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March 27, 2006
Nancy Drew's Father - Part II
Edward Stratemeyer was born in 1862 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. His parents, Henry and Anna, were middle-class German immigrants with a staunch work ethic. Henry was a tobacconist, and Anna, who had been married to Henry's brother before his death, reared six children; Edward was the youngest. As a boy, he idled away his time reading the popular rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger and William T. Adams (a.k.a. Oliver Optic). As a teen-ager, he had a printing press and amused friends by printing broadsheets and stories, including an early effort titled "Revenge! or, The Newsboy's Adventure". His father spoke to him of wasting time. According to Deidre Johnson's "Edward Stratemeyer and the Stratemeyer Syndicate". he was twenty-six when he sold his first story "Victor Horton's Idea" to Golden Days, the beloved boys' magazine, for seventy-five dollars - about six times the standard weekly wage. Later, he liked to claim that he had written the story on brown wrapping paper in the tobacco store, and recalled showing the magazine's check to his father, who promptly said, "You'd better write a lot more for them."
He did. He wrote "Poor but Plucky" as Fred Frisky. He wrote "Dashing Dave, the Ever Ready Detective" as Captain Ravell Pinkerton, of the U.S. Secret Service. He wrote "Joe Johnson, the Bicycle Wonder" as Roy Rockwood. He aslo worked as a stationer - he did not sell enough stories to support himself - and then, later, became an editor at Good News, where his heroes Alger and Optic published their work.
Every Horatio Alger hero's rise to riches depends on a lucky break. Stratemeyer's was his proximity to Alger himself. In 1898, the older man, in failing health, wrote to Stratemeyer at Good News and asked him to complete a story that he was too ill to finish. "Can you take my story and finish it in my style?" he inquired. "You will divide the proceeds equally with me but I shall retain the copyright . . . I fancy it would be easy work for you as you have a fluent & facile style."
In truth, Stratemeyer's style was much like Alger's; each was of the "Maggie, for this was the name by which she was universally known" school of circumlocution. Stratemeyer took on the job and ultimately completed several of Alger's unfinished manuscripts for posthumous publication. (Alger died in 1899.) Then, in the late eighteen-nineties, Gilbert Patten began publishing his stories about Frank Merriwell, America's first fictional schoolboy hero. The success of the Merriwell dime novels is hard to conceive of today: they sold a hundred and twenty-five million copies over two decades. Stratemeyer, who had given Patten his start at Good News, decided that he could improve on the invention. The result in 1899, was "The Rover Boys" - the schoolboy exploits of three wisecracking brothers named Tom, Dick, and Sam. It was an immediate hit.
Stratemeyer's timing was superb. The spread of primary education had spawned a host of independent young readers, and juvenile fiction was on the verge of becoming hugely popular. The dime novel, which had emerged in 1860, had created an appetite among children for more exciting fare than Sunday-school moralism. What Stratemeyer brought to this burgeoning market was not literary brilliance; the early Rover Boyd books are crudely written at best. But he had two essential gifts: a knack for coming up with ideas, and organizational genius. As Henry Ford was revolutionizing the auto industry, Stratemeyer was revolutionizing the way children's books were produced. The boy who had played at the printing press had learned how to put his singlemindedness to work for him.
The most daunting obstacle facing publishers at the turn of the century wasn't finding good stories but figuring out how to package and distribute them. Advertising was relatively uncommon, and, in any case, children didn't read the newspaper. Salesmem travelled around the country, selling books from publishers' lists, but this system was highly inefficient.
New printing techniques had made it easier to manufacture good-looking books for less than ever before. Most "quality" hardcover juvenile fiction cost a dollar or a dollar twenty-five, but it was still primarily instructional. The most famous of these was the Rollo series, about a boy who travelled through Europe with his uncle, learning the virtue of honesty. For excitement, people had the Deadwood Dicks and the Lone Star Lizzies, low-end dime novels aimed at working-class men and read on the sly by boys - and some girls - everywhere. (Publishers assumed that girls would happily read boys' books but not vice versa.)
