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It was with both sadness and irritation that I read of the recent death of 96-year-old Mildred Benson of Toledo, Ohio. Under the pen name of Carolyn Keene, she wrote the first Nancy Drew novel, and went on to write 23 of the first 30 installments in that series.
My sadness at her passing was just that, but the
irritation came from the news accounts of her death. Every
one I read said something like generations of girls
enjoyed reading Nancy Drew books.
Maybe I'll get thrown out of the Guy Club for this confession, but when I was devouring juvenile novels by the armload 40 years ago, I preferred Nancy Drew, especially the early ones, to all the other series.
Sure, the Hardy Boys were okay, but they were also too cozy with the local police, who in my experience believed that boys could help solve crimes in only one way -- by confessing. Also, I lived in land-locked Colorado, and the Hardy Boys spent way too much time on or near some saltwater bay for me to identify with their adventures.
It's getting hard to remember any of the others that I toted home from the city library. There was a Mel Martin series about high school baseball players that probably inculcated moral lessons about the virtues of sportsmanship, which were a staple of the athletic tales of John B. Tunis.
I could swear that there was another baseball series about a major-league team called the Blue Sox, loosely based on the New York Yankees of my boyhood (the Yankees had a pitcher named Whitey Ford, the Blue Sox had Wilcey Lord, that sort of thing), but my nosing around the Internet produced no evidence, not even of how Wilcey should be spelled.
There was also a series about astronauts, with the Cold War carried over into plasma-ray battles between capitalists and socialists about mining the asteroid belt. No names leap to mind from that, but I also remember a whodunit series that featured an ace reporter, Whiz Walton.
None of these, though, was a tenth as good as Nancy Drew. She was smart and spunky and her blue roadster was even cooler than a '57 Chevy Nomad wagon. And I'm not the only guy who thinks this way; every so often the subject of juvenile literature comes up when we're keeping some brewery in business, and always it turns out that Nancy Drew was everybody's favorite.
Among people my age, that is. When our own daughters started reading for pleasure as they became teenagers, we suggested Nancy Drew, which they tried. Times have changed. They thought that Nancy's friend Bess was a useless priss, while her tomboy friend George was a lesbian who added nothing to the story line and was probably there just for diversity -- when Martha and I had been of that age, we didn't even know what lesbians were, let alone diversity.
Our daughters preferred modern series like Sweet Valley High and the Babysitters Club, and didn't much care for Nancy Drew. I found out why when I read one of theirs -- the series had been updated, even the early ones, and the charm was gone when Nancy no longer drove her blue roadster.
At any rate, Nancy Drew wasn't just a favorite of girls -- a lot of us boys enjoyed her adventures. But the widespread belief that the series was read only by girls illustrates one problem with the publishing industry: it doesn't know much about its audience.
Mildred Benson wasn't the only Carolyn Keene.
The publisher had a stable of writers who used that name
for Nancy Drew books. The practice continues; about 15
years ago, Martha and I were Jon Sharpe
-- there
were several Jon Sharpes who helped produce a new adult
Western every month for the Trailsman series about the
adventures of Skye Fargo circa 1859-61.
One year we wrote seven of them. We also fought a lot with the editor. Anything that even hinted that there was a Civil War erupting back east generally taboo, because Westerns actually sell best in the South, and they don't like to be reminded that they were on the losing side.
We got a copy of one installment that some other Jon Sharpe had written. It had Fargo forted up with a wagon train, fighting off the circling Apache (very unlikely that any such thing ever happened, but it's a staple of Western fiction), and the spent brass shells began to pile up.
I told the editor that they didn't use brass cartridges on the frontier in 1860, that the bullets and powder and priming caps were all loaded separately into Skye Fargo's revolver and carbine.
Oh, who cares?
he responded. They just read
these things in truck stops, you know.
It had been my experience that if you needed to find experts on the history of American firearms, a bunch of guys drinking coffee at a truckstop would be about the best place to start, and I feared the Trailsman series would lose all credibility under an editor who knew so little about his audience.
And that, I fear, is probably what happened to Nancy Drew after Mildred Benson quit serving as a Carolyn Keene. Benson's tales were great reading for 12-year-olds -- even 12-year-old boys. She knew that, even if nobody else there did.
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