Girl Detectives Blog

Dizzy Lark and her chums in Bayou City Burning inherit a long and distinguished legacy from more than a century of girl detectives who came before them—a history that began long before Nancy Drew first drove her “new, dark-blue convertible” onto the scene in 1930. In this blog, I’ll tell you about some of these spunky young women. For the purposes of my research and this blog, a “girl detective” is a single young woman in her teens or early twenties.

This figure first appears in the dime novels of the late nineteenth century, where the frequent inclusion of gothic elements links her to the courageous and curious gothic heroines of the mid- to late eighteenth centuries. In fact, the first gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), featured two such heroines, who defy corrupt paternal and royal authority and explore forbidden spaces in the service of justice and self-defense. The type of the timid, fainting gothic heroine so deliciously spoofed by Jane Austen in her youth (Love and Freindship [sic], 1790) was less common than might be generally supposed. It’s true that Emily St. Aubert faints dead away in Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), but she does so after defying the injunction against lifting the veil on an infamous veiled picture to see what lies beneath. When we consider that at the time, she’s been kidnapped and transported to a creepy moldering castle in a foreign country, we can applaud her determination and excuse a momentary weakness. And we shouldn’t be surprised that one of Anne Radcliffe’s early biographers, Clara Frances McIntyre, identified Radcliffe’s work as a forerunner of later detective fiction (Ann Radcliffe in Relation to Her Time, 1920).

In the second half of the nineteenth century, dime novels and story papers provided cheap thrills for the masses—and probably for many of their middle- and upper-class counterparts. Detective stories and westerns were two popular genres, and some stories crossed the boundaries between them. The need for publishers to fill these monthly papers and wrestle readers away from their competitors led writers to imagine a wide range of sleuths—the more sensational, the better—not just an Irish, Italian, French, or Yankee detective, say, but a “magic disguise” detective, a gypsy detective, a Wall Street detective, a ventriloquist detective, a “magic trick” detective, and a bicycle detective, to name a few. Lady detectives offered yet another oddity, and were presumably even more sensational if they, too, crossed categories, such as Italian or French or gypsy women detectives, the lady bicycle detective, and the lady barber detective (a western crossover).

I’m going to start here with one of my favorites from the dime novels, New York Nell.

Interested in the history of professional literary women detectives? Check out Bob Schneider's Women Detectives time chart.

Augusta Huiell Seaman, A Founding Mother

May 1, 2020 By D.B. Borton 2 Comments

THE SAPPHIRE SIGNET: Sisters and Friends — THE SAPPHIRE SIGNET: Sisters and friends

Closer kin to Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton than L. Frank Baum’s professional young Secret Service agent Josie O’Gorman were Augusta Huiell Seaman’s girl detectives. Seaman was a prolific writer who wrote more than forty books, most of them mysteries for girls. In 1915 at the time she published her first mystery, The Boarded-Up House, first as a serial in the children’s magazine St. Nicholas, publishers were only just beginning to recognize girl readers as a viable target market distinct from boys.

The typical Seaman protagonists were a pair of teenage girlfriends (“chums” is a word that appears often) or sisters, sometimes with a male cousin thrown in to provide colorful language (see below). These girls often present a contrast in appearance and temperament, as in The Dragon’s Secret (1921): “Leslie was slight and dark in appearance, rather timid in disposition, and inclined to be shy and hesitant in manner. Phyllis was quite the opposite—large and plump and rosy, courageous and independent, jolly, and often headlong and thoughtless in action.” Think plump Bess and boyish George, with some attributes redistributed. What the best of friends in these books have in common is their passion for reading. The invalid Margaret Bronson (whose favorite book is Little Women — did you guess?) in The Sapphire Signet (1916) “loved books—loved them with the passionate delight that only confirmed invalids can feel for the printed magic that takes them out of themselves and makes them forget their bodily ills” and “read voraciously everything that came her way.” In The Shadow on the Dial (1927), sixteen-year-old Naomi says that her sister Enid “adores mystery and detective stories.” Fourteen-year-old Doris shares books with her new friend Sally in The Slipper Point Mystery (1921), and fifteen-year-old Bernice shares books with her new friend Delight in The Mystery at Number Six (1922).

