“[The check] went out by mail today,” she continued jubilantly in her letter to Edna, who was at the Jersey Shore. “We think the lady in Cleveland did herself proud, and as we are always more adverse in our criticism than you, we have no doubt but that you will find the story excellent. We shall mail it to you tomorrow for your perusal. I did not have the pencil in my hand until I had reached [>]. I think the story will need so few corrections that I might as well do it as I go along.” With Nancy Drew number thirteen, published in 1936, Harriet, Edna, and Mildred had reached the apex of their working relationship.
It was all the more impressive considering Mildred’s schedule. Though it would take America’s entry into World War II to really put an end to the Depression, book publishing was finally recovering somewhat and orders were rolling in almost faster than she could keep up with them. In that same year, a Dana Girls book and two Kay Traceys she had written for the Syndicate were published, along with two books in her new Mildred A. Wirt Mystery stories (put out by Cupples & Leon), a stand-alone girls’ novel called Carolina Castle, and the first three books in her Penny Nichols series, also mysteries, written under the name Joan Clark. In 1937 another eleven books in those and other series—including two more Nancy Drews—were published. It seemed the more pressure she was under, the faster and better she could write.
For not only were Harriet and Edna pleased with The Mystery of the Ivory Charm, they were complimentary about Mildred’s recent work on the Kay Tracey books as well, in spite of getting after her to keep her characters speaking the way they thought girls should express themselves. “We have found this story well handled as a mystery. It is baffling, and the revelation is interestingly delineated,” Edna wrote to her. “[But] we will have to round out and develop the conversation between our heroine and her chums, tempering their speech at times. For instance, you often say ‘she informed,’ which is decidedly abrupt and not youthful.”
It was only logical that a person who had been in as much of a hurry to grow up and speak like an adult as Mildred might occasionally lose her grasp on someone else’s idea of girlish talk, and her journalism training probably didn’t help, either. But Harriet and Edna became more and more disapproving of Mildred’s characterization of girls and the kind of language she had them use in almost every manuscript. “Our only criticism is that we believe Kay and her chums at times speak too sarcastically and audaciously for growing girls. The story has a boyish ring throughout which we will temper to conform with more girlish ideals,” Edna wrote to her at one point. The following year it was a similar line: “The writing is well done and the only changes we are making are along the lines of softening the characters of both Kay and the tramp. The heroine seems a bit too officious at times.”
Mildred’s portrayal of Nancy Drew, too, came under fire. “Enclosed is the outline for the new Nancy Drew story, The Clue of the Tapping Heels,” Harriet wrote to her. “As you write, will you please bear in mind two things—in your zeal for synonyms in the latest manuscript you included a generous number of words beyond the comprehension of the average girl reader of our stories. We think you have improved a great deal in your writing during the past few years, but once in a while the phraseology is really too good—in other words, a bit adult for our yarns.” In particular, she thought, Mildred was unaware of what it meant to behave like a proper girl. “We have already mentioned to you the idea of making the heroines too officious. This does not occur very often, but once in a while Nancy or Kay will get beyond the bounds of respectfulness for their elders. After all, they are a bit young to order around police officials and doctors!”
While Mildred was surprised by all of these comments, she was not unwilling to alter her style. “It never occurred to me that the use of ‘she informed’ was brusque or unusual,” she replied, “and there are perhaps other expressions of mine which could be altered to meet your wishes, if I know just what they are.” No doubt she felt she had plenty of other places besides Syndicate books to make her girls talk as she wished. Indeed, Sally Lansing, the heroine of The Hollow Wall Mystery, the second title in the Mildred A. Wirt Mystery stories, both “grumbled” and “declared in a low tone” within the first few pages of the book. Her chum Victoria, not to be outdone, said things “firmly” and also “commented grimly.” These girls talked the way Mildred talked, with an edge that served them well in a world where men and boys were still mostly in control.
