As readers of series literature, we bring our own imaginations and histories to bear on any installment, and what we require most of the author. Both Adams and Benson’s contributions to the series are explored in Melanie Rehak’s Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her. More of a house type.” But “she was the owner of the business, so it wasn’t my place to think about it.” By some estimates, as many six different writers were involved in writing the original 56 Nancy Drew novels. That takes a good deal of work.” Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, Benson said, made Nancy into more of a “traditional sort of a heroine. One year I wrote 13 full-length books and held down a job besides. I wrote from early morning to late night for a good many years. I did it just like I did my newspaper work. In a 1999 interview with Salon, Bensen described the experience of writing as Carolyn Keene: “It was a day’s work. Her New York Times obituary describes Mildred Wirt Benson, a journalist from Iowa, as the actual writer of twenty-three of the first thirty Nancy Drew mysteries, including the first three in the series. Verbs of action, and polka-dotted with exclamation points and provocative questions.” Legend has it that Stratemeyer once crossed out a writer’s entire page worth of description and replaced it with a single word: “Boom!”īillman credits Stratemeyer himself with writing the first three Nancy Drew novels, and then passes the credit on to his daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who made Nancy less “bossy.” Stratemeyer Adams claimed credit as the series’ sole author because, she said, she supplied the plots and thoroughly edited the stories that the “half ghosts” provided. One of Stratemeyer’s writers, quoted in Billman’s study, explained the stylistic requirements succinctly: “A low death rate but plenty of plot. After Stratemeyer’s death in 1930 (the year the Nancy Drew series was released), his daughters, Harriet and Edna took over the family business.Ĭertain formulas naturally had to be followed to preserve the impression that each series was written by a single author. The Syndicate, not the author or even the publisher, retained the rights to all the novels. By 1930, he paid his writers between $50-$250 to write a two-hundred-page book. Stratemeyer would dream up a new series, write a 3-page outline for each volume, and then turn over the outline to a contract writer to finish. Both decisions proved to be wildly successful. The first was to ask his publishers to lower the price of his books from about $1.25 to 50 cents each and the second, spurred by overwhelming demand, was to hire other writers to flesh out his ideas. In The Secret of the Stratemyer Syndicate: Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and the Million Dollar Fiction Factory, Carol Billman writes that Stratemeyer was in the midst of “The Rover Boys,” “The Outdoor,” “Deep Sea,” and other series, when he took two major steps around 1906. What mattered most was that the product should possess a certain distinctive feel, and yet remain consistent from book to book. His central-and perhaps unsettling-insight was that, when it came to series fiction, it didn’t matter who in particular wrote the stories. He had sold several dime novels and was already a prolific writer himself before he hit on what was to become his hit-generating, money-making formula. Stratemeyer, the son of German immigrants, was born and lived in New Jersey.
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