THE BOARDED-UP HOUSE: "Oh, I wish I were Sherlock Holmes!" — THE BOARDED-UP HOUSE: “Oh, I wish I were Sherlock Holmes!”

What do they most like to read? Mysteries, of course, and Sherlock Holmes mysteries in particular. Reading fuels their longing for adventure, and Holmes is the model they attempt to follow in exploring mysteries. In The Boarded-Up House, Joyce tells her best friend Cynthia, “Why, it’s an adventure, Cynthia, like the kind we’ve always longed for. You know we’ve always said we’d love to have some adventures, above everything else.” The invalid Margaret in The Sapphire Signet confides to her mother, “Oh, I want some adventures — just one nice, big, beautiful adventure would do!” One can’t help thinking of Jane Eyre, who wrote, “It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity [sic]: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. . . .Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do.” Conan Doyle’s Holmes mysteries may also explain the frequent inclusion of codes and ciphers in these books.

And speaking of Jane Eyre, there are plenty of Gothic houses in these books, often forbidden spaces that the girls explore, their consciences taxed but not overtaxed by the knowledge that they are trespassing. These houses conceal secrets from the past, including papers, journals, and artifacts that reveal the turbulent histories of their former residents. A favorite theme is a family torn apart by a violent quarrel, later regretted, sometimes having to do with opposing sides in the Civil War. (Contemporary readers should be warned that Southern settings often feature stereotypical black characters.)

As to the protagonists’ own families, these are interesting, too. I’ve written before about the inconvenience of mothers to the development of a girl detective. According to Christine M. Volk, though, Seaman’s own mother died when she was nine, and she spent time living with relatives, so that may provide a more obvious explanation for the missing mothers in Seaman’s novels: some are dead, some are ailing, and at least one is a working single mother, so they are rarely around to interfere with their daughters’ adventures. Fathers, when present, can also suffer poor health or be absent on business. But the father in The Sapphire Signet is an interesting case. While the father of the Bronson sisters is dead, their friend Corinne’s father is actually permitted entry into the girls’ secret society, the Antiquarian Club, on Corinne’s enthusiastic recommendation: “He and I are such chums! . . . He romps around with me as though he were only sixteen!” Mr. Cameron is also in poor health, however, and it is this poor health that enables a trip to Bermuda to solve the club’s mystery. Mr. Cameron is a clear forerunner of Carson Drew.

Brothers in these books are mostly a nuisance, but boy cousins and boy friends occasionally come in handy. Along with a wider geographical range than the girls, these boys sometimes introduce a wider verbal range as well. The horrid Alexander, a thirteen-year-old who

THE DRAGON'S SECRET: Girls Trespassing — THE DRAGON’S SECRET: Girls Trespassing

spies on them, is permitted into the Antiquarian Club grudgingly by his cousins, again at the urging of Corinne, who exclaims, “Did you ever hear such a glorious collection of slang!” Alexander’s cousin Bess has a very different reaction: “His language is so dreadful and slangy! It irritates me to pieces.” When sisters Naomi and Enid first meet their new friend Ronny in The Shadow on the Dial, “his slang somewhat took the girls’ breath away.” These boys’ speech adds color to the books, but it also follows a recurring theme in girl detective fiction generally. The young women sleuths who populated the dime novels of the nineteenth century had to master slang in order to become masters of disguise; in order to impersonate men and enter spaces forbidden to women, they had to talk the talk as well as walk the walk, and the impropriety of their speech is often commented on.

Seaman’s long career demonstrates the success of her formula, but for a more personal tribute, read Christine Volk’s “Nancy Drew for Smart Kids: Mysteries by Augusta Huiell Seaman.” She describes her reaction to the typical Seaman plot, a reaction similar to mine when I, an avid Nancy Drew fan, discovered the more commonplace pleasures of Judy Bolton: “This was a situation in which my friend – another reader of Seaman’s books – and I could easily imagine ourselves becoming involved. While we read, and liked, the Nancy Drew mysteries, Nancy’s ability to travel on a whim almost anywhere in the world was so far outside of our own personal experience that we never really expected to live in one of her stories.”

