BookScapes #1
How I Got to be Carolyn Keene When I Grew Up
I had to smile when I saw Deb Marsh’s comment on Monday’s Senior Chronicle. Maybe you will, too: “I think Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden are imbedded in my DNA,” she wrote. “Any book with an old house, rickety barn, lost letters, hidden secrets works well for me!”
Still works pretty well for me—and I suspect for you, too. By the time many of us were in fifth grade, we had devoured every Nancy we could get our hands on. We raided the library, scouted the local bookstore, traded with friends, and plundered our aunts’ and cousins’ bookshelves. After all, the books had been around since since 1930 (The Secret of the Old Clock), and by 1960 (The Clue in the Old Stagecoach) there were 37 titles. Plenty to keep us busy.
Well, they kept me busy, anyway. I’m not sure I’d read all 35 published Nancys by the time I graduated high school, but I’d read most of them, and I knew who I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be Carolyn Keene.
Not strictly speaking, of course. I’d read somewhere that Carolyn Keene was a pseudonym, and that 23 of the first 30 books were really written by Mildred Hirt Benson for the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which created Nancy. I was reading other women writers, too: Louisa May Alcott (Little Women), Laura Ingalls Wilder (the Little House books), Helen Dore Boylston (Sue Barton, Nurse), Shirley Jackson (Life Among the Savages). Women whose wonderful books I read and reread until I almost knew them by heart. I enjoyed the work of other women, especially mystery authors Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Dorothy Sayers. But I didn’t aspire to write, as they did, for grownups. I was still a teen. I wanted to write for readers like me: girls, teens. I wanted to be Carolyn Keene.
The 1950s and early 60s were a fine time to be writing for kids, with over two dozen monthly magazines, all of them looking for content. I’ve written about that over here, if you’re interested, so I’ll just say that in those five years I learned what I needed to know and do as a freelance magazine writer and went on to the Next Thing, which for me was college and then grad school and then teaching, accompanied (of course) with all the necessary academic research and writing—all of which kept me busy for the next decade-and-a-half of my life.
But by 1983, I was thoroughly fed up with academic politics. Remembering the pleasure of writing for teens in those early days, I decided to try it again. I picked up some young adult series books at a bookstore, wrote a precis and three sample chapters, and sold it under my then-married-name, Susan Blake. It appeared as Summer Breezes, #60 in the Bantam Sweet Dreams series. Encouraged, I wrote a YA paranormal, The Haunted Dollhouse, and sold it to Dell’s Twilight series (#22, 1984), also as Susan Blake.
And then, one late summer afternoon in 1985, the telephone rang. The male caller introduced himself as an editor from Mega-Books, a book packaging company that was working with publisher Simon & Schuster to produce Nancy Drew books. S&S had bought the franchise from the Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1984, he said, and intended to update it with a new series called the Case Files. Tasked with recruiting authors, he had happened to pick up The Haunted Dollhouse at a bookstore and liked it. The next words out of his mouth were “How would you like to be Carolyn Keene?”
How would I . . . How would I like . . How would I like to be Carolyn Keene? CAROLYN KEENE?
Did I? I did. Of course I did! Wouldn’t you? It took a while to catch my breath and a whole lot longer to understand that the phone call had changed my life in ways it would be hard to comprehend. If nothing else, it taught me that we are creatures of random luck, as much as intention and plan. What were the chances that this editor would lay eyes on Dollhouse?
My first Nancy was a book called White Water Terror, followed by several more Nancys and a pair of Hardy Boys, written alone or with husband Bill Albert (also my partner on our Robin Paige series). For me, it was an apprenticeship in how a series of books is created, how to work with editors on development, revision, and production, and how to complete a project under deadline even when your personal world is going to hell all around you. I also learned about writing for readers, as you must when you’re writing for kids. And I learned to write with an emphasis on story and characterization rather than literary style. These things shaped my writing in ways I still notice today.
It started with Nancy, but it didn’t end there. I went on to work with over a dozen different publishers in as many different series, learning something new with every book, every editor. By the time I began to think of moving on to Another Next Thing, there were 60-some YA titles on my booklist, books I had written alone or with my husband/co-author Bill, many of them still (amazingly) in print.
Another Next Thing? It was 1991 and “cozy” mysteries were just beginning to show up on the market. There was Carolyn Hart (the Death on Demand series), Nancy Atherton (Aunt Dimity), Diane Mott Davidson (Goldy Schultz), Lillian Jackson Braun (the Cat-Who books), and several others.
It was time for Thyme of Death, the first China Bayles mystery. And where that book might take me, I could never have guessed.
Interested in the wild and wonderful history of Nancy Drew? Read Melanie Reehak’s fascinating 2006 study, Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her. For a more recent look at how the later books were produced and who-did-what at Mega-Books during the years I was writing there, take a look at this interesting post by James Keeline. And if you’re curious, here’s a list of the titles in my long-ago past. (The adult titles need updating, the YA are complete.)
Your Turn. My next novel, Someone Always Nearby, is coming in November. To celebrate, I have an ARC (advanced reading copy) to share. If you’d like a chance to win a signed copy, leave a comment on this post telling us about the books that you loved as a young reader. I’ll email the winner (chosen randomly—there’s that luck thing again) on Thursday.
My mother encouraged me to read, thanks be. She let me buy books from the “Weekly Reader” I remember the Dr Seuss books from that. Then off to the library for the Oz books. Once I clearly enjoying reading mom suggested that I read “My Family and Other Animals “ by Gerald Durrell. Then progressed to all of his zoo series.
Then in teen years friends at school were reading “Lord of the Rings” and on to science fiction. I have come to mystery stories only in my later adult years. I can not remember a time when I didn’t have a book on the bedside table.
Before I was gifted my first Nancy Drew (geez I wonder if my mom still has it - she saved everything!) I fell in love with Betsy and Tacy, then Betsy, Tacy and Tib, all the way through Betsy’s Wedding. The author was Maud Hart Lovelace and they were published before I was born. Still I loved them so much.