Still, the Syndicate remained a major supplier of work to Mildred, and assignments and outlines flew fast and furious through the mail to Cleveland in the first half of 1937. In January of that year, Edna wrote to her to ask if she would be interested in doing another Kay Tracey volume. Mildred replied with a shot of her usual brisk professionalism: “I am just completing a book but will have it finished within ten days and will be very glad to write the new Kay Tracey for you, forwarding it in approximately the usual time.”
Her next paragraph, however, contained a revelation that made her ability to write so much and so well even more astonishing. “You and Mrs. Adams may be interested to know that early in November I gave birth to a blue-eyed, red headed baby girl,” she wrote. “My work this past year was somewhat difficult, but at present I am in excellent health, thoroughly enjoying both my writing and the new baby.” In contrast to many of the other writers for the Syndicate, fathers included, who asked for extra time when there was a new addition to the family, Mildred had not only not breathed a word of her situation, but had worked harder than ever while expecting. Motherhood had no doubt loomed as an unwelcome specter for a woman who, unlike Harriet, was not invested in family life or parenthood in the slightest. The relentless writing, in addition to providing some extra cash in anticipation of the new family member, was probably her best effort to make sure her career did not slip away from her when the baby arrived, a necessity for someone who measured her self-worth by the number of pages she could turn out each month.
Harriet and Edna were amazed. They sent her the plot for The Secret at the Windmill later that month, saying, “We hope you will find this story interesting to write and that it will not take too much time away from your new baby. It is a mystery to us, a la Kay Tracey, how you were able to manage so well with your writings and your household last year. We do congratulate you upon the birth of a daughter and should like to hear her nom de plume. That wisp of red hair sounds most intriguing.”
Though her daughter was only two months old, Mildred kept right on going, cheerily informing the Syndicate sisters, “The new baby’s nom de plume is Margaret Joan, and most fortunately, she seems to be a very good baby!” She was called Peggy for short, and Mildred kept her employers apprised of the child’s development from time to time, even as she kept up a breakneck pace with her writing. In addition to the three girls’ mystery series she was writing, Mildred took over the Honey Bunch series, which was for the age group the Syndicate referred to as “children,” the assumption being that from ages six to nine, boys and girls would read essentially the same kinds of stories (the Bobbsey Twins also fell into this category).
She was, by this time, well aware of her value to the Syndicate, and she used her leverage to angle for the raise she had been seeking. “I am pleased to note that book sales have been picking up recently,” she wrote to Edna, at the same time accepting a few more assignments. “I do hope that it will soon be possible for the Syndicate to reestablish the old rates which were in effect before the depression, as I feel that I should begin to increase my income if I am ever to do so.” She had found her preferred method of parenting as well, and it included less involvement than Harriet’s. “Our vacation this year extended over six thousand miles, quite too strenuous a trip for little Peggy Wirt, who only went a part of the way and spent her time with a doting grandmother,” she wrote to Harriet at the end of 1937. “She seemed to thrive on it for she came home talking a blue streak!” When Asa was transferred by the Associated Press the following year, the young family moved to Toledo, a
nd Mildred continued to keep the ladies of the Syndicate updated on her life. “We are well settled in our new home now, and have just sold our residence in Cleveland,” she wrote to Edna. “However, as yet I cannot say that I like Toledo, as it seems a rather dirty, noisy city.” But despite her distaste for her new surroundings, which she found “at best . . . smoky,” thanks to the factories for the glass, automobile, and other industries that made up a huge part of the city’s livelihood, Toledo would prove a boon for Mildred. Its huge public library downtown provided her with information for many of her series books, and its newspapers—the Toledo Blade and its morning edition, the Toledo Times, where she got a job during World War II—would be her journalistic home for the rest of her life.
Even as Mildred began to experience the joys and trials of motherhood, Harriet was leaving them behind. “Your son goes to Colgate this fall, does he not? It is exciting, having children about to leave for college,” she wrote to the current writer for the Bobbsey Twins, also a woman. “My oldest is headed for Princeton. Now that our big children will be away we shall have to adopt the Bobbseys as small charges to take up our attention!” Harriet took great pride in the accomplishments of her children as they began to make their own lives. “I must tell you what happy occasions Class Day and Commencement at Blair were,” she wrote to Edna when her eldest son graduated from prep school. “Perhaps you read in the Newark News that Sunny made Cum Laude.”
