- The Outline of a Ghost
The basic plot was simply that there was an old clock in which there was a booklet hidden, and the booklet gave the clue to the fact that the will was in a safe deposit box. Then there was detail on that, and the conflict of people wanting to get the old man's money. But that was the basic plot, which was a very old hackneyed thing. That's all there was.1
These are the recollections of Mildred A. Wirt Benson regarding the first manuscript she wrote in 1929 chronicling the adventures of Edward Stratemeyer's girl detective, Nancy Drew. The book was to be called The Secret of the Old Clock.
Edward Stratemeyer's Idea
Researchers of the enterprise of Edward Stratemeyer and his later Stratemeyer Syndicate know of his ingenious method of producing countless stories for boys and girls; he devised plots and brief outlines for his stable of ghostwriters to turn into 200-page novels. As a colleague of Horatio Alger, Jr., Stratemeyer had learned just what attracted the turn-of-the-century children and helped to satisfy that demand. With an imagination faster than fingers could type, he often hired chums from the pool of newspaper reporters for his staff of "ghosts." Once texts were completed and accepted, each of the writers would receive, to exchange for payment, a release to be signed and returned to Stratemeyer; they relinquished all claims and rights to that which they had just written. To these newspaper writers, this seemed not to be an unusual practice: more often than not, they saw their creative efforts go unacknowledged. Newspaper reports of the day rarely boasted the byline of their authors. When allowed to write creatively for Mr. Stratemeyer, most thought nothing of not being credited for their work. Moreover, it was quick, easy cash in the bank.
A graduate of the University of Iowa, Mildred Wirt Benson was the first woman to receive that university's degree in journalism. As a young [End Page 60] newspaperwoman Benson answered an advertisement, placed by Stratemeyer in a trade publication, that requested authors of books for children. She sent samples of her numerous published short stories to him and was hired to write the adventures of his then-popular heroine, Ruth Fielding. Beginning in 1927 with Ruth Fielding and her Great Scenario, she became author of that series through its final title, Ruth Fielding and her Crowning Victory, published in 1934.
With the growing popularity of his teen sleuths, the Hardy Boys, Stratemeyer decided to create a girl counterpart in the guise of one Nancy Drew. Wirt Benson's writing style on the Fielding books made her his obvious choice as author for the new series.
A.k.a. Carolyn Keene
As had happened with other writers hired by Edward Stratemeyer, Mildred Wirt Benson was supplied with one of her employer's synopses for that first title of the Drew series, which was to be written under the newly created pseudonym Carolyn Keene.
She described it as follows:
It was two or three pages, and it was all written together. There were no chapter endings. There was no cast of characters as such. There was just interrelationship, like "Nancy and her father, Carson Drew, a lawyer," or something like that.
(Benson 95)
Benson recalls having returned her finished manuscript to Stratemeyer:
I remember it vividly because I was rather crushed. He wrote that he thought I had departed from the pattern of the old series books that had been written. He said that the character in particular was too—this is a modern word, but the idea was that it was too flip. She was not the nambypamby type of heroine that had been dominating series books for many, many years prior to that and was an accepted type of heroine. He said I had missed it and he did not think that the publishers would probably either want it or care for it.
(117)
Contrary to his beliefs, the submitted manuscript was greeted with enthusiasm by Alexander Grosset and George Dunlap, who requested that Benson continue the series in the same mode...