Harriet, who opened the letter while Edna was on vacation, both took Mildred’s criticism to heart and seemed to be grateful for the extra work Mildred had put into the book to make up for the lack of plot. “Dear Edna: Before I shut up shop here and take two dozen eggs down to Aunt Etta I shall report progress up to date,” Harriet dashed off to her sister. “Nancy Drew has arrived here from Red Gate Farm and, according to Mrs. Wirt, solved the mystery satisfactorily. However, her ‘guardian’ says in a letter that she was very shy of plot and had to add a great deal on her own account. I read the first chapter and it sails along breezily and entertainingly, and I have great hopes that the whole book will be of the same tenor.” Perhaps because she had written the outline in question—her first, admittedly—Edna reacted rather differently. “Well, we got to be gray heads to know everybody’s whims,” she huffed by return mail. “Certainly men writers write with much less written outline, I should say.” Still, her letter later in the summer showed she had registered Mildred’s comments.
Whatever Harriet thought of Mildred’s complaint, she behaved impeccably toward her. She knew she needed her, not only for Ruth Fielding and Nancy Drew, but for the new Doris Force series, which was intended to capitalize on the girl detective genre. “We are sorry that you found the outline short, and, although we have not as yet read the story, we hope that the material which you inserted will hook up well with the story without seeming like intruding insertions,” she wrote to Mildred. “I read a couple of chapters, and up to that point the story is excellent . . . Thank you for getting the story back to us so soon. The publishers seem to like Nancy Drew and her adventures and have already been asking for this volume. It is possible that they will request a second one for this year and, if so, we shall communicate with you.”
That request soon came, and Mildred began working on The Clue in the Diary. She was busier than ever on her Underwood typewriter but sent the manuscript in that August as promised. In mid-September the sisters asked her to take on two more Doris Force books and another Nancy Drew, but there was a catch. The publisher of Doris Force was wavering a bit about the future of the series, they explained, and “because of this, and because of the great drop in sales as shown by our July statements from publishers, we are going to ask you to take a reduction on these manuscripts of twenty-five dollars each—in other words, we will pay one hundred dollars for each story. We hope that business is very soon going to take an upward turn, and that we shall be able to return to the former standard of payment.” Harriet concluded, “We hope that you will be willing to carry on with us through this period, as we enjoy working with you, and do not want to make any shifts on these series.” Harriet and Edna had held out as long as they could on pay cuts for the authors of their bestsellers—Leslie McFarlane and Mildred—but by now they were too worried about falling Syndicate revenues to keep even those writers at full salary.
Mildred wasted no time responding. Though she was cordial, it took her only until the second sentence of her reply to address the main issue and to make a pointed remark about the Syndicate’s pay rate. “I . . . am sorry to learn that business has not been as good as before with the syndicate. I have always tried to cooperate in every way possible, but I feel that I cannot take less than one hundred and twenty-five dollars for each manuscript—an average of about one-fourth cent a word.” She proceeded to lay out her reasoning, which not only displayed her complete understanding of her own progress as a writer, but highlighted a problem that Edna and Harriet had no way around: Unlike their father, they commanded very little loyalty from their writers, nor had they made an effort to. “At the time I started to work for the syndicate, about five years ago, I believe, I accepted this rate, for at that time I had not had a great deal of experience in book writing. I have never requested a raise although my work has improved, as you will note by comparing it with my earlier volumes. Then, too, after the first year, Mr. Stratemeyer always gave me a bonus, which helped out. As the rate now stands I am receiving less than I did when I first became associated with the syndicate.”