To Be Continued . . .
Posted by mysterygamers at 11:19 PM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2006
Nancy Drew's Father Part I
Following is from an article written by Meghan O'Rourke in "The New Yorker" in 2004. We enjoyed it so much we wanted to share it - even if in installments!
The summer I was seven, a sudden adventure shanghaied my parents, and they hastily deposited me at my grandmother's home, in suburban New Jersey, for the weekend. I was sitting mournfully by the back-yard pool, without the prospect of a playmate, when my grandmother came down the flagstone path, a box in her hands, and announced with an air of genial relief, "I've found your mother's old Nancy Drews." Warped and moldy, "The Bungalow Mystery," on top of the box, appeared unpromising - and, at two hundred pages, long. But desperation will drive a child to great lengths. I began to read and, it now seems, didn't look up for several years.
What I was reading were dozens of variations on a single story, which went something like this: Nancy Drew, a sixteen-year-old girl in the suburb of River Heights, visits a friend and learns of a mystery, typically involving a lost treasure or a missing heir. An anonymous note slipped under her door warns her, "Keep off the case, or else"; high jinks and a car chase ensue. While sleuthing, Nancy gets knocked out by a crook, and comes to in an elegant old mansion ("Nancy saw lovely damask draperies, satin-covered sofas and chairs"), where she partakes of a refreshing tea service and cinnamon toast; renewed, she discovers a secret passageway, thanks to a cunning knob of some kind, rapidly solves the mystery and restores social order.
As Bobbie Ann Mason points out in her excellent 1975 history, "The Girl Sleuth", Nancy Drew is a paradox - which may be why feminists can laud her as a formative "girl power" icon and conservatives can love her well-scrubbed middle-class values. She climbs fences like a tomboy but cries "How dainty!" upon spying a gold bracelet. Her friends have marvellous weddings, but Nancy never frets about her future; more than a kiss from Ned Nickerson, her worshipful beau, would only interrupt her sleuthing. Like many juvenile heroines of her time, she is missing a mother. (Hers died when she was three.) But there are no shadows behind her "sparkling" bright-blue eyes. The shadows are in the world and they are easily detected and vanquished, for they have squinty eyes, poor grammar, badly mended clothes, and a habit of wearing too much rouge.
Next year, Nancy turns seventy-five, and having sold more than two hundred million books, she has been rewarded with a twenty-first-century makeover. "Nancy Drew Girl Detective" is a new series launched last spring by Aladdin Paperbacks, a division of Simon Schuster. The contemporary Nancy is more attuned to emotional issues than the old Nancy, as one can only expect in our therapeutic age. But her gaze remains unshadowed.
I don't remember wonering much about Carolyn Keene, the book's putative author, although I must have eventually asked how she could write so many books; I recall my father gently suggesting that Keene had been replaced by a ghostwriter. This concerned me for one reason: what if the books changed? I needn't have worried. The truth is that Nancy Drew, like her comrades-in-sleuthing the Hardy Boys, was never a creation of a sincle mind. From the start, she was the product of a corporation - a literary syndicate. The man who created the syndicate was not a feminist or a brilliant writer. But in his own unassuming way he was, like Nancy Drew, a phenomenon.
To Be Continued
Posted by mysterygamers at 09:50 PM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2006
Nancy Drew - The Case of the Changing Icon . . . Part 2
by Anna Hanks
Continued
I was expecting excitement.
But alas, excitement is not what I received. The biggest excitement in my life is The Case of the Missing Keys or The Mystery in the Meat Drawer. And despite being almost twice Nancy's age, the closest I've ever been to international intrigue was an ugly altercation in customs over some undeclared apples.