She was equally admiring of her daughters, who were turning out to be the kind of independent young women she herself had wanted to be. Instead of being confined at home during vacations, they were going out into the world and being encouraged to nurture their interests both as hobbies and professionally. “News from our house includes the fact that Patsy has decided to accept the job offered her by Miss Deucher. Did I tell you or write you that the head of Pathfinder’s had asked her to become play director for the summer?” she continued on in her letter to Edna. Then, writing about a family friend, she extolled the virtues of work as a vital organizing force. “Jean is getting pretty discouraged about her play acting part, and I am about to suggest that she plan some form of work, either from the house or a few hours a day away from it. I really think the poor girl needs it. She is wonderfully fine and brave, but one cannot live pretense forever without a change of scene.”
No matter how busy Harriet was praising her children and working on her series, she always had time to remind a writer that he or she had no rights to a story or even to talking about a story, the latter of which seemed to be happening with increasing frequency. To one writer, who had done a miniature volume in the Tom Swift series for the Syndicate, she displayed an almost paranoiac obsession with the issue: “We feel we should recall to your mind the idea of your work for us being a confidential matter,” she wrote to him. “For this reason, in the future will you please not write on post cards data which might better be kept in a sealed envelope.”
And while it was true that the Syndicate’s properties, especially Nancy Drew, were taking on more and more value as they were considered for radio shows, movies, and other merchandise—one agent thought she could get far more than the $10,000 Harriet was requesting for the movie rights to the Rover Boys series, while another thought that advertisers would pay from $1,500 to $1,750 a week for a Nancy Drew radio show—Harriet’s impression of the Syndicate’s standing in the world at large frequently leaned toward the overblown. This resulted in often comically conflicted letters to interested parties who wrote in to the Syndicate, regardless of how harmless their requests were. One such note went out to the secretary of the University of Arkansas Public Information Bureau in the winter of 1936: “Your letter of January 2 to Grosset and Dunlap, Publishers, requesting information about Miss Carolyn Keene and her book, ‘The Password to Larkspur Lane,’ has been forwarded to me,” it began. “In reply, I must bring to your attention the fact that there are many people in official, political, or professional life who have the urge to write books, especially for young people, but who for various reasons deem it inadvisable to attach their own names to their stories. Owing to a like situation, the real identity of Carolyn Keene must remain a mystery.” This was clear enough, and it was the excuse Harriet had been giving for quite some time about why it was not possible to identify ghostwriters in the media. Never mind that no such people were actually writing for the Syndicate—from her tone, one might have thought that President Roosevelt was penning the Bobbsey Twins in his spare time.
The writer of this letter was none other than “Secretary to Miss Carolyn Keene.” The absurdity of posing as the assistant to a pseudonym, and then having that assistant explain that her boss was not a real person, did not seem to occur to Harriet, who had Agnes Pearson type up the little masterpiece and send it out.
This sort of schizophrenia became the norm as more and more writers had to be kept from telling anyone about their work. No doubt as the series they ghosted became increasingly visible, and interest in them grew, the writers felt it was only fair that they be able to discuss them. They had given away their “right, title and interest” in each story they wrote, as per the release form signed for each one, but nowhere did it say anything about mentioning the books in conversation with friends or potential employers. As it had since Edward’s day, it all seemed to come down to how those agreements were interpreted, a problem Harriet would set out to fix in the next few years. For the moment, all she could do was plug the leaks as they occurred.
A big part of the difficulty was that even Harriet and Edna did not have a consistent position on whether or not what the ghostwriters did was of actual creative value. They were willing to write letters to other publishers for their ghosts, praising their writing skills, but at the same time were loath to admit to the writers themselves that they were providing an invaluable part of the story by returning to the Syndicate a manuscript that could be edited. To do so would have made the release forms each author signed essentially untenable, and so they continued to behave as though the authors were nothing more than glorified stenographers.
