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.

If You Want Something Done Right . . .

September 9, 2022 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

Nita, the Female Ferret

What do you do if you report a robbery to the police and they don’t believe you? You resign yourself to becoming a detective and solving the crime yourself. That’s how 18-year-old Juanita Henriques becomes the “female ferret” in Police Captain Howard’s 1885 dime novel, Nita, the Female Ferret.

When a plainly dressed young woman presents herself at the police station to report that she has been robbed of several pieces of diamond-studded jewelry, the superintendent and one of his detectives don’t believe her, even though she makes a strong impression on them. She tells the superintendent that if she knew who the thief was, she would not have come to him; instead, she says simply, “I would have received back my property, or else killed the robber” (2). The superintendent concludes that “she is a singular young woman . . . and has the sharpest eye I ever saw in a woman’s head” (3), and sends a Detective Mason to investigate. At the house where Miss Henriques boards, the landlady tells Mason, “She impressed me as a young lady of extraordinary strength of mind and will power. She is well educated, and as deep as the ocean” (3). In fact, Nita’s past is shrouded in mystery; the residents of the house find her quiet, well bred, and rather withdrawn. Mason is the first to admit to her, “Miss, had you been born one of my sex you would have made a first-class detective” (4). The landlady chides Miss H for not confiding her suspicions to him, but she says, “It’s a detective’s business to find a clew [sic]. If I had a clew I could follow it up myself, and would do so to save the expense of employing a detective” (4); after he’s left, she declares, “My suspicions are not a clew” (4). The next day she returns to the superintendent with a set of diamond earrings and brooch that were not taken in the robbery, and when she is told that the police detective “could see nothing to show that any robbery was committed there,” she responds, “Which shows that he was not much of a detective” (5). Enter Nita, the female ferret (“ferret” was one of many slang terms for a detective).

Her first act is to don a disguise: she tells the landlady that she will be away for a while and will send a friend, Nita Endicott, to occupy her room in her absence. Nita is very like Juanita in stature, but blond rather than dark-haired, and most importantly, lively and outgoing. In no time, Nita is captivating the household with her piano playing, singing, beautiful new dresses, dazzling diamonds, and especial kindness to the maid, Margaret. This is the first of two disguises Nita uses to gather evidence. Quite early, her suspicions fall on Margaret’s lover, Tom Nelson, and she adds a second disguise as a boy so that she can tail Nelson unrecognized and follow him into saloons. As the lovely and enchanting Nita, she dazzles Nelson, goes on carriage rides with him, and permits him to make love to her. As Randy Holland, she follows Nelson and even gets the better of him in a bar confrontation.

Mastery of disguise and role-playing was an essential trait to a dime-novel detective at a time when deceit was regarded as a serious moral failing in a well-bred young lady. Yet unlike some other female detectives who regret the necessity for masquerade, Nita quite enjoys her new persona. She tells herself, “This is the best thing I ever did” (10) and even muses,

“Oh, I wish I was not afraid of betraying my sex in a fine suit of clothes. I’d go to the theaters and operas and mash the girls just for the fun. But this detective business is fun enough just now, and it grows more interesting every hour, and I like it more and more every day.” (17)

But as if concerned that this kind of declaration might risk the reader’s disapproval of Nita, Howard follows immediately with an encounter that underscores Nita’s true sex: she comes to the aid of a weeping young woman because, we’re told, “Nita had a true woman’s heart, and this unmistakable sign of distress touched her deeply” (17). The young woman, Sadie, turns out to be one of many that Tom Nelson has “married” and abandoned; “Randy” reveals her true sex to Sadie and rents some rooms for her in his new role as Sadie’s husband. In fact, however, she plays Tom Nelson’s role of “masher” the next day when a young woman flirts with him, playfully doubting his strength, and he tells her, “I can take a much heavier girl than you are and hold her on my knee, and talk to her all the evening” (20). After a night (alone) in a hotel room, she reminds herself, “Oh, I came near forgetting that I have a wife down in Twenty-second street” (20). She wasn’t the first girl detective to discover the liberating power of cross-dressing. It permits her entry into some spaces that are generally off-limits to respectable middle-class women.

