Let me start with a simple fact: The Hardy Boys books were much better than the Nancy Drew books. I can say this on the basis of having read 40-odd Hardy Boys books and one Nancy Drew book. That’s a more than adequate sample size if you are both prepubescent and male.
My parents learned that, for $1.98, they could throw me a cheap mystery book and I would be (mas o menos) well-behaved for several hours. This was peace and quiet at a price they could afford. I later understand this concept very well when, at the age of eighteen, I ran a small café on the South Texas border and the eatery, unfortunately, had a jukebox. After listening to Freddie Fender singing Wasted Days and Wasted Nights approximately a million times, I put a blank record in the jukebox and titled the two songs, Life After the Bomb and After Infinity. For only a quarter, I could purchase fifteen minutes of peace and quiet.
One day (evidently because the only bookstore in our small town was out of the Hardy Boys series), my mother bought me a Nancy Drew book, written by Carolyn Keene. Though I never told my mother, I enjoyed the book. I still preferred Hardy Boys books, but the book was okay. At that age, reading a book “written for girls” was like riding a mini-bike—it might be okay, but you don’t want any of your male friends seeing you do it.
I doubt that any boy ever read all 178 of the Hardy Boys books, or that any girl ever read all 175 Nancy Drew books. Depending on how you count the books in each series, there may be many more than that, since the books were written, rewritten, restarted, and issued in hardback, paperback, and graphic novel format several times. This is not counting the multiple movie, television series, and video games that have appeared since the first book was published in 1930.
That brings up the usual question: Did the Hardy Boys appear before or after Nancy Drew? Neither, both series are publications of the Stratemeyer Syndicate. In 1896, the first series, the Rover Boys, was established along a set formula: Each series featured set characters, a formulaic plot, a fictitious pen name for an author, and a ghost-writer who was paid a pittance to flesh out an outline handed to him by the syndicate. The first series was so successful, that many more followed. The Bobbsey Twins started in 1904, Tom Swift in 1910, the Hardy Boys in 1927, and Nancy Drew began publication in 1930. The latest new series from the company is the Three Investigators, which began in 1964. All of the above series are still in publication.
After the success of the Hardy Boys series, Stratemeyer approached the same publishers and offered them a new series, featuring a young female detective named Stella Strong. The publishers accepted the offer and the first three novels were contracted out to Mildred Wirt Benson. Following a strict outline, Benson wrote the stories for a flat fee of $125 without royalties. The series was immediately successful and Benson was contracted to write five additional books for the same price.
By the time of publication, Stella Strong had turned into Nancy Drew, who was a blue-eyed blonde who had graduated from high school at sixteen, and who was the daughter of a wealthy and successful lawyer whose clients frequently paid the expenses as Nancy solved crimes associated with the cases her father defended. Of course, that was the original series—Nancy changed over the decades. In the early series, Nancy drove a roadster and by the fifties she drove a convertible, but in the latest books, she owns an electric car.
Note. Somewhere, over the years, I lost most of the those early Hardy Boys Books, possibly because of how cheaply-made the books were. I gave one of my last remaining copies to my nephew, who eagerly read it. About forty pages into the book, he had a question, “What’s a jal-o-py?” Now that I think of it, I wonder how many of today’s readers know what a “roadster” is?
Mildred Wirt Benson wrote the first eight books, but when the depression hit Stratemeyer realized that, with so many writers out of work, he could lower the pay offered to his ghostwriters. When Benson learned that the new fee would only be $75, she quit, so Stratemeyer needed a new stand-in for Carolyn Keene.
Walter Kariq was an American art student in Paris when World War I started in 1914. Kariq wanted to fight, but the United States wouldn’t join the war for three years, so he joined the French Foreign Legion, ending the war as a Captain of Infantry. When the war ended, Kariq worked as a writer, a columnist, and a cartoonist while he traveled the world. He visited Mexico and Canada, spent weeks in Japan in 1935, and sent dispatches back from the Philippine Islands, the Malay Peninsula, Ceylon, India, Egypt, Italy, and France.
When World War II started, Kariq joined the Navy, eventually rising to the rank of Captain. During the war, he wrote numerous battle reports and articles, as well as serving on the USS Texas. By the war’s end, he was an aide to Admiral Nimitz. After the war, Kariq remained in the Navy, writing history books and some of the scripts of the Victory at Sea television show. Following the war, Kariq also continued writing novels, including one of my personal favorites, Zotz!, which was made into a movie of the same name.
Walter Kariq, a combat veteran of the French Foreign Legion, a naval captain who served on convoys in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and who was an aide to Admiral Chester Nimitz—somehow managed to serve over a decade in the US Navy without anyone ever knowing that he was the author of several Nancy Drew books.
One last point: In 2025, it will be 95 years since the first Nancy Drew book was published, meaning that the copyright on the name expires and anyone can publish their own Nancy Drew novel. Nancy Drew in Space. Nancy Drew CSI. Nancy Drew in the Dallas Cowgirls. You should start now.
Lots of folks wrote books or did artistic stuff they later kept from public knowledge. One of my favorite secret identities was that of Marine Corps Major Donnie Dunagan. He used to balk when his colonel gave him scut work, that is until his colonel found out that as a child, he was the voice of Bambi in the Disney film of the same name. After that, the Colonel threatened to tell the men of the battalion that he was, in fact, Major Bambi. After that poor Dunagan had to do anything the colonel dumped on him without muttering a complaint. If you've ever worked in an all male environment especially where a lot of the work was very physical, you know what sort of hell your fellow man can heap on your head. For all his indentured servitude to his colonel, Dunagan was known as a tough no-nonsense Marine officer, not to be trifled with.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of writers with secret identities, Frederick Pohl, then a Sci-fi publisher, roped Isaac Asimov, holder of a whole flock of PhDs, into doing a series of youth books about a space cadet named Lucky Starr which he wrote under the name Paul French. Asimov didn't talk about it much. Just cashed the checks.
Agatha Christie wrote 6 romance novels under the name Mary Westmacott. CS Lewis published several books under the name Clive Hamilton. JK Rowling recently wrote a well-received book under the name Robert Galbraith. Michael Crichton wrote as John Lange, Jeffery Hudson and Michael Douglas during medical school, presumably wanting to hide how little studying he was doing from his professors. Stephen King wrote as Richard Bachman. Ben Franklin wrote controversial letters to the newspapers as a woman named Silence Dogood.
Washington Irving, a prodigious self-promoter in his day, also wrote as Jonathan Oldstyle, Diedrich Knickerbocker and Geoffrey Crayon. The Knickerbocker pseudonym was part of one of Irving's guerrilla marketing scheme. Irving posted missing Dutch person notices for Knickerbocker all over New England saying Dietrich had gone missing from his hotel room. He then posted a notice saying Knickerbocker had left a story in his hotel room, and that the hotelier could publish the story in lieu of payment for the room. Since "Knickerbocker" by then was well known as a missing person mystery, the story was scooped up, published and the public ate it up. Irving made a tidy profit off that bit of 18th century guerrilla marketing.
My wife and I have written a novel but she wants to use a pseudonym in case someone recognizes an unflattering character in the book and sues us. I've told her that's why you put a notice in almost any book of fiction that "any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental...." I'm hoping to finish editing and debut Mary Katherine Keen 's first novel soon if my Sweet Baboo ever finishes writing her memoir which I'm editing as she goes. She's off her meds and in the midst of a creative outburst.