Some of Seaman’s books are widely available free from Project Gutenberg, Hathi Trust, and Amazon, as well as in low-cost reprint editions. You should know, though, that many of these editions do not include the original illustrations, although the Project Gutenberg versions do.

Belle Boyd, Ex-Pinkerton and Girl Detective

February 28, 2020 By D.B. Borton 2 Comments

In Allan Arnold’s Belle Boyd, The Girl Detective, a dime novel published in the New York Detective Library in 1891, our heroine is a gun-toting, cross-dressing, larger-than-life crimefighter, a former Pinkerton who is described by one miscreant as “the boss detective of Chicago and the West” (4). Full disclosure: this is a ham-fisted potboiler of a novel, complete with ghosts, demonstrating all of the racial stereotyping typical of the dime novels. But it’s useful for our purposes in its portrait of the fearless girl detective.

In the first scene in the novel, 18-year-old Belle is dressed in men’s clothing, wields two revolvers, and talks the confident slangy talk of the streets, even though she will soon demonstrate in her speech the education of a middle-class young woman. We’re told that the setting is “a miserable room in one of those dark and threatening houses down among the slums” (2) and the hour is midnight, so she is where no respectable, or indeed sensible, young lady should be. As she confronts Sneaky Sim, one of the criminals she’s been tracking, with a revolver and tells him to drop his knife lest she be “necessitated to perforate yer” (2), the narrator informs us, “This Belle Boyd, who was at the date of which we are writing the most wonderful female detective in the world, had become the terror of the criminal class of Chicago” (2).

The crowded plot involves kidnapping, murder, forced marriage, and plunder (ships are lured to the rocks to be wrecked, their valuables taken and survivors killed), though the main thread with which we’re concerned is the chief villain’s scheme to discredit an heiress’s honorable suitor so that he can marry her himself, by force, if necessary. It’s interesting to note how often in these early stories a bold and accomplished girl detective is contrasted with a victimized, helpless young woman in whose cause she becomes enlisted (and that is not a plot that dies before Nancy Drew appears on the scene); these helpless women represent the likely fate of any woman, the girl detective included, who doesn’t train herself to resist, preferably with arms. Belle also resorts to chloroform and drugged whiskey when necessary, but she is a crack shot, at one point shooting down a telegraph line. In yet another scene, she catches a small dynamite shell in her bare hand (!). During the course of the case, Belle assumes many disguises, including that of “a young and handsome gentleman, dressed in the height of fashion, and wearing a little wax moustache” (6). As in the opening scene, these disguises allow her entry into places forbidden to most women.

But one of the main attractions for me is Belle’s sidekick, 10-year-old Billy, “a type of the shrewd street Arabs of Chicago” (5), whom Belle rescues in the opening scene and whose undying loyalty she wins. Billy calls her “Beller,” becomes her protégé, sometime rescuer and full-time cheerleader. Such sidekicks, treated by the girl detective as a younger brother and useful for tracking criminals, hiding in small spaces, and listening in, are not uncommon in the annals of girl detection, but Billy is one of my favorites.

SPOILER ALERT: Like other girl detectives, Belle has a Secret in the form of a—you guessed it—tragic love affair, ended, she believes, by the murder of her lover. But anything can happen in this novel. So in the end, the disgraced suitor’s reputation is restored and he is permitted to marry the heiress. Billy turns out to be the long-lost son of the disgraced suitor’s wealthy uncle, and, restored to his father, “was sent to college, and afterward became a first-class professional detective” (31). And one of the stout-hearted miners that the suitor has enlisted in their cause (are you following this?) turns out to be Belle’s long-lost lover, so yes, reader, she marries him.