Once Nita has caught the culprit and explained all to her landlady and landlord, the landlord tells her of two “mistakes”: “First, that you were not born a man, that you might have been the greatest detective in the world” and “Second, that being born a woman, you did not go on the stage and become known as the greatest actress that ever lived” (27). The second compliment is sincere, but perhaps unintentionally backhanded, since actresses were considered of dubious moral standing at the time. Indeed, the liberties she permits Tom Nelson — embraces, kisses — are justified, but perhaps not justifiable, by the role she’s playing, and after reminding readers what’s at stake, the narrator observes: “The reader can readily understand then, the extraordinary will-power of our heroine, which enabled her to smile when Nelson kissed her in the carriage” (10). Indeed, Nita’s “will power,” mentioned here and in the previous quotation, set her apart from the feminine ideal, as does her willingness to spend time in cheap dives among disreputable company, where:

The men and women talked with a freedom of expression that made our heroine wish herself a thousand miles away.

But she stood it for the sake of her mission. (15)

As you might guess by now if you have been following this blog, Nita doesn’t rely solely on her acting skills and men’s clothing to keep her safe in dangerous places and situations. Her small pearl-handled revolver makes its first appearance in a wonderfully comic scene in a restaurant, where Tom Nelson picks a fight with Randy Holland for — wait for it — wearing his hat at the table. Insisting on his status as a gentleman, Tom menaces the offending Holland until s/he calmly draws “a tiny revolver” and aims it at him. Confident of his own shrewdness, Tom offers her ten dollars to relinquish the gun to a waiter, and when she takes him up on it and collects her cash, he springs at her again, only to be repulsed this time by “a long bright bladed dagger” (11). Slow on the uptake, Tom offers another ten dollars if she’ll relinquish the dagger, and when she does, the inevitable ensues: Tom lunges for her, only to be brought up short by “a tiny pearl-handled revolver” (12). Clearly, Nita is armed to the teeth. Later, Randy tells a gang of would-be assailants, “The man who comes up to pick a fight with me will get both steel and lead” (16), and she proves it by shooting their leader. Like other girl detectives, however, Nita also demonstrates that she has the physical prowess for the job when she pursues the escaping Tom across roof-tops, at one point leaping ten feet down from one rooftop to the next.

Nita’s “masculine” traits and abilities contrast sharply with the those of the other women characters in the story. Tom’s two female victims, Margaret and Sadie, are characterized by their tears, whereas we never see Nita cry. Both women are blinded by their love for Tom. Margaret refuses to heed Nita’s warnings about him up to the point when Nita reveals the other wife she has met. Then Margaret becomes a picture of female vengeance: “True, she thought of Tom, but only how she might avenge herself” (21). In the cheap dive mentioned above, two gin-soaked women engage in a catfight motivated by jealousy over Randy Holland. When Nita pursues Tom across rooftops later, he enters a house through a window and terrifies the women inside, who, after “raising a terrible racket,” demonstrate their panicked incompetence by running “screaming from room to room in the house, locking the doors to protect themselves, but in reality preventing him from getting out” (25). It’s difficult to see how Nita developed her strong will, her sangfroid, her intelligence, and her adventurous spirit if these were the kinds of female role models available to her. We know little about her background, except that she, like so many other girl detectives, is an orphan.

The ending of the novel is something of a disappointment, if perhaps an inevitability. Nita’s celebrity in the press makes her the talk of the town, especially after she testifies in court to the incompetence of the police, and she’s confronted by an importunate millionaire banker who wants her to investigate bank thefts and won’t take no for an answer. She cracks the case in very short order because she visualizes the theft in a dream! Delighted, the banker gives her a blank check in payment for her services, and when she threatens to take the whole bank, he insists that the banker himself would have to be included. Later, when she next shows him the check, she has filled in the amount to read “the banker himself” (29), thus strengthening our impression of Nita as a young woman who knows what she wants and goes after it. They are married immediately and live happily ever after, especially when the papers she has recovered along with her stolen jewels prove her claim to an English fortune that doubles her husband’s. So her unconventional story ends in a conventional way, and we are left to consider that it is, perhaps, just as well, since a professional detective could hardly rely on visionary dreams to solve the average case.

I’ve been unable to locate an online version of this text. According to The Dime Novel Bibliography published by the Edward T. LeBlanc Memorial Library, “Police Captain Howard” was a “pseudonym used by multiple people.”

Mercedes Quero: Elusive Yet Ubiquitous

February 28, 2022 By D.B. Borton 2 Comments

A queer fish indeed is Mercedes Quero, who shows up when she’s least expected and most wanted. She appeared in four novels by Gladys Edson Locke, who wrote as G. E. Locke: That Affair at Portstead Manor (1914), The Red Cavalier, or, The Twin Turrets Mystery (1922), The Scarlet Macaw (1923), and The House on the Downs (1925). Though Locke lived all her life in the Boston area, these novels are all British country house mysteries. They usually feature an unmarried male focal character, whom Bob Schneider of SpeedyMysteries.com compares to Captain Hastings of the Hercule Poirot mysteries.

