Reconstruction Vol. 11, No. 3

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Sisters, Schoolgirls, and Sleuths. 184 pages. Hardcover $40, Kindle $28; The Boy Detectives. 220 pages. Paperback $35, Kindle $14.99; Making the Detective Story American. 231 pages. Paperback $35, Kindle $14.99; Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks. 496 pages. Paperback $16.99, Kindle $4.99.

<1> Four recent works seek to define the success of detective fiction, especially in its Golden Age (1920s-1940s), through examinations of its most memorable characters. Indeed, as Sisters, Schoolgirls, and Sleuths and The Boy Detectives acknowledge, children’s detective series have become synonymous with their most popular protagonists, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, at the expense of other notable yet largely forgotten child detectives. Likewise, a recent study of adult detective fiction of the Golden Age, Making the Detective Story American, focuses as much on the characterization of its most famous investigators--the Continental Op, Sam Spade, Charlie Chan, and Philo Vance--as it does on biographical and historical background or plot development. On the other side of the pond, although Agatha Christie wrote more than sixty detective novels and hundreds of short stories, those books featuring her famous detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple are among her most enduring; Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks reveals how much Christie relied upon her characters, rather than plot twists, as inspiration. Although they cover slightly different topics, all four works argue that characterization is more important than plot.

<2> Carolyn Carpan’s Sisters, Schoolgirls, and Sleuths (2009) follows other notable studies of girls’ detective series, including Ilana Nash’s American Sweethearts (2006) and the anthology Nancy Drew and Her Sister Sleuths (2008). Carpan’s interest in library studies and women’s studies shows in her focus upon the “sisters” and the “schoolgirls” rather than the “sleuths.” Carpan provides a decade-by-decade overview of trends in girls’ series, but in such a short book (ten chapters plus appendices), she can do little more than re-introduce the girl detectives. Nancy’s rivals--Judy Bolton (38 volumes by Margaret Sutton, 1932-67), Kay Tracey (18 volumes written under the house pseudonym Frances K. Judd, 1934-42), Penny Parker (17 volumes by the original Nancy Drew author, Mildred Wirt, 1939-47), and the Dana Girls (30 volumes from 1934-68 under the house pseudonym Carolyn Keene)—receive only cursory attention. These popular girl detectives await their own book-length treatment.

<3> Carpan’s book shines in the attention she pays to the non-detective series popular before and after Nancy’s domination (1930-1979). She discusses best sellers such as the Elsie Dinsmore series (28 volumes by Martha Finley, 1867-1905) and the Ruth Fielding series (30 volumes written under the house pseudonym Alice B. Emerson, 1913-34). Nor does Carpan neglect lesser-known orphan, high-school sports, college, camping, and motor series popular before 1930. Through her chronological approach, Carpan stresses that girls’ series changed along with American attitudes about female independence and social roles. Series about girls moved conservatively from religious morals and extreme sentimentality of Elsie Dinsmore in the decade after the Civil War to emphasize female bonding through sports, school, and travel at the turn of the century. These adventure series then evolved into mysteries featuring the independence and intellect of the lone girl detective of the late 1920s. Now that most of these series are in the public domain and available for free (or almost free) electronically, new scholarship may develop.

<4> After introducing Nancy and her many imitators from the 1930s and then noting the demise of the girl detective by the 1970s, Carpan concentrates on soap-opera romances, detailing the Sweet Valley High girls and their many paperback imitators from the 1980s and beyond. She spends a third of the book discussing the origin and intent of these series as well as noting common motifs, such as teenage sexuality and sexist depictions of girlhood. Overall, Sisters, Schoolgirls and Sleuths provides much-needed basic information about titles and plots while emphasizing historical and social trends in American girls’ series.

<5> Social bonding as an identity-shaper is a motif that also runs though the eleven essays in the anthology The Boy Detectives: Essays on the Hardy Boys and Others (2010). Almost half of the essays concern the Hardy Boys, who have been the subject of other books: The Hardy Boys Mysteries, 1927-1979: A Cultural and Literary History (2008) and The Secret of the Hardy Boys (2004). The essays explore ways that the Hardy Boys sustain their identities as “boy detectives” throughout 80 years and many updates to the series. Brian Taves’ chapter, “Strategies of Adaptation: The Hardy Boys on Television,” stands out by offering new research about this important but neglected part of the Hardy Boys canon--especially since some of the footage Taves discusses is not easily available.