Note: The real Belle Boyd (Isabella Maria Boyd), known as “the Cleopatra of the Secession” and “the siren of the Shenandoah,” was a pistol-wielding Confederate spy during the Civil War. Alan Pinkerton assigned three men to catch her, and in fact, she was arrested multiple times, but never brought to trial; at one point she was released in a prisoner exchange, at another because she had contracted typhoid fever. She married three times, the second ending in divorce, and earned a living as a stage actress after the war. She is an appropriate role model for the detective in this story, who takes her name; the detective’s real name is Mary Fogg.

Author Allan Arnold, pen name for H. K. Shackleford, primarily wrote boys’ adventure fiction. I was not able to find an online version of this novel.

Josie O’Gorman, Secret Agent

February 4, 2020 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

Dorothy of Oz fame wasn’t the only adventurous girl hero created by L. Frank Baum. Often writing under pseudonyms, Baum loved to put girls and young women at the heart of a mystery. Writing as Edith Van Dyne, Baum published four novels in the Mary Louise series beginning in 1916; a fifth book was completed after Baum’s death by Emma Speed Sampson, who continued the series with three additional books. The series was intended to focus on the titular character, Mary Louise, but for many the true center of interest was the detective Josie O’Gorman, which Sampson and the publishers recognized by giving Josie her own book, Josie O’Gorman, in 1919. Josie is one of the candidates for the title of first modern girl detective, in part because her books were written for girls, not adults (though sadly, not illustrated).

In the first book, Mary Louise, 15-year-old Mary Louise Burrows discovers that her mother and her adored Gran’pa Jim, with whom she and her mother live since her father’s death, have disappeared in the middle of the night, and that he is wanted by the government for giving state secrets to the enemy. Before this happens, her grandfather has told her to write to him care of his attorney. After a brief interrogation by a blustering Secret Service agent, she leaves school and travels on her own to see the attorney, an old family friend named Conant, but she is followed. The detective who follows her turns out to be the famed John O’Gorman of the Secret Service, who speaks kindly to her, pays for a hotel room, and treats her to breakfast, telling her that she reminds him of his own daughter.

The Conants invite Mary Louise to spend the summer with them at Hillcrest Lodge, their rented summer place, which they hope will be remote enough to discourage the government’s unwanted attentions. Their new neighbor is a fashionable single woman, accompanied by a secretary, whom Mary Louise and her new friend Irene Conant come to know and like. When a dull-witted Irish girl shows up at the door claiming to have been offered employment by the house’s owners, the Conants hire her for the summer. In fact, the plan to avoid government agents fails because the woman neighbor and her secretary are crack Secret Service agents, and the dull-witted Irish girl is none other than Josie O’Gorman, John O’Gorman’s daughter, who has been trained in detective work from her infancy. It is Josie who brings back Gran’pa Jim and establishes his innocence to the astonishment of the two women agents. They have heard of Josie, but never met her: “Everyone who knew O’Gorman had often heard of his daughter Josie, of whom he was accustomed to speak with infinite pride. He always said he was training her to follow his own profession and that when the education was complete Josie O’Gorman would make a name for herself in the detective service” (1^st World Library edition, p. 181).

In subsequent books in the series, Mary Louise continues to encounter various mysteries that need solving, and to engage Josie, now a good friend, to solve them. In fact, after the death of her father, Josie moves to the same town to be close to Mary Louise, even though her increasingly busy detective career often takes her away. We learn more about her training, carefully supervised by her father, and her passion for her work: “Josie O’Gorman loved mysteries for their own sake. She loved them because they required solutions, and to solve a mystery is not only interesting but requires a definite amount of talent” (Mary Louise Solves a Mystery, 1917, Echo Library Edition, p. 74). Published during the war years and soon after, these books are often patriotic, even jingoistic.

Nancy Drew and my own girl detective, Dizzy Lark, are direct descendants of Josie O’Gorman, and students of girl detectives will be interested in both similarities and differences. Most notably, Baum does not make Josie beautiful, like Titian-haired Nancy Drew: “Josie O’Gorman was small and ‘pudgy’—her own expression—red-haired and freckle-faced and snub-nosed. Her eyes redeemed much of this personal handicap, for they were big and blue as turquoises and as merry and innocent in expression as the eyes of a child” (Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls, 1918, Biblio Bazaar edition, p. 52). Like girl detectives who came before her, Josie is a master of disguise, with a talent for deception not generally encouraged in girls and young women. And Mary Louise and her friends are referred to as “chums” (Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls, 1918, Biblio Bazaar edition, p. 40, for example)—a word that I will always associate with Nancy, George, and Bess.

