Although Carolyn Keene (a pseudonym for Mildred Wirt) wrote the Nancy Drew stories 75 years ago, they really sprung from the literary syndicate of Edward Stratemeyer, Nancy Drew’s Father:
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 Boys 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 single-mindedness to work for him.
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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.)
In 1906, Stratemeyer had his first big idea. The Rover Boys had sold tens of thousands of copies, but Stratemeyer had hopes for more. He went to a publishing firm with a radical proposal: his new series, ”The Motor Boys” (the Rover Boys with more speed), would cost fifty cents but, with its cloth hardbound covers, look like it cost twice as much. The ”fifty-center” would bridge the gap between the nineteenth century’s moralistic tradition and the dime novel’s frontier adventures. Because the fifty-center was a hardback, unlike the dime novel, it seemed respectable to parents. And it was within range of a boy’s allowance, or his wheedling skills.
At first, the publishers worried about the scant profit margin — probably three to five cents per book. But Stratemeyer thought that the books would make up in volume for the diminished profit margin per unit. He was right. The Motor Boys series quickly became “”the biggest and best selling series for boys ever published,” according to a publisher’s blurb. When Stratemeyer repackaged the Rover Boys series in the same format, it, too, grew into a bona-fide phenomenon, selling more than six million copies by 1920.
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The fifty-cent books had an advantage over their more expensive, single-volume counterparts: you could release a “breeder” set of three at once — a strategy that Stratemeyer had pioneered with the Rover Boys — to test the waters, and, if the set did well, you had immediately generated an audience for the sequels. Sequels to one-off books, in contrast, tended to sell relatively poorly.
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Stratemeyer could not keep up with the demand for his stories. This prompted his second big idea: he would form a literary syndicate, which would produce books assembly-line style.
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Stratemeyer would come up with a three-page plot for each book, describing locale, characters, time frame, and a basic story outline. He mailed this to a writer, who, for a fee ranging from fifty dollars to two hundred and fifty dollars, would write the thing up and — slam-bang! — send it back within a month. Stratemeyer checked the manuscripts for discrepancies, made sure that each book had exactly fifty jokes, and cut or expanded as needed. (Each series had a uniform length; the standard was twenty-five chapters.) He replaced the verb ”said” with ”exclaimed,” ”cried,” ”chorused,” and so forth, and made sure that cliffhangers punctuated the end of each chapter — usually framed as a question or an exclamation.
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Stratemeyer’s heroes — among them the Motor Boys, the Outdoor Girls (the first girls’ series, Dorothy Dale, was introduced in 1908), the Motion Picture Chums, Tom Swift, and the Bobbsey Twins — dashed about in six-cylinder racing cars or jets or balloons. ”Swift by name and swift by nature” was Tom Swift’s motto. Most strikingly, Stratemeyer abandoned the model of self-improvement that informed both Alger’s and Patten’s best-sellers. His children were already perfect — solidly middle-class ”übermenschen,” as one syndicate partner later termed them. ”Manly” and ”wide awake,” they succeeded at whatever they turned their hand to and enjoyed utter freedom (in contrast to ”firmly guarded” nineteenth-century types), typically exposing the schemes of ne’er-do-wells hoping to siphon away the fortune of an innocent orphan. Stratemeyer understood that twentieth-century children wanted a fantasy posing as reality. As Patten aptly put it, the new model was a story about ”the boy that every kid would like to be. Not, mind you, the boy that every kid ought to be. That was the Horatio Alger idea.”
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In 1926, ninety-eight per cent of the boys and girls surveyed in a poll published by the American Library Association listed a Stratemeyer book as their favorite, and another survey showed that the Tom Swift books, which the syndicate launched in 1910, were at the top of the list. Thirty-one series were in full swing. Yet Stratemeyer still wasn’t content. He had noticed the growing popularity in the twenties of adult detective fiction and of pulp magazines like Black Mask,which was founded by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. As the journalist Carol Billman points out in ”The Secret of the Stratemeyer Syndicate,” Stratemeyer saw that this detective fiction, grafted onto an adventure story, might appeal to children. In 1926, the year that S. S. Van Dine’s ”The Benson Murder Case” introduced Philo Vance to the world, Stratemeyer wrote the outline for the first three volumes of a series that proved more popular than any that had come before: the Hardy Boys.
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In 1930, Stratemeyer decided to follow up with a girl detective, whom he called Nancy Drew. The women’s movement of the time had energized girls’ fiction, creating an audience for female characters with spunk (in contrast to Stratemeyer’s early girl heroines, like Honey Bunch, who ”knew exactly how to do a washing for she had watched the laundress many times”). Stratemeyer had signed up a young college graduate named Mildred Wirt, and he sent her the outline of ”The Secret of the Old Clock.” Wirt went on to write twenty-three of the first thirty Nancy Drews. From the start, the series sold better than any other Stratemeyer series, overturning the conventional publishing wisdom that boys’ series outperformed girls’.