Girl Sleuth by Melanie Rehak Read Free Book Online

always remembered their manners. Their names were Bert, Nan, Freddie, and Flossie, otherwise known as the Bobbsey Twins. Stratemeyer wrote the first book himself, under the pen name Laura Lee Hope (he later assigned the series to Howard Garis, one of his first “employees” and the author of the Uncle Wiggily books). Their first adventure,
The Bobbsey Twins; or, Merry Days Indoors and Out,
appeared in the fall of that year. The two sets of twins, aged eight and four (they would later grow up to twelve and eight), were the epitome of simple, cozy stability, right down to their perfectly complementary personalities and physical attributes: “Nan was a tall and slender girl, with a dark face and red cheeks. Her eyes were a deep brown and so were the curls that clustered around her head. Bert was indeed a twin, not only because he was the same age as Nan, but because he looked so very much like her . . . Freddie and Flossie were just the opposite of their larger brother and sister. Each was short and stout, with a fair, round face, light-blue eyes and fluffy golden hair.” With this jolly band, Stratemeyer tapped in to the kind of world that was to become the mainstay of juvenile books for the next fifty years. It was real enough to be recognizable to readers, but everything in it was improved upon. Parents were generous, punishments rare, and everything always seemed to work out in the end.
    These were also the first books by Stratemeyer that took into account not only a younger age group, but female readers. It was not yet popularly believed that little girls were worth catering to as an audience, as they had shown themselves to be perfectly happy to borrow books from their brothers to get their adventure fix. As Stratemeyer sized it up, “Almost as many girls write to me as boys and all say they like to read boys’ books (but it’s pretty hard to get a boy to read a girl’s book, I think).”
    Furthermore, there was competition for girls once they reached a certain age in a way that there was not for boy readers, and publishers—and Stratemeyer—believed it made the investment of both time and money in too many girls’ series unwise. In an interview around this time, Stratemeyer displayed his admirable grasp of both publishing and human nature: “The little girl begins at perhaps 7 years of age to read girls’ books written for her. By the time she is 12, she is ready for the [adult] ‘best seller’ and will have nothing else. A boy will cling to the boys’ book till he is 15 or 16, often older.”
    Still, the success of the Bobbsey Twins could not fail to affect Stratemeyer. He began to expand his winning formula to include the opposite sex, taking into account another, more personal reason for doing so. As he noted in a letter to a successful girls’ book author: “I have two little girls growing up fast, so I presume I’ll have to wake up on girls’ books ere long.”
    By 1905 Edward was easily the most successful juvenile writer in the country, and he had even more ideas than he could keep up with: As he had confessed in 1903, he had “the plots and outlines of a score of books in [his desk].” He had also begun to recognize that his pseudonymous works, written under the names of Arthur M. Winfield and Laura Lee Hope, were earning him more money than books by Edward Stratemeyer, such as the Old Glory series. The market would never be saturated, he reasoned, as long as he could think up another pen name. As he wrote to one publisher: “A book brought out under another name would, I feel satisfied, do better than another Stratemeyer book. If this was brought out under my own name, the trade on new Stratemeyer books would simply be cut into four parts instead of three.” He was also “neck deep in contracts on books” and could barely keep up with himself.
    So he decided to act on a consolidation scheme he had