Billie Bradley - D.B. Borton

Billie Bradley: Prototype for Nancy Drew

Ten years before Nancy Drew drove her new blue convertible onto the mystery scene and into literary history, the Stratemeyer syndicate introduced a girl detective named Billie Bradley in Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance (Cupples & Leon, 1920). The author was named as “Janet D. Wheeler,” a pen name for Elizabeth A. Duffield (Ward). While Billie seems never to have attracted the following that Nancy did (there are only nine Billie Bradley books), she was still around when Nancy launched her own sleuthing career in The Secret of the Old Clock (1930); her career overlapped Nancy’s by two years, during which time they shared an illustrator, Russell H. Tandy. What these two series have in common and how they diverge is what interests me most as a historian of girl detectives.

Billie Bradley is 14 years old in the first book to Nancy’s 16, but what a difference those two years make! Billie is about to enter boarding school (high school), which confines her adventures to the school environs or nearby vacation spots in keeping with other girls’ adventure books — Twin Lakes, Sun Dial Lodge, Treasure Cove. Billie has two chums, named as such in the title, Billie Bradley at Sun Dial Lodge; or, The Chums Solving a Mystery (1929), but her retinue includes her brother and the brother of one of her friends. These boys conveniently attend a neighboring boarding school and arrange to accompany Billie whenever she travels.

Nancy has already graduated from school in her first outing as a detective, and this circumstance liberates her in more ways than one. Not only can she range farther afield, but her travels need not be confined to school holidays. To underscore her greater independence, Nancy is immediately and often characterized as a driver, a point further emphasized by illustrations showing her behind the wheel, as in the first interior illustration of her first mystery, The Secret of the Old Clock. It’s also worth noting that she’s alone in this illustration. Billie is too young to travel unchaperoned, so she and her friends must recruit an older woman to travel with them in Inheritance. But Nancy’s ability to move freely about the world is also a result of her financial status. The car she drives is a gift from her father. The Bradleys are not so well off, and if Billie had not solved the mystery of her inheritance in her first “case,” she and her brother would not have joined the others at boarding school.

Both Billie and Nancy are described as pretty, popular, and athletic. Billie has brown eyes and curly brown hair and, in addition to being “gorgeous” (Classmates) is “the most popular, best-loved girl in all North Bend” (Inheritance). Moreover, this popularity extends to boys as well as girls. The point is made often that Billie is not overly feminine; she’s a real pal — and a tennis champion. Boys often compare her to a brother. One finds her “the nearest like a boy of all the girls he knew” (Classmates) and another declares that “a fellow can have more fun with her any day than he can with another boy” (Classmates).

It’s interesting that while Billie’s two friends seem to serve as prototypes for Nancy’s chums Bess Marvin and George Fayne — one dark, one fair; one more timid, one less so; one fonder of eating than the other — Bess and George do not appear in the earliest Nancy Drew mysteries, making their debut in the fifth book, The Secret of Shadow Ranch (1931). Instead, Nancy has a school chum named Helen who appears in two of her first three cases, but this character is not a best friend. Perhaps Edward Stratemeyer wanted to emphasize Nancy’s maturity and independence when he created his new detective. That would also explain the absence of a boyfriend until the seventh Nancy Drew mystery, The Clue in the Diary (1932). Billie is given — one is tempted to say “saddled with” — a boyfriend, who takes every opportunity to separate her from the others so that he can express his admiration for her in ways that this reader finds painfully extravagant. One example: when Billie remarks, “I do believe all a person would have to do to collect a crowd would be to stand on a soap box and say, ‘Isn’t this beautiful weather?” he responds, “You bet. Especially if that person were you” (Three Towers). (Aside: While we don’t know for certain who wrote each of the Billie Bradley books, at least one expert believes that they were all written by Duffield, but I disagree. Teddy is 15, but looks “quite a deal older than he was” (Classmates). In some books, the compliments he pays Billie seem relatively awkward and appropriately youthful, whereas in one or two of them, including Three Towers, he comes across as a junior Lothario.)

One thing Billie shares with her successor is her vocation for detective work. In Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island (1920), another friend of Billie’s mentions their plans to form a Detective Club. Her friend Vi says of Billie, “As a sleuth, she has no equal” (Treasure Cove, 1928). Like Nancy’s cases, Billie’s typically benefit the downtrodden, such as a school outcast (School Mystery, 1930) or the impoverished widow of a dispossessed inventor (Classmates). And the Gothic lingers in these mysteries as well, with Billie called upon to venture into spooky spaces (Three Towers) and lay ghosts (Sun Dial Lodge, 1929).

In fact, many of the characteristics of Billie Bradley’s world will be familiar to aficionados of Nancy Drewland, from the innocent squabbling among chums to the less innocent stereotyping common at the time, especially of Black characters, old maids, and redheads (always associated with evil). These features of the girl detective narrative would have a longer wait for revision.

Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance; or, The Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners

Billie Bradley at Three Towers Hall; or, Leading a Needed Rebellion

Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island; or, The Mystery of the Wreck

Billie Bradley and Her Classmates; or, The Secret of the Locked Tower

Billie Bradley at Twin Lakes; or, Jolly Schoolgirls Afloat and Ashore

Billie Bradley at Treasure Cover; or, the Old Sailor’s Secret

Billie Bradley at Sun Dial Lodge; or, The Chums Solving a Mystery

Billie Bradley and the School Mystery; or, The Girl from Oklahoma

Billie Bradley Winning the Trophy; or, Scoring Against Big Odds

Six of the Billie Bradley books are available free at Project Gutenberg.