Quero is a detective of considerable reputation, in spite of her gender. When a diamond necklace is stolen in Portstead Manor, a character says, “I should send for that woman detective, Mercedes Quero. All London is talking about her since the Dexter case,” to which Lord Portstead responds, “Women are not at all suited to detective work. They are illogical and carried away by sentiment.” In Red Cavalier, a character notes that she is “highly successful in her profession.” In The Scarlet Macaw, she’s described as “the celebrated woman detective whose fame was known throughout England and even on the Continent.” Of course, her nemesis Detective Burton has a different view of her, and calls her “the most devilish, provoking and meddlesome skirt that ever was wished on a man.”

We’re never told Quero’s age, only that she is young. But her background is typical for professional women detectives; in Portstead Manor, the male character who befriends her learns something of her history: “Born and bred a gentlewoman, a sudden turn of fortune had thrown her upon her own resources.” She is often described as attractive, as from the point of view of another male character in Red Cavalier: “This slim, girlishly pretty young woman with mirthful brown eyes, skin fair as a child’s and soft brown hair simply coiled in her neck was not at all his idea of the detective who had already won an enviable name in her chosen profession.” In fact, Quero’s eyes are frequently characterized as “mirthful” or “mischievous” or “mocking,” and they appear to express most particularly her opinion of the men who surround her. She is capable of gentleness toward vulnerable women, and her mirthful eyes turn “misty” with sentimentality as she watches one man’s gentleness with a crippled little girl. But these are rare moments. She does not suffer fools gladly, especially men, or challenges to her authority, telling one man, “Don’t be stupid!” and admonishing Detective Burton at one point, “You will be good enough to remember that I am conducting this inquiry.”

As for the qualities that ensure her success as a detective, she is called “devilish smart.” And when one male character, who has commented on “the paradox of a pretty woman and a logical combined,” calls her “jolly clever,” she responds, “It is my business to be ‘jolly clever.’” A woman character made rather uncomfortable by Quero’s “very unusual pursuit” calls her “quick and intuitive,” as if to reclaim her for the female gender by privileging intuition over logic. And there is something to this claim, since she has a habit of showing up on the scene under an assumed name, and sometimes, as in Red Cavalier, even before she has been sent for. In this case, like Sherlock Holmes, she has read about the case and taken an interest. In all of these cases, Quero first appears in the guise of a secretary or maid, so that the experienced reader begins to look for her in the background long before she takes center stage. These impersonations permit her to spy on the principals in the case, a most unladylike thing to do.

While she is not the most athletic of girl detectives, she is perfectly capable of subduing an angry woman wielding a knife (Scarlet Macaw) and carries a small revolver that she uses to shoot a fleeing suspect (Red Cavalier).

Only in the first book, Portstead Manor, are we given a glimpse of the drawbacks of Quero’s career. When one character tells her, “I cannot understand you,” she replies, “No one does. I am a very much misunderstood person.” At the end of the book, the narrator mentions her lonely life, and speculates on the value of her continued friendship with the focal male character, for which she was “probably grateful.”

Locke herself seems to have been an interesting figure, with multiple degrees from Boston University and Simmons College, as reported by Douglas A. Anderson in his blog on Lesser-Known Writers. She was sufficiently proficient in Latin, French, and Italian to tutor in these languages and taught high school Latin and English. She was a member of the Boston Society for Psychical Research and never married.

The books have garnered mixed reviews. Anderson cites a review by the New York Times of Mr. Locke’s The Scarlet Macaw that damns it with faint praise, calling it an “interesting mystery” delivered in “extremely mediocre prose.” The plots are intricate and convoluted, and in the last book, The House on the Downs, almost every character is using an assumed name (the names themselves are worth mentioning: Sir Quenton Rotherdene, Theophilus Elphic, Bannard Darrel, Wallington Melrose, Paul Wardle). Should you decide to go looking for the Quero books, be warned: they have recently been reprinted in dreadful editions by the Hard Press of Miami. These appear to have been scanned and published uncorrected, with Quero’s name spelled in a variety of ways, most frequently as “Queer.”

