D.B. Borton

Author

history of detective fiction

By Leave a Comment

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.

Billie and her friends dig for treasure at

Treasure Cove.

Ghost-hunting at Sun Dial Lodge.

Nancy Drew’s debut: alone at the wheel.

https://dbborton.com/2501-2/

Female Self-Reliance

By Leave a Comment

The Female Barber Detective

Cover Illustration: The Female Barber Detective

The cover illustration shows an attractive young woman with lace at her collar and cuffs watching two men face off with pistols. She appears to be playing the stereotypical female role of passive observer. But she’s holding an open razor in one hand, and wait — is that a dark stain on the blade? Could it be — no, surely not — blood? This is just the kind of sensational, even titillating, image the dime novels were so fond of. In fact, the female barber detective in question never bloodies her razor in the story, but she threatens to do so and the cover illustration appears to back up that threat. The subtitle of the story, published in Beadle’s New York Dime Library in 1895, is “Joe Phenix in Silver City,” promoting it as a spinoff of Albert Aiken’s popular Joe Phenix detective series, even though Phenix himself never shows up in the narrative, which is not set in Silver City.

Before the titular detective, Mignon Lawrence, even arrives at her destination, a mining town called Bearopolis (I couldn’t make this stuff up), she undermines in spectacular fashion her cover story as an “unprotected female” (2) on her way to meet her uncle after the death of her father. A “road-agent” (a common term for a highway robber) attempts to rob the stage, and she coolly relieves him of his pistol, knocks him over the head, and announces her intention to take him with her and hand him over to the proper authorities. Since the authorities are bribable, they allow the robber to escape, giving Lawrence one of several enemies to contend with throughout the story. SPOILER ALERT: she always comes out on top.

Shortly afterward, we are privy to a conversation between two miscreants who are apparently expecting a detective to be following the trail of one of them from New York, but the other, who has attempted to ingratiate himself with Lawrence, observes: “It does not seem to be at all likely that the New York sharps would select a woman to do such a job as this” (2). He’s wrong, of course.

With no male relative in sight to protect and support her, Lawrence sets herself up as a barber and in no time is doing a land-office business. To explain her fortuitous possession of a collection of razors and shaving accessories, she tells the woman hotel-keeper that she possesses a “horrid mustache” (5) she must shave regularly. This is only the first overt reference to gender-bending, but there are more to come. In explaining her success as a barber, the narrator tells us that “she possessed the light touch and dexterity common to womankind, coupled with the strength of a man” (6) — a seemingly gratuitous observation since shaving and cutting hair are not usually thought to require strength. Later, when a customer gets fresh with her and tries to steal a kiss, she delivers two hard slaps to his face and throws him out: “He was as powerless in the grasp of the muscular and agile young woman as though he had been a half-grown boy” and an onlooker comments, “A professional pugilist . . . could not have delivered two better slaps” (17). Earlier, she has executed a “right-hand swing” (15) that enables her to escape from a female captor. All things considered, it might seem contradictory that she insults this same female captor by calling her “more a man than a woman” (15), but this story is filled with contradictions.

Eventually, the female barber disappears, supposedly on a mission to restock her supplies, and a young Mexican cowboy appears on the scene, “a well-built stripling of twenty or thereabouts, wearing the gaudy costume usually favored by ‘cow punchers’ of Old Mexico” (20). This is Lawrence in disguise. While she is awaiting an arrest warrant for her quarry, she has taken an interest in the affairs of Margaret Vanderbilt, “a real lady” (11) who is the target of a plot by the two miscreants mentioned earlier. They are corrupting her father with drink and gambling, drawing him further and further into dissipation and debt, so as to force a marriage with his daughter and get their hands on the mine he owns. The owner of the local gambling establishment is in love with Vanderbilt and, suspecting the plot against her, asks Lawrence for her help. When Vanderbilt’s father dies suddenly, Lawrence’s Mexican disguise is intended to entrap these two, insure that the mine ownership remains in Vanderbilt’s hands, and leave the two plotters with nothing for their efforts. This ploy succeeds.

Lawrence often lays claim to that most Emersonian of virtues, self-reliance. When the road-agent holds her at gunpoint, she tells him, “Though I am a woman, I am not one of the fainting kind, and am, as a rule, usually able to take care of myself” (14), and the narrator tells us that “she felt a strong inclination to give the rascal a right-hander which would knock him heels over head” (14). To her gambler ally, she confesses that she’s tired of the sneak attacks she’s been subjected to and plans “to put a stop to it”: “I have always been able to paddle my own canoe pretty well” (17). Every time she’s attacked, she attests to her fearlessness, as when she protests to the road-agent: “Oh, I am not at all frightened” (3). We later discover one reason for her sangfroid when she draws “the revolvers which she always carried in her breast” (15). (No, gentle reader, I cannot explain the physics of this feat, not even if the revolvers were derringers.)

