Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, and: Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book (review)

If asked what Nancy Drew and Superman have in common, most readers would agree that they are American cultural icons, names almost everyone knows. Fewer would list their other common factors. Both were created in the 1930s in media (dime novels and comic books) considered trashy by many social arbiters, and both survived most of their contemporaries. Ruth Fielding, the Motor Girls, Slam Bradley, and Clip Carson have faded into obscurity, their names familiar only to aficionados of their genres, while Nancy Drew and Superman continue to enthrall new readers with each generation.

Girl Sleuth begins with Nancy Drew's creator, Edward Stratemeyer, whose Stratemeyer Syndicate was a leading publisher of dime novels, which later became "fifty-centers," cheap novels for young readers, and eventually inexpensive hardbacks. Stratemeyer's best-known creations are probably Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Within the framework of discussing the syndicate and the history of such pulp novels, Melanie Rehak focuses on the two women who wrote most of Nancy Drew's adventures: her original writer, Mildred Wirt Benson, and Benson's successor, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who managed the syndicate after her father's death. Both women wrote under the name Carolyn Keene.

Adams graduated from Wellesley and, as expected in those days, married well. She played no role in her father's business until after his death, when she became the head of the syndicate. Her sister initially shared the responsibility, but their relationship deteriorated, eventually leaving Adams in charge. Over the years, partly because of financial considerations and partly because of affection for the character, Adams became increasingly protective of Nancy Drew. She eventually supplanted Benson as Nancy's writer altogether.

Rehak suggests that much of Nancy's adventurous character stems from Benson's own experiences. Benson grew up in Iowa, where she participated in Chautauqua seminars and high school athletics. As an adult journalist, she traveled to the far corners of the world, earning her pilot's license at age fifty-nine. She also dabbled in archaeology and worked as a journalist until her death at age ninety-six in 2002.

The contrast between Adams's life and Benson's provides a look at the slow evolution of women's social roles during the seventy-five years Nancy Drew has been in print. Adams's position at the publishing house was unusual for a woman of her time, and Rehak notes that Adams obtained her husband's support before assuming the position. Benson's adventures were equally rare for a woman of her era.

One of the most interesting parts of Girl Sleuth deals with the lawsuit between Grosset and Dunlap, the Stratemeyer Syndicate's original hardcover publisher, and Simon and Schuster, the publishing house Adams chose to replace them. The two houses battled over rights to future publication of the Stratemeyer titles. In the process, the fact that Carolyn Keene, Nancy Drew's supposed author, was a syndicate pseudonym came out, and Benson received the recognition her contract as a ghostwriter had initially denied her. Rehak explores the publishing world and the lives of Adams and Benson but never loses her focus on Nancy Drew. This is an enjoyable and informative book.

Men of Tomorrow also contains threads of social history. Many of the men who created the comic book industry sprang from the Jewish community of New York's Lower East Side in the early 1900s. Those social influences shaped their thinking and their habits. Selling newspapers led to work in the printing and distribution business and then into pulp magazines and pornography; eventually—accidentally—the comic book industry was launched as this community sought an enterprise less vulnerable legally. Harry Donenfeld, Hugo Gernsback, Will Eisner, Bob Kane, Stan Lee, William Moulton Marston, and Julius Schwartz all play prominent roles in...