Some of the Mary Louise books are available from Project Gutenberg:

Mary Louise, 1916

Mary Louise in the Country, 1916

Mary Louise Solves a Mystery, 1917

Mary Louise Adopts a Soldier, 1919 (with Emma Speed Sampson)

Josie O’Gorman, 1919 (Emma Speed Sampson)

Mary Louise at Dorfield, 1920 (Emma Speed Sampson)

Mary Louise Stands the Test, 1921 (Emma Speed Sampson)

Violet Strange, the Debutante Detective

January 6, 2020 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

In her landmark 1979 book Murderess Ink, Dilys Winn identifies Anna Katharine Green as one of the “founding mothers” of detective fiction, and notes that up until the rediscovery of Seeley Regester’s The Dead Letter (1867), Green was credited with writing the first cozy detective novel, The Leavenworth Case (1878), which introduced many of the characters and plot devices with which we’re familiar today. In two subsequent novels featuring the same detective, Ebenezer Gryce, The Affair Next Door (1897) and Lost Man’s Lane (1898), Green introduced the first spinster detective, Amelia Butterworth, forerunner to Miss Marple, Maud Silver, and others. Then in 1915, Green created a girl detective, debutante Violet Strange, in The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange, a collection of linked stories.

Violet is strange in many ways, the most puzzling of which is her willingness to undertake detective work despite her social status and apparent wealth. The police chief who hires her is compelled to entice her to take a case by engaging her interest, and yet admits that “the consent he had thought dependent upon sympathetic interest could be reached more readily by the promise of a large emolument” (32). When her employer brings her a case that she regards as distasteful, she scolds him, “I should not be asked to touch the sordid or the bloody . . . . What do you see in me, or miss in me, that you should drag me into an atmosphere of low-down crime?” (68). On another occasion, she dictates that a case “must be an interesting one,” and further specifies, “It must not involve death or any kind of horror. If you have a case of subtlety without crime, one to engage my powers without depressing my spirits, I beg you to let me have it” (139). Once when Violet feigns indifference, the wily chief leaves behind an envelope of notes on a case, knowing that her curiosity will induce her to read them; as she dances and socializes that evening, her thoughts are not on her adoring partner, but on the hints that the chief has dropped regarding the case: “A woman difficult to understand! A mysterious house—possibly a mysterious crime!” (187). To add to the puzzle, Violet’s detective work must be kept secret, particularly from her father. We are never told how old she is, but presume that her debut was fairly recent.

Violet specializes in cases involving high society, in which as a debutante she can move freely without blowing her cover. In Problem 1, “The Golden Slipper,” for example, she attends a house party to safeguard a priceless jewel necklace, and then discovers the culprit when the necklace is stolen. In more than one case, in spite of her abhorrence of violence, she clears innocent suspects of murder. In Problem 4, “The Grotto Spectre,” she achieves this end by impersonating the ghost of the murdered woman (as illustrated in the frontispiece above). As this detail suggests, the world in which she moves is a blend of sparkling modernity and Gothic gloom; in a missing will case, she describes the house in which she is staying: “had it been taken bodily from some historic abbey of the old world, it could not have expressed more fully, in structure and ornamentation, the Gothic idea at its best” (154).

Like other girl detectives, including Nancy Drew, Violet Strange is motherless, since it is difficult to pursue adventures with an affectionate and attentive mama hovering about. She has instead, like Nancy, a father, who, however loving toward her, turns out to be the source of Violet’s problems. We learn in Problem 9, “Violet’s Own,” that he has disinherited Violet’s sister, who married her music master and lives in poverty, now a widow. Since the sister is too proud to accept money from any other family member, Violet’s detective career will finance the sister’s further musical training, which will permit her to support herself. Violet explains, “The money I have earned has been immense; since it was the troubles of the rich I was given to settle, and I was almost always successful” (424).