XXX - over 16 only:
Despite my disappointment I should have known that Nancy lived in a fantasy world. After all, her college football hero boyfriend Ned never pressured Nancy for sex. That's good, because The Case of the Missing Virginity might have been . . . er, a hard one to solve.
But despite the effect she has had on my life, Nancy is no longer to be feared as the perfectly dressed River Heights goddess in her open-top gasoline-powered chariot. Nancy has been sent down to earth. She is everyteen.
This downturn in Nancy's fortunes took place shortly after the "real" Carolyn Keene died.
There is no lack of evidence to prove this fall of Nancy to earth. One easy example comes from Plato. And while you think that Nancy and Plato have no more business together than "tuna" and "helper", let me explain that Nancy no longer inhabits Plato's world of ideal forms. To wit, a blue roadster is a perfect form, a GM Mustang convertible (as it is described in the later books) is but a shabby copy of the ideal.
Likewise, Nancy is no longer described as Titan-haired, a term coined for the strawberry-blond Renaissance tresses of the women in Titan's paintings. These days Nancy is "reddish-blond", a term that is culturally significant only on the Isle of Clairol.
Nancy's clothing has also descended to earth. Instead of wearing stylish, elegant dresses, she is described as wearing tight designer jeans that accent her slender figure. Instead of perfect dresses appearing magically in her closet, Nancy has to go to the mall like everyone else. From couture to trend de jour.
Another indication of Nancy's loss of goddess status is the loss of her powerful female triumvirate. Here the goddess status of her associates is diluted, and the power of the trio is obliterated by the addition of other characters. In the earlier books, Nancy is surrounded by George, an Amazon warrior, and Bess, the plump blond figure of Venus. In the earlier books, George is described as enjoying her mannish name and wearing tailored clothing. Her name was seen as an extension of her personality.
Now it is carefully pointed out that "George likes boys just as much as Bess does", lest the specter of lesbianism hang over River Heights.
The Amazon figure of George is balanced by the figure of Venus, aka Bess. As the soft, blond, boy-crazy, and reclining friend, Bess could hardly be anything but the goddess of love. Now she is the goddess of perpetual dieting.
In the recent books, the power of the trio is broken by the addition of new characters, a group one acquaintance refers to as "Nancy's rainbow coalition of friends".
Yet despite what Nancy Drew did to my life, perhaps it is best if our young stick with the pre-fallen Nancy. After all, the world is short on goddess figures. The next closest thing we have is Pamela Anderson, and we all know that she can't be real.
Originally published in The Austin Chronicle
Posted by mysterygamers at 08:03 PM | Comments (0)
March 05, 2006
Nancy Drew - the Case of the Changin Icon
by Anna Hanks
Part I
Nancy Drew ruined my life. There, I've said it. Now I've voiced my resentment of one of America's most beloved female icons. Nancy Drew gave me false hopes - by pretending to be just an average girl when she was really a goddess in disguise. Oh, there were aspects of Nancy's life that ought to have clued me in: She was tall, slim, Titian-haired, perfectly dressed and possessed of both a wealthy and indulgent father and a seemingly infinite number of new convertibles. It was really the convertibles that ought to have tipped me off - like multi-headed Hydra, one convertible only had to be cut down for another to appear in her driveway.
Since Nancy was supposed to be just an average girl, I thought that when I was old enough to drive my life would be just like Nancy's. I too would be trailing short, dark Eastern European men with limps through my hometown, receiving letter bombs which I would inevitably manage to throw out of the mailbox seconds before they exploded, receiving threats to "mind my own business or else", and having my brake lines cut everytime I drove down a hill.
I was expecting excitement.
To Be Continued!
Originally published in The Austin Chronicle
Posted by mysterygamers at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)
March 02, 2006
Customer Appreciation Day
Get a 15% discount on your purchase at MysteryGamers.com every THURSDAY starting 3/2/06! (Minimum purchase $15.00)
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Posted by mysterygamers at 01:36 AM | Comments (0)