Indeed, Edward had always given a generous annual Christmas “present” to the writers who were doing the Syndicate’s best work. Harriet and Edna had decided that they couldn’t afford to make that gesture, but its disappearance was a blow that many of their ghostwriters must have taken as a sign that the Syndicate as they knew it was gone. Though some surely attributed the loss to the Depression, several other writers who refused the lesser rate mentioned the lack of bonuses as well. It turned out that many of them had been writing Stratemeyer books for a price they knew was low in relation to the market in general largely because, as one of them explained, with the annual bonus “my books averaged about $175.00 each as compared to the $125.00 I have been receiving for the past year, constituting an actual reduction of fifty dollars on each book under the present regime.” Another longtime author wrote in to say, “I am sorry that I cannot accept the reduction of $25 that you propose on payments for subsequent books . . . Only my attachment to the memory of a dear friend and my earnest desire to be of real service to the new organization have kept me at the work at the sacrifice of my own personal interests. I do not feel that I can go any further in that direction.”
For Mildred, too, not accepting the lowered fee was a matter of pride—as she wrote in another letter to Harriet, who had asked one more time if she might reconsider. “I realize what difficult times we are passing through and would have been willing to accept some reduction were the amount paid not already as low as I feel I could accept with justice to myself.” But it was also a matter of practicalities. Though the country was in an economic crunch, Mildred, it seemed, was not. She had so much work that she was juggling “clients,” and though she was sorry to stop her work for the Syndicate, she was also able to. “Since writing you I have signed for a new girls’ series and have other work in prospect. In my negotiations with the publisher I reserved time for my syndicate work but unless I hear from you soon I must fill up this vacancy,” she informed Harriet rather impatiently. And then, as if to soften the blow, or perhaps simply to keep relations good, “I trust that the future will produce happier circumstances which will permit a resumption of our relations. With best personal regards and kind wishes for the continued success of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, I remain, Yours truly.”
Mildred was not alone in feeling insulated from the effects of the Depression. Though they were worried about the company, neither Harriet nor Edna had given up the lavish lifestyle in which they had been raised. Each of them had her own income from Edward’s estate, Russell was still earning a good living as a stockbroker, and Edna was living at home with Lenna, who had an income of her own as well as royalties and securities from Edward’s estate. In fact, there was so much money to be spent that no one was even accounting for it, as Edna complained in a memo she wrote for her sister entitled “Resume of the Management of Monies and Welfare of Mother.”
Certainly no one in the Stratemeyer family had even been ostentatious, but Edward’s death seemed to have brought it out in Lenna. “It doesn’t seem necessary to pump everything up and live so grandly because Dad died,” Edna sighed. Lenna and Edna were paying a full complement of servants, including a chauffeur, a nurse, a couple to keep the house, and a variety of other staff. Lenna had gotten into the habit of giving them money to keep them happy, something she apparently felt she needed to do and that resulted in them, as Edna put it, “not wanting to follow my instructions in matters, then going behind my back and getting mother to say they don’t have to do it.” Edna was also beginning to resent her role as caretaker of her difficult invalid mother. “It certainly works me up and to get no co-operation and no thanks for a hard job is I think the last straw,” she informed Harriet at the end of the memo. “Think it over.” Though she was aware of how hard Harriet was working at the Syndicate in addition to making time for her young family, Edna could not hide her petulance.
She also had a somewhat differen
t take on the Syndicate’s financial problems than Harriet—or at least on the people who refused to help alleviate them. Just as she had once been willing to sell the Syndicate as quickly as possible, she now saw little reason to hang on to pesky writers like Mildred, whom she considered arrogant. When Harriet forwarded her Mildred’s letter refusing the lower fee, she wrote back immediately and in great annoyance. “Dear Hat: Received letter from you enclosing Mrs. Wirt’s tale of woe. Of course she is getting a swell head and doesn’t choose to take less. Well, I think if your letter to her doesn’t make her change her mind we better consider Mr. Karig.”
So, after five years and thirteen books, Mildred was suddenly no longer writing for the Stratemeyer Syndicate. A letter went out to Walter Karig, who was writing the Perry Pierce mystery series for the Syndicate, asking him to take on Doris Force. When he agreed, they sent him an outline and a few significant pointers about the difference between writing for boys and girls, according to the Stratemeyer Syndicate: “You will notice that the story contains adventure and characterization but that the idea of the secret oil well is kept from being too prominent. While girls like action in their stories, they are not as interested in the details of things like these as boys are, and therefore such ideas are merely used as background.”