Cad Metti: The Female Detective Strategist

December 13, 2021 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

Here’s a girl detective that has outlasted Nancy Drew, even if she’s never had Nancy’s star power. I counted nine editions on AbeBooks alone (not including the edition I own) and you can read about her exploits online for free. The original edition, as far as I can tell, is Cad Metti, The Female Detective Strategist; or, Dudie Dunne Again in the Field, published in 1895 in the dime novel series Old Sleuth’s Own (no. 37). The author is identified as Old Sleuth, “Author of all the Famous ‘Old Sleuth’ Stories.” “Old Sleuth” was a pen name adopted by Harlan Page Halsey. But “Old Sleuth” was, like the “Carolyn Keene” of the Nancy Drew books, a pen name used by other authors within the Old Sleuth dime novel empire, as well as the name of the fictional protagonist of many of the stories. (In his 1982 book, The Dime Novel Detective, Gary Hoppenstand identifies this character as “the first serialized detective character” and the prototype for what he calls the “Avenger Detective.”) There are several female detectives attributed to Old Sleuth; in fact, Roberts, Hoppenstand, and Browne have published a collection entitled Old Sleuth’s Freaky Female Detectives (1990). That this collection does not include Cad Metti suggests how many examples they had to choose from.

Oscar “Dudie” Dunne had been introduced in a previous novel (no. 29 in the series) as an ace detective with a remarkable facility for disguise. In Cad Metti, he has acquired a female trainee, “one of the brightest women that ever entered the profession: she is a born detective.” We are not told Cad’s age, only that Dudie is young and in the opening scene, they are described as “a young lady and gentleman,” though they are in disguise. Dudie describes himself as “her instructor.”

Gender-bending, as we’d term it now, is clearly part of the sensational appeal of the story. Dudie himself is “a young man of singularly effeminate appearance, with muscles like whipcord and powers of endurance that were seemingly tireless. He was not only a great athlete but a wonderful boxer, and it was a favorite role with him to assume the character of a dude.” As for Cad, according to Dudie,

She could make her living on the stage as a marvel. She is a great musical genius. She can sing or dance, she can fence or wrestle like a man. Her strength is extraordinary, and as a pistol shot she is the champion woman of the world; and when it comes to quickness, nerve, cunning, and courage she cannot be excelled.

Indeed, the impersonation they’re enacting in the opening scene is intended to draw the attention of ruffians and provoke an attack — a common strategy for the two detectives. As Cad says, “it is a great thing to meet an antagonist who really underrates you.” Once the two are accosted by the criminals they are trawling for, a rare editorial comment assures the reader that the two are playing a dangerous game: “We desire to call our readers’ attention to the courage and nerve of both the detectives in daring for one moment to think of meeting those three great burly men.” When the attack comes, the two detectives draw their concealed billy clubs and counterattack: “Cad meantime played a single-note tattoo on the head of number two.” When the dust settles, one of the ruffians laments, “It was the gal gave me my rap and she came down on me with the force of a Goliah.” Yet Cad has a softer side, for we’re told that she’s a mother, since she has “rescued and adopted two Italian children from the street.” She joins the ranks of female detectives with adopted children apparently intended to reassure readers of their femininity; we never hear about the children again.

As the senior detective (and the one presumed to have established fans among the Old Sleuth readership), Dudie Dunne is the star of the narrative and the story follows his actions and thoughts. But this strategy heightens the mystery of his female partner, who often turns up unexpectedly, especially when Dudie is in trouble. And Dudie is often in trouble as the two track a large gang of counterfeiters, since several government detectives on the gang’s trail have already disappeared or been assassinated. It is Cad whose spying saves Dudie when he is taken in by a beautiful woman’s appeal for help. In the guise of a messenger boy, Cad has overheard the woman scheming with the head of the gang to lure him to his death, and Dudie, who in spite of being warned that the gang has female members, has declared, “I’ll bet my life on her sincerity,” is forced to eat his words. In another scene, when Dudie is being menaced by members of the gang and forced into a duel, a “boyish-looking youth” magically appears to serve as his second. This is Cad, of course, and she’s had the foresight to recruit three men who “were Jim terrors right on their looks” to back her.

The narrator emphasizes that Cad’s chief advantage as a detective is her skill at disguise and her consequent ability to spy on criminals. At one point, she is described as “the strange, weird girl, who could flit from place to place like a shadow, who could change her appearances as readily as a change actress on the stage.” At one point, even Dudie doesn’t recognize her in disguise as a messenger boy, and praises her as “the wonder of the age.” Historians of gender will note that while the story reinforces the particular reprehensiveness of female deceit, it is Cad’s ability to out-deceive the master criminal deceiver that makes her its hero.

There is no strong suggestion of romance between the partners, who call each other “brother” and “sis.” But when Cad dismisses Dudie’s “lovely lady” as “the beautiful siren who is to lure Ulysses into the den where he is to be slain with merciless precision and cold-blooded exactness,” he suspects her motives:

Seeing the glitter in Cad’s eyes he fell to a conclusion and asked:

“Is my beautiful partner jealous?”