Like Nancy, Violet is privileged in her ability to move about freely, although her chauffeured limousine is both more luxurious and more constraining than the various cars Nancy owns and drives herself. Unlike her predecessors in the dime novels, as a relatively sheltered young lady, Violet cannot travel alone to questionable places; she must take her brother into her confidence and ask him to accompany her on such occasions.

All of this information is presented in the final problem by way of a confession to the man she is about to marry. Yes, dear reader, Violet’s detecting days are over, and we may be disappointed in this conventionally feminine ending. She is not, however, marrying one of the society swains who surround her at balls and house parties and teas, but a rather melancholy man whom she has cleared of charges that he murdered his first wife. With that, I suppose we must rest content. After all, the liberated Twenties are still five years in the future.

To read the full text of The Golden Slipper, click here.

New York Nell

December 11, 2019 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

In New York Nell, The Boy-Girl Detective: or, Old Blakesly’s Money (1880), by Edward L. Wheeler, the title character Nell Niblo swaggers onto the scene in the character of a newsboy selling papers on a street car in Philadelphia. We see her through the eyes of Redmond Blakesly, a bit of a rube who can be excused for his surprise at beholding this cross-dressed urchin at a time when cross-dressing was illegal. He strikes up an acquaintance with her to learn her story. She tells him she’s from New York, but “had to skip out, because I p’izened a butcher’s big ugly dog, an’ the cops was going to put me in the Tombs.” (Later, she returns to New York, and we hear no more of the impending arrest there.) When Blakesly criticizes her attire, she tells him, “I like the togs first rate, because a person can get around ship-shape, much better.” Moreover she confides that the newspaper sales are a sideline that brings in some money and helps her in her real business: “I’m a detective.” She is 17, a year younger than Nancy Drew was in her debut novel.

Blakesly scoffs, but it turns out that he is in need of a detective, though he doesn’t know it yet. He’s about to be targeted by an old enemy in a swindle involving a false claimant to his considerable estate, a young man who pretends to be Blakesly’s long-lost son. In one of the coincidences endemic to these stories, Nell meets Blakesly’s true son while she’s rescuing a young woman from a burning boat (she identifies herself to the fire patrol as “Nell Niblo of the N.Y.D.F.”). She undertakes to expose the false claimant and protect the older Blakesly, whom she regards as well-meaning but naïve. During the course of the case, she has occasion to dress in women’s clothing, and draws admiring glances to her amusement, saying to herself, “Oh my! What a figger I cut! S’pect half of my old acquaints won’t know me.” But like other girl sleuths both before and after her, she finds male clothing gains her entrance into places, such as saloons, where she can pick up useful information. In fact, she acquires a number of wigs and costumes to permit her to move about freely. But perhaps more importantly, she is well armed; just when two paid killers are about to murder the true heir, Nell intervenes: “About a half-score of feet away, stood New York Nell, with a pair of cocked Smith and Wesson’s [sic] in her gripe, the muzzles of which were turned menacingly upon the would-be criminals.” When the chief villain tries to hire someone to remove Nell permanently, his prospective henchman declines, saying, “There isn’t a sport in N.Y. who does not know her by sight, or hearsay, and respect her.”

At the end of the story, Nell has her moment to confront the villain and summarize the case, telling him, “Your hand is beat. You are fogged. I’ve got your full pedigree and future mapped down in my log-book.” And when old Blakesly tearfully thanks her, and calls her “my brave, noble child,” she responds, “No, don’t call me your gal, fer I ain’t no one but Nell Niblo, who wears trowsers in spite o’ fashion or famine.” Sadly, while she is not married off, like many others of her ilk, to the hero of the story, she is married off, in the last sentence, to “a noble husband, who is justly proud of his wife whose experiences in the detective business brought about such auspicious results!”

Thanks to the wonderful Edward T. LeBlanc Memorial Dime Novel Bibliography, links to many of these rare works can be found in one centralized location. To read the full text of New York Nell, click here. You can read more about Edward Lytton Wheeler on Wikipedia.