Nobody’s little girl: Nancy Drew goes to the movies

Abstract

In the space of less than a year, Nancy Drew, the doyenne of girl detectives, headlined four films at Warner Bros. Nancy’s case differed from those of other female detectives, such as Hildegarde Withers and Torchy Blane, in part because she was so much younger but also because she was already an industrial product even before her movie sale. Unlike Stuart Palmer and Frederick Nebel, who wrote the books about Hildegarde Withers and Torchy Blane respectively, Nancy Drew’s author, Carolyn Keene, was a legal fiction, a collective pseudonym for an army of anonymous contributors. Under this arrangement the Stratemeyer Syndicate, established by Edward Stratemeyer in 1906, launched a vast number of children’s book franchises, drafted outlines for each volume in every series, contracted the writing and editing of individual volumes, sent the finished products to Grosset and Dunlap for publication, and closely monitored sales figures to determine which series should continue and which should expire. Although Stratemeyer died only a few months after the 1930 publication of The Secret of Old Clock, the first Nancy Drew mystery, the Drew franchise, supervised by his daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, and written largely in its earliest years by Mildred Wirt (later Mildred Wirt Benson), became his most successful.