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Will the real Carolyn Keene please stand up?
Girl detectives find Nancy Drew creator's true identity
Friday, June 26, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photos by EMILY BARNES
Candice Washington, 14, left, and Katie Sullivan, 9, follow leads and gather clues during the Nancy Drew mystery event at the Waldorf library. Both girls are avid readers and Nancy Drew fans.
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It must be fun to be Nancy Drew — driving around in a blue Roadster, solving crimes, hanging out with boyfriend Ned Nickerson and best friends, Bess and George, not working but supplied with endless amounts of money from her lawyer father.
She dances like Ginger Rogers, has the figure of a model and etiquette that would make Emily Post look like a backwoods yokel.
To be Nancy Drew and solve crimes that randomly fall into your highly fashionablyclad lap, walk away from a variety of scrapes — she's been beaten, choked, strangled with snakes, locked in closets, dumped in car trunks and hit on the head with falling theater scenery — and never has a strand of her titian hair been out of place.
"She does all these exciting things," said Cindy Thornley, a librarian at the P.D. Brown Memorial Library in Waldorf, who coordinates the mother and daughter book club. "She does all these adult things and she doesn't have to work."
Thornley laughed thinking of the wholesome fantasy the Drew books weave, while remaining popular with today's readers who are often used to more razzmatazz in their entertainment.
With young girls inundated with images of so-called role models who are more likely to pose for mug shots than class photos, Nancy Drew is more the role young readers in the club want to model themselves after.
"Girls can relate to Nancy," said Candice Washington, 14, a member of the book club with her mother, Christy. "She's just a really cool character."
Christine Pennington, 17, agreed.
"I was reading one of the older ones," she said of the series that was launched by publishing powerhouse Edward Stratemeyer in 1930.
"She's a role model … you can even learn etiquette from her. She always uses the proper grammar. She always does the right thing."
The women behind
the girl detective
During Wednesday's meeting, Thornley launched the summer's reading club with a mystery event. Teams of girls, mothers and volunteers were given clues to find the identity of Nancy Drew's creator, Carolyn Keene.
See, Keene was, and is (the Drew series has stretched out to include young adult novels), the pen name of a band of writers.
Under Stratemeyer's direction, the Stratemeyer Syndicate launched the mystery series for young readers started in the 1920s.
The popularity of the Hardy Boys, brothers who solved mysteries, lead to Stratemeyer creating Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins.
For $50 to $100, ghostwriters would sign away their rights and produce a novel in about 40 days working from an outline provided by Stratemeyer.
The first "Carolyn Keene" was actually Mildred Wirt. Wirt, the first female graduate from the University of Iowa's School of Journalism (she was also the school's first woman to earn her master's in journalism) penned the first 22 Nancy Drew's (she quit for a spell when she wasn't getting paid as much as the other writers before coming back with a raise.)
Wirt's Nancy was a spitfire. She was saucy and quick with a quip; she skirted the law by opening sealed mail or picking a lock.
Stratemeyer, eyeing the wholesome market, wasn't too happy about the heroine's moxie, calling Nancy "too flip."
So Nancy was tamed a bit.
"I think the real Nancy was a bit like Mildred herself," Thornley said. "To be the first woman to graduate [at Iowa], she had to be tough."
Upon Stratemeyer's death, his empire fell into the hands of his daughters, Harriet and Edna.
Harriet, the mother of four young children, had zero business sense. She hit the ground running and started writing Drew novel herself.
"Mildred saw Nancy as a job," Thornley's research uncovered. "Harriet saw Nancy as a daughter."
Harriet took it upon herself and re-wrote the first 22 books, making Nancy into the law-abiding bit of perfection in penny loafers.
Around the 1950s talk started stirring, who was Carolyn Keene? How could she churn out these books?
Information found at the Library of Congress revealed that Stratemeyer insisted the identity of the Nancy Drew's creator never be divulged.
A lawsuit between publishing houses in 1980 would bring Harriet Stratemeyer Adams and Mildred Wirt face to face
"I thought you were dead," Adams was purported to say to Wirt when the two met in a courtroom.
Eventually everything was sussed out; Nancy Drew continues to solve mysteries and has been re-vamped over the years to keep up with the times. Ghostwriters now have much better compensation than Wirt and her colleagues.
Still sleuthing
Nancy Drew's popularity was evident at the library Wednesday.
Katie Sullivan, 9, devours the mystery novels. She even summarized the significance of a red herring better than most readers who are decades older than she.
"It's a dead end," she deadpanned.
She thinks Nancy Drew is cool and loves her car.
More importantly, Katie longs for a good page-turning whodunnit.
"Everyone loves a good mystery," she said.
It took Thornley about a month to dream up the clues for the event, giving each team a lead to the next piece of the puzzle, hidden around the bustling library.
Teams named for Nancy Drew books — the Hidden Staircase, Moonstone Castle, Broken Locket — collected bits and pieces of information on Keene's true identity leading them back to the young adult section and a drawing room discussion on what was gathered. Thornley had to do last- minute scrambling to change some clues that were hidden in books and items that had been checked out of the library before the event.
The kickoff event was a good way to start off the book club season. And proved girls don't have to drive a Roadster to follow a lead.
"She has pluck, good sense and was adventuress," Thornley said of America's most famous teenage girl amateur detective (sorry, Veronica Mars.) "I think that's why everyone likes her."
Chick lit
The Mother-Daughter book club is held once a month during the summer months. The next meeting at P.D. Brown Memorial Library in Waldorf is 6-7 p.m. July 22. The book discussed is Ann Rinaldi's historic fictional tale of Lady Jane Grey, "Nine Days a Queen." To register, call Cindy Thornley at 301-645-2864 or 301-843-7688 or e-mail cthornley@somd.lib.md.us.
Registration is requested, but not required.