As for Mildred, Harriet and Edna decided to try to keep her “on reserve” for Nancy Drew in the event that Walter Karig proved incompetent, a plan that involved treating her with a gra-ciousness they did not necessarily think she deserved. “My dear Mrs. Wirt,” Harriet wrote. “Of course, we were disappointed that you felt you were unable to acede [sic] to our request in regard to the writing of certain books, but we are really delighted to hear that you are making out so well with your own stories. As we do not want to hold up any of your own work, we thought it best to write you that we have been able to place the writing of the Doris Force books with someone else. As the Nancy Drew story would not have to be decided upon immediately, we are reserving our decision in this matter. If we should decide that we would like you to do it we will communicate with you at a little later date . . . We wish you every success with your new girls’ series.”
It was not to be, however. When Walter Karig handed in his first Doris Force book, in spite of the fact there were “some places where they conversation is perhaps a bit too mannish,” Harriet and Edna decided to give him more work, no doubt at least in part because he was willing to accept a lower payment per manuscript than Mildred. “All in all, the story was so well handled that we are asking you if you will for the same price undertake work on a girls’ mystery story,” Harriet wrote to him in October. “You may already know the NANCY DREW books.” This latter was a rich display of false modesty if ever there was one, for by the end of 1931, there were very few people, especially people involved in the juvenile book world, who had not heard of Nancy Drew.
THE OPENING PAGES of Nancy Drew Mystery Story number seven, The Clue in the Diary, published in 1932, noted that, in addition to all of the teen sleuth’s other stellar qualities, “in any crowd, she unconsciously assumed leadership.” Even when her peer group was made up of all the other juvenile series that occupied the ravaged world of book publishing in the early 1930s, she did not disappoint. “Sales are not up to very much,” the series editor at Grosset & Dunlap wrote to Harriet in April of that year. “But NANCY is still thumbing her nose at the depression and shows a good increase in the first quarter.”
If anyone could rise above the bad economic climate, it was Nancy Drew. Surely the fact that the Depression did not exist in the well-appointed world of her stories was part of their appeal, but Nancy herself had just as much to do with the books’ success. Her adventures provided an escape from the humdrum dailiness of childhood just as surely as her world provided an escape from the Depression. Slouched fashionably against a table as she questioned a dastardly suspect in Russell Tandy’s frontispiece drawing for The Clue in the Diary, she was unmistakably a girl of great daring and strength. Neither the proper white-collared suit and high heels nor the blond curls that spilled from beneath her beret to frame her lovely, inquisitive face could diminish her force—especially not when the third character in the drawing, the suspect’s wife, was frozen for all time with a shrill expression and a gaping mouth. The picture caption attested to the sleuth’s powers: “‘Don’t give in to Nancy Drew!’ his wife screamed.”
The poor swindler, did, of course, give in—on the very next page—just as everyone else had. When an article about the fifty-cent juvenile industry came out in Publishers Weekly that summer, it noted that as a general rule “one of the first hard facts which successful publishers of fifty-cent juvenile series learn is that their bestseller boys’ series always run into far higher figures than their best-seller girls’ series.” This was due to the same basic cause that Stratemeyer had diagnosed some years earlier: “Girls are unashamed readers of boys’ books, while boys are notoriously loath to be seen with anything as effeminate as a book whose hero is a heroine.” But while boys may not have been picking up her stories—she was still a girl, after all, George Fayne’s influence notwithstanding—Nancy Drew was thumbing her nose at publishing trends as well as the Depression. The article went on, “Today the Nancy Drews stand as the top-notch sellers of the many best-seller juvenile series published by this firm.”
In record time the teen sleuth had captured the hearts and imaginations of girls as well as the market. She did not even require many expenditures on the part of her publisher, because “boys and girls like them [top-notch sellers] so well that they themselves do the advertising by talking enthusiastically about them with each other,” the Publishers Weekly article continued. Had they paid the author—in fact, they did not even know about her before her article came out in June—Harriet and Edna could not have asked for better publicity.