The problem took on new dimensions in 1937, when Walter Karig reappeared. He had done no work for the Syndicate since his three Nancy Drews in the early 1930s, but he had continued to tell people about what he had done in spite of Harriet’s earlier warnings. When Publishers Weekly printed Karig’s name as the real author of the books he had, indeed, ghostwritten, Harriet wrote to the editor immediately, falsely claiming that Karig had not only not written any Nancy Drews, but any of the other books he had done for the Syndicate. While the Syndicate had provided outlines for each of his books, as usual, it was also not wholly true to say that the Syndicate had written the books. Unable to explain the complicated process that brought a Stratemeyer book into being, Harriet simply wrote Karig out of the production chain altogether.
Her fury was no doubt inflamed by the fact that Karig had done more than just talk about his role: In direct violation of his agreement with the Syndicate, he had written to the Library of Congress specifically requesting credit for the books he had written. The Library of Congress had in turn assumed he had written all of the books in the series he mentioned, a simple error of magnitude. Harriet may well have avoided telling other ghostwriters about his stunt because she feared they would copy him. “How many times the Stratemeyer Syndicate had rued the day that Walter Karig ever wrote any books for it!” she would later exclaim in a letter to Mildred. But somehow, amazingly, she had gotten the Library of Congress on board with the Syndicate’s plan. Writing to an adult fan who was requesting information after getting confused while doing research on authorship, she explained, “The matter now has been straightened out. The Library of Congress is willing that the identity of Carolyn Keene should not be known.”
The Karig fiasco fell on Harriet alone. Edna was increasingly absent from the office as, at the age of forty-two (long past the age at which women were considered marriageable in those days), she had gotten married to a man named Wesley
Squier. In the summer of 1937, while Harriet toiled in New Jersey, she was on her honeymoon. And she was pregnant. She gave birth to a baby girl in January of 1938 and, in spite of Harriet’s having already used the name for her second daughter, named her Camilla.
Edna was back at the office by the fall of 1938, relishing her dual roles for the time being. “My lovely baby girl is now nine and one half months old and weighs twenty-two pounds,” she wrote to one of the Syndicate authors. “She looks like her daddy, as girls so often do, though we both have dark hair and dark eyes. My sister’s older boy is in his third year at Princeton and her three other children are most active in sports and school affairs. Between home and business we find life very exciting, with new problems to be solved every day.” An admiring article that came out the following year in a local paper, the East Orange Record, confirmed her report, though it also made clear who was really running things over at the Hale Building:
The two sisters now running the Stratemeyer Syndicate, Mrs. Russell V. Adams of 48 North Terrace, Maplewood, and Mrs. C. Wesley Squier of Summit, have a full working day, watching the juvenile market, plotting stories, contacting writers, and buying and selling manuscripts. Mrs. Adams is especially well known in the local suburbs by reason of a boundless appetite for living which has made it impossible for her to follow the ordinary routine of bridges and teas which seem to comprise the daily lives of most housewives, and has instead set her feet on the road to high adventure pursued by the Rover Boys and their allies of the printed page . . . We don’t see how she does it, but then people never could understand the inexhaustible energy of the Stratemeyer clan.
Along with the glowing press—the sisters seemed to have realized they could control it better if it was local—there was another reason to celebrate in the Adams household. Seventeen-year-old Patsy, who was touring England with a group of girls and a chaperone for the summer, received this joyful missive from her mother in mid-July: “Dear Patsy: By this time you have received the cable telling you that you are being admitted to the Freshman class at Wellesley College. Hurrah! Your worries are over.” Harriet was almost as excited about her daughter’s entry to Wellesley as she had been about her own. “Your course of study must reach the Dean’s office by August 20. I notice that English Composition and Hygiene are the only two subjects required. You decided, did you not, that you would take Mediaeval History and French. We spoke of Speech as the extra elective. I notice from the catalog that the course which is given three hours a week comes only the second semester.”
Girl Sleuth Page 19
