat in the curve of her body, defeat in the droop of her head.

  Carella, he thought. Oh God, Steve, no …

  He rushed to her, and she looked up at him, and her face was streaked with tears, and when he saw the tears on the face of Steve Carella’s wife, he was suddenly barren inside, barren and cold, and he wanted to break from her and run down the corridor, break from her and escape the pain in her eyes.