<6> Although the sub-title indicates the inclusion of other boy detectives, the anthology’s scope is disappointing. There is a veritable who’s who of popular boy detectives, so where are the essays on Ken Holt (18 volumes under the pseudonym Bruce Campbell, 1949-63)? Rick Brant (24 volumes written under the house pseudonym John Blaine, 1947-68)? Or the prototype for Johnny Quest, Biff Brewster (13 volumes written under the pseudonym Andy Adams, 1960-65)? And Brains Benton (6 volumes by Charles Spain Verral, 1959-61)? Alas, the lone essay on The Three Investigators (the first nine volumes written by Robert Arthur, 1964-68) is little more than an introduction, making the obvious point that the personalities and skills of the three boys form one identity for the group. Two other essays more successfully address the complexities of merging identities: Tom Swift (written under the house pseudonym Victor Appleton, 1910-1941) is the subject of an essay on the influence of nineteenth-century attitudes on characterization, and Christopher Cool (a minor though well-regarded six-volume teen spy/detective series written under the house pseudonym Jack Lancer from 1967-69) is also served well by an overview by the editor. Poor sales of the Christopher Cool series is even explained by the merging of two popular 1960s genres; while he might be “cool,” Christopher can never fully reconcile his lone James-Bond maturity with his youthful identity as a teen safely investigating the world within the confines of his peer group of brothers, best buddies, and father-figures.

<7> The remaining essays, unfortunately, are about characters whose identities are not that of “boy detectives” nor shaped throughout a children’s series. Tom Murphy, the protagonist of a forgotten four-book series by Graham M. Dean, 1931-34, is a twenty-one year-old reporter and government agent, certainly no “boy.” The orphan Rasmus (the protagonist of Rasmus and the Tramp, 1961) is a one-book character created by Astrid Lindgren, who is better known for the Pippi Longstocking books. Christopher Boone, the subject of two essays, is the autistic narrator of Mark Haddon’s 2003 adult bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. The impression left by these selections is that the essayists were unfamiliar with the riches of the genre; boys’ detective series are still largely unexplored except by collectors.

<8> As J.K. Van Dover points out in his historical overview, Making the Detective Story American (2010), the same can be said of the greats of the Golden Age of adult detective fiction; they simply have never been the subject of enough scholarly attention. Dashiell Hammett, considered the most literary of the bunch, is the subject of 247 MLA entries, a number which Van Dover calls “respectable” compared to 589 entries about Sherlock Holmes. Agatha Christie has fewer total entries at 176. Earl Derr Biggers (who wrote the six Charlie Chan novels) gets a mere 13 entries. S.S. Van Dine (author of the 13 Philo Vance novels) musters only a pitiful 8, and Mary Roberts Rinehart (now remembered for the locked-room classic The Circular Staircase, 1907, and “the butler did it” solution) is not much better served with 12 entries (Van Dover 27). Van Dover provides biographical material for Biggers, Van Dine, and Hammett, but his focus remains on the characters that they created.

<9> Van Dover proposes that the lasting appeal of Hammett’s novels comes from detectives who are “lowbrow” and anti-intellectual—as opposed to Van Dine’s now largely forgotten novels featuring “highbrow” New York socialite Philo Vance, who was drawn in the much-imitated, out-of-fashion tradition of Dupin and Holmes. Van Dover positions Charlie Chan uneasily between the two extremes, stressing that Chan’s intellect challenges Asian stereotypes such as Fu Manchu (13 volumes written by Sax Rohmer, 1913-59), illiterate servants, and opium addicts so popular in pulp literature of the 1920s and 30s. To emphasize the contrast between highbrow and lowbrow attitudes, Van Dover provides social and historical context: he devotes a chapter each to 1) popular trends, such as cults and séances, associated with Golden Age crime 2) ethnic and gender stereotypes and 3) real-life crimes adapted into Golden Age fiction, comparing Van Dine’s Benson Murder Case (1926) and Canary Murder Case (1927) to the newspaper accounts on which they were based. Finally, Van Dover singles out Biggers’ first Chan novel, House without a Key (1925), as a first-rate novel; The Black Camel (1929), Chan’s Hollywood mystery, is not far behind. Hammett’s novels receive praise, with much discussion going to Red Harvest (1929). Overall, Van Dover thoroughly explains the cultural milieu that produced the American (male) detective.

