Girl Sleuth by Melanie Rehak Read Free Book Online Page A

been thinking over for some time. He intended to model his new company on the Street & Smith plan, writing outlines for series and handing them out to ghostwriters, who would work under the pen name assigned to each series. This way, no one would ever be the wiser about who was actually doing the writing, and if it became necessary to change authors, there would be no risk of alienating readers. He himself would edit all the manuscripts for consistency, so that even if volumes in the same series were written by more than one person, the final product would be of apiece with the entire series. By controlling all of his characters, pen names, and manuscripts, and more or less renting them out to publishers for royalties, he would be able to sell different books to different houses, thereby grabbing a larger share of the market and putting his many idle story ideas to use. He would pay his ghostwriters, whom he hired from local newspapers and by placing ads in trade publications like the
Editor,
a flat fee for each manuscript, usually ranging from $75 to $150 depending upon their effort and experience. The amount of work done by the ghostwriter versus the amount of work done by Stratemeyer on any given book could not be determined, though Stratemeyer always had the last word. In addition, he required that his authors not tell anyone which books they wrote and under which pen names—they gave up “all right, title and interest” to their stories in every release form they signed and further agreed that they would “not use such pen name in any manner whatsoever”—though they were allowed to say they worked for the Syndicate, and Stratemeyer did not prevent them from writing elsewhere.
    The Stratemeyer Syndicate, in essentially the form in which it would remain for the next three decades, had been launched. In 1905, the first year of its existence, Edward Stratemeyer earned $6,757.74, triple his earnings just a few years earlier. The following year, he earned $8,757.18 and paid out $2,267.00 for manuscripts and advertising, leaving him with $6,490.18. It was almost the same amount of money for less work on his part; his business idea had been a sound one. “The syndicate idea is booming, and I am now negotiating for sixteen copyrights of A No. 1 stories,” he wrote to Mershon Company, one of his New Jersey publishers. “I think when all is in shape I shall have the best line of juveniles on the market, written by those who know exactly what is wanted.” Edward Stratemeyer was on his way to becoming, as one magazine would later anoint him, “the father of . . . fifty-cent literature.”

    T HANKS TO HER father’s wise scheme, by the time Harriet was fifteen, the young, well-to-do Stratemeyer clan had moved to a large, stylish three-story Queen Anne house on North Seventh Street in Roseville. In addition to three bedrooms, the house had a fireplace in the parlor, a small balcony off the second floor, and a laundry room in the basement where their hired help did the wash. The Stratemeyers also employed a cook and a chaffeur for Lenna. The third floor contained Edward’s flower-papered private study, where he dreamed up his characters and committed them to the page first by hand, and then by typewriter. His debut as an operator of this technological marvel was thrilling enough to merit mention in his literary account book. In the same way that he reveled in keeping up to the moment with his car purchases and enthusiastically embraced all the newfangled timesaving devices America had to offer, he adapted, with marvelous aplomb, to his new luxury. “Did you ever use a typewriter?” he wrote to a friend. “It took me just a week to get used to it and now I would not work in any other way for the world.”
    While Edward wrote, his girls were constantly being reminded to keep quiet lest they should disturb their father’s great imaginings upstairs. Harriet