We know little about Lawrence’s background, except that she is fatherless (13); we might suspect that she is motherless as well, given the high mortality rate of women in the 19th century. What we do know is that she is a professional — so skilled at her job that her male boss would send her alone to a Western mining town. In order to be good at her job, she must be an accomplished liar and as adept at disguise as she is at gunplay and fisticuffs. Since Albert Aiken himself was a popular actor as well as an author, he was presumably well acquainted with women skilled at masquerade. According to the Albert Aiken entry in the Edward T. LeBlanc Dime Novel Bibliography,  he wrote under several female pen names, including A Celebrated Actress, Adelaide Davenport, and Sara Delle.

You can read The Female Barber Detective here.

Nellie, the Girl Detective

By Leave a Comment

I’m including here Detective Edenhope’s 1894 dime novel Nellie, the Girl Detective not because it is a thrilling read, but because it includes so many of the tropes and themes prevalent in early girl detective stories. Despite the sensationalism of its content, the prose is plodding and the dialogue advances the story by baby steps, reminding readers, as do the one- and two-sentence paragraphs, that dime novels were uniform in length, so an author with a 20-page idea who wanted to sell a story to Old Cap. Collier Library had to find a way to stretch it to 30 pages.  I read it so you wouldn’t have to.

Nellie Nugent is an 18-year-old beauty who works for the Norton, Larkins & Co. detective agency. She’s smart, dedicated, and courageous. She’s also a crack shot. We learn that she’s powerfully motivated by a desire to advance in her profession. But if she’s given an unladylike ambition, she’s also given an acceptably feminine motive for her interest in money: “She was very poor, and had to depend upon her weekly salary and perquisites to support an aged and helpless mother, and educate a younger sister and brother” (24). Time and again, she risks her life for the potential reward: “If she should distinguish herself in the present case by recovering the missing Miss Mason, and bringing the culprits to justice, she would earn fame and riches” (24). Later, when she expresses regret that she cheated her boss of the criminal capture, we can be excused, I think, for skepticism.

Nellie is sent undercover to the Mason Mansion as a servant to investigate the disappearance of the Mason daughter on the night of her eighteenth birthday. Nellie discovers, with the help of her lock-picking skills and a hairpin, a network of secret passageways under the house that lead to a gothic cavern. This is the hideout of the Nighters, a cultlike criminal gang of men and women dedicated to evil. In this dimly lit place, surrounded by skeletons and skulls, the satanic master criminal Sam Sloat holds religious meetings of a sort, wearing a robe decorated with a skull and crossbones, waving a skull in his hand, and ranting about his evil power. One of the gang’s activities is white slavery, as a captured Nighter confesses: “It has always been the object of our gang to capture young girls and either to keep them until a large reward was offered for them, or take them to some other large city and dispose of them to some woman or man for a few hundred dollars” (20). Edenhope emphasizes the vulnerability of women to sexual exploitation, imprisonment, and male violence in large part for titillation, but also to highlight Nellie’s courage as she braves danger in the pursuit of her mission:

“It is a serious undertaking, but as I alone have discovered the secret entrance, I alone will see it to the end, come what will!

“What have I to fear any more than anybody else? I am prepared to fight. I am armed, and I know how to use the revolver as well as most men.

“Although I am only a young girl I am not afraid of the best man or woman that ever lived!

“So here goes! Fortune favors the brave.” (10)

As it turns out, there are two missing girls being sought, both of them drugged and moved about as they are rescued and recaptured, demonstrating how little control they have over their lives and their bodies. Indeed, it seems that as the climax approaches and the danger increases, so do the reminders of Nellie’s youth and vulnerability; she’s called a “little heroine” (24) and a “brave little girl” (24). As she confronts the ghoulish spectacle of the cave for the first time, she experiences a moment of weakness, but it passes: “Her will-power was remarkable, and her sense of duty more so” (12).

This little girl manages to rack up a lot of rescues and captures: she rescues three men and two women and captures three criminals single-handedly, with the help of her daring and artillery: “The men turned round surprised and frightened, and saw a young girl standing in the doorway having them fully covered by two revolvers, one in each hand!” (19).

Interestingly, however, Edenhope avoids the easy explanation of feminine intuition that other writers use to explain their detectives’ thought processes. Nellie has instincts, but they are professional, not sex-based. When she tells her boss that she followed two men because of an “instinctive feeling” common to detectives, he agrees: “You are right there, Nellie; all great detectives will tell you the same” (22).

If you have been reading this blog, you might suspect by now that Nellie would be adept at cross-dressing, and you would be right. On two occasions she disguises herself as a boy, and Edenhope assures us that she makes a good job of it: “indeed, there are very few boys in the world who could have looked half so manly and bright” (24).

He also avoids the easy outcome of marrying Nellie off. There is a marriage in the end, but it is not Nellie’s. She receives gifts and property, but, the contemporary reader will be pleased to note, no wedding ring.

 

Thanks to the University of Minnesota for digitizing their collection of dime novels and for their help in accessing them. If in spite of everything I’ve said to discourage you, you’d like to read this novel, click here.

Josie O’Gorman, Secret Agent

By 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” (1st 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)