<10> Another immensely valuable contribution to the study of the Golden Age is John Curran’s 2009 explication of excerpts from Agatha Christie’s handwritten notes, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, which are still owned by her estate and have not been released for public viewing. Christie kept more notebooks of plot ideas, titles, and character descriptions than she was able to use--a few pictures of actual pages are included--and they are a treasure trove of insight into Christie’s method. Most striking is the fact that Christie really did plan “whodunits”; she delineated characters by name, occupation, relationships, and motivation (the “who”) long before she sorted out the particulars of the plot (the “how”). For example, the notebooks reveal that well into the drafting, Christie seriously entertained characters other than the little girl as the murderer in Crooked House (1949), a novel known for its disturbing conclusion. Christie also added the controlling ideas of alphabetically named victims as well as the titular ABC train timetable clue long after beginning The ABC Murders (1936), recognized as one of the first serial-killer novels. Thus, the evidence of the notebooks reveals that rather than starting with a shocking premise (e.g., what if a child committed murder? what if a serial killer chose his victims alphabetically?), Christie often turned to characterization as the impetus for a murder mystery.

<11> Concerning Christie’s most famous characters, Curran also presents new information about the last Marple and Poirot novels (books which Christie wrote in her prime then locked away for publication upon her death) and compares several short stories and plays not discussed elsewhere to their novel-length treatments. Often Christie toyed with interchanging Marple and Poirot, deliberating in early drafts which detective would best suit an investigation, and she often changed lead characters, along with the endings, for stage adaptations. Curran received permission to reprint two uncollected Poirot stories and outlines their development from notebook-scribble to full manuscript; one is the original short version of Dumb Witness (1937). As shown by Curran’s point-by-point comparison, Christie retained the basic plot of this short story but extended the characterization to develop it into the novel. In all, Curran has done an excellent job of reading Christie’s intentions (not to mention her handwriting) and sorting out dead-end ideas across notebooks that were neither dated, labeled, nor organized in any chronological fashion. For the textual scholar interested in process and authorial intent, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks provides invaluable primary source material available nowhere else.

<12> In fact, all four of these studies offer readings of texts not readily available. Most of the series discussed in these books have been long out of print, overlooked and ignored for the most famous titles in the genre. Even the most familiar series, such as Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, have become victims of their own success. With over 400 titles each, assessment of these series becomes an overwhelming task. As evidenced by the anthology essays on Tom Swift and The Three Investigators and upon Carpan’s readings of girl detectives, many studies touch on only the first few volumes of a series out of sheer practicality; however, such an approach at best seems incomplete to series fans, who frankly often know more about these books than the academics who analyze them. Adult detective fiction of the Golden Age also turns silver from its own success, for countless black-and-white movies and TV episodes adapted and continued the investigations of “the famous detective” without necessarily bothering with the original plots. Even Agatha Christie’s canon suffers from the sheer confusion of titles and the interchangeability of manor house settings and family discord. It is no wonder then that characterization runs through each of the four books reviewed here, for it is those characters that we remember from the Golden Age.

Works Cited

Carpan, Carolyn. Sisters, Schoolgirls, and Sleuths: Girls’ Series Books in America. Scarecrow Studies in Young Adult Literature 30. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow P, 2009. Kindle.

Connelly, Mark. The Hardy Boys Mysteries, 1927-1979: A Cultural and Literary History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008. Print.

Cornelius, Michael G., ed. The Boy Detectives: Essays on the Hardy Boys and Others. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. Kindle.

---, and Melanie Gregg, eds. Nancy Drew and Her Sister Sleuths: Essays on the Fiction of Girl Detectives. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008. Print.

Curran, John. Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making. London: HarperCollins, 2009. Kindle.

Greenwald, Marilyn S. The Secret of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Athens: Ohio UP, 2004. Print.

Nash, Ilana. American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006. Print.

Van Dover, J.K. Making the Detective Story American: Biggers, Van Dine and Hammett and the Turning Point of the Genre, 1925-1930. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. Kindle.

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