It seemed fortuitous, then, when that same writer, Edna Yost, contacted Harriet to say she was working on a second article on her subject and was hoping for an interview. “They have commissioned me now to do another featuring the personalities of the authors of the various series,” she explained. “Yesterday I talked with Mr. Arthur Leon [of Cupples & Leon, one of the Syndicate’s main publishers] and he referred me to you for material on Lester Chadwick, Roy Rockland [Rockwood], Alice B. Swann, and Frank V. Webster.” All of these were Syndicate pen names, a secret so well kept that even the intrepid Ms. Yost was not entirely sure whether or not they were real people. “The Weekly wants only fact material—and is not interested in discussing any of the series authors under nom de plume,” she told Harriet. “Will it be possible, then, for me to include material on any of the above list—and if so, will you let me have it and how?” In the event that the answer was no, Harriet could still serve a purpose, which was to illuminate the readers of Publishers Weekly about a great legend who had made it his business to stay out of the limelight. “I also want to write about Mr. Stratemeyer who—Mr. Leon says—was your father.”
Harriet replied immediately, clearly flattered by the attention. She informed Yost that the list of authors she had inquired about were, indeed, all pseudonymous and thus useless to her for “portraying the lives of writers of certain series.” She did not even mention the names of the real ghostwriters, much less offer them up for interviews, lest the secret of the Stratemeyer Syndicate should be revealed. “Because of the credulity of the young reader this fact is never made public,” she wrote with chirpy authority. “Why dispel their illusions!”
If anyone was poised to know something about the credulity of young readers, it was Harriet. For one thing, she was privy to the loads of letters from children that arrived at the Syndicate each month and worried about how best to perpetuate the legendary lives of the adored pseudonymous series writers. “Fan mail is indeed heavy,” she had recently written to Arthur Leon. “ We shall be hard put to it to properly answer these letters so that the juvenile minds in that section will not become suspicious that their beloved authors write under pen na
mes.” She was also living with such minds under her own roof. Practically since the start of her work at the Syndicate, Harriet had become accustomed to consulting her children on some of the details of the books she was working on. “Another phrase where our correction was erased was, ‘Atta boy,’” she once reprimanded Laura Harris, her editor at Grosset & Dunlap, regarding one of the Buck and Larry Baseball stories books, her father’s final pet project. “I took the trouble to ask my son about this phrase when I was correcting the manuscripts, and he informed me that it is already obsolete.” On the matter of the title for Nancy Drew number six, she had again consulted with her offspring, this time Camilla. In writing to Harris, she gave her daughter’s opinion every bit as much weight as the conversation that had taken place between her, Edna, and Agnes Pearson:
We have talked this matter over in this office and really do not favor the name ‘The Red Gate Farm Cavern.’ We think the last word a bit grown-up, and it sounds very much like tavern . . . Incidentally, my ten year old daughter, who is also a devotee of the Nancy Drew series, has read this manuscript and prefers the first title mentioned below:
The Plot at Red Gate Farm
The Adventure at Red Gate Farm
The Cave at Red Gate Farm, or, The Red Gate Farm Cave.
Fully confident in her children as arbiters of taste, Harriet was also not beyond using them as a kind of litmus test when she was in an argument with a publisher over the content of a book. “In regard to the first Doris Force book, we feel that perhaps we are putting too much stress on the opinion of one [editor],” she wrote with some annoyance to the publisher. “Two other series approved by her have been written by the same author, and we do not feel that this author would have put anything into the Doris Force books which girls 12 to 14 should not read. Acting upon your suggestion we have carefully gone over various approved series, and are really at a loss to understand how your critic can find this story so different from the others. I, myself, have a daughter nearly 10, and I should not hesitate one moment to let her read this book, and I have a reputation for being perhaps over-careful in the selection of reading for my children.”
Girl Sleuth Page 16