Cad responds, “Yes, I am jealous for your life.” Whether the author intended to prepare the way for future romance, or whether he intended only to provide further evidence of Dudie’s inability to read women, I can’t say, since as far as I know, the pair never appeared together again. (I’m happy to be corrected by a more knowledgeable reader.)

Oddly enough, Cad exits the story before its climax. When Dudie’s villainous female antagonist gives the order to shoot him and the police burst into the room, Cad is nowhere to be seen — unless she is disguised as one of the men with repeating rifles who crowd the room. Has the author abandoned her when she’s served her purpose or is he guarding her secret? We can hope for the latter explanation, but the dime novels aren’t known for their subtlety.

Cad Metti, the Female Detective Strategist is widely available in multiple additions. You can read it free online through Project Gutenberg or download a free copy at Kobo or Amazon.

All ‘Round Kate and Her Detective Pard

September 7, 2021 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

Murder! Mayhem! Sword fights! Italian banditti! A severed head! Anarchists! Opium dens! Unnatural fathers! Dastardly uncles! Bad dialogue! Anthony P. Morris’s All ‘Round Kate, published in 1890, had it all: everything that sold dime novels to a reading public eager for sensationalism. And at the center of it all was Detective Kate, a legendary figure among the criminal underworld of Chicago.

Kate’s introduction is as dramatic as her persona. The notorious Little Trivet, partner in the detective firm of Caxton and Trivet, is tracking a mysterious steel box that he’s been hired to recover when the pavement gives way beneath his feet and he plunges into an underground trap, where he’s menaced by a knife-wielding assassin. He appears doomed — and not for the last time in this thrilling tale — when something interrupts the “terrible tableau”:

Now the trap was suddenly jerked open, and a form that was evidently stretched upon the stomach, and at full length, leaned over the edge. A pair of arms extended down, and in both hands gleamed revolvers that were leveled at the savage Italian.

“Hold on there, my man!” cried a woman’s voice. “I guess we’ll have to spoil this little stabbing-match. Down with the knife or I’ll down you. Hear?” (5)

This is Kate (a popular name for young women detectives in the sensation literature of the time), so famous that she doesn’t need a surname. We’re told simply: “Kate was a well-known assistant to the Chicago police detectives; she had figured in a remarkable drama some time before as a companion and ally of a famous detective named Old Bull’s Eye” (5). This reference serves the purpose of providing Kate’s bona fides, since Old Bull’s Eye was a popular detective in dime novels. And although she’s termed an “assistant,” she wears a badge pinned to the underside of her bodice and has full authority to make arrests. As if to cement her reputation, all of the criminals in the story are out to kill her.

In the story, Kate teams up with Trivet when they discover that their cases intersect. They’ve been hired by separate individuals to find a mysterious steel box, said to be impossible to open. Kate tells Trivet, who doesn’t know the contents of the box, that it contains a human head. All of the villains in the story are after the box, and every time it is within the grasp of the two detectives, it’s snatched away, usually in situations involving grave peril to one or the other or both of them. Luckily, they have established a method of communication so that one can appear at the last minute to effect a rescue of the other.

As in many stories involving women detectives, there are young women victims in the story who also need to be saved from dastardly men. This story is especially sensational because one villain orders his own daughter killed.

Kate is admirably suited to this work, not only because of her courage (not to mention her insouciance), but because of her skills. In addition to the revolvers that she handles with such aplomb, she is an expert swordswoman, as the abovementioned savage Italian learns to his cost:

Kate made a great bound, caught up the fallen sword, and quick as a flash, she had crossed blades with the savage intruder.

Another moment and Jim saw that the woman who so suddenly and formidably confronted him was an excellent swordswoman. (5)

Far from modest, Kate presses her psychological advantage, crying, “You have a master to deal with here!” Then we’re told, “Next instant her swordpoint was at his throat.” That the villain survives another 27 pages gives Kate ample scope for displaying her other advantages. In another confrontation with her Italian adversary, Kate’s revolver fails her, but readers need not be alarmed: “The exciting moment gave Kate another opportunity to display her wonderful muscle and endurance” (7). Indeed, in a later scene, Kate is called upon to haul the captured and bound Italian out of yet another pit:

If the wonderful muscle of this female detective had never been displayed before, it now showed itself with wonderful emphasis. She gradually but surely began to draw up the heavy form of the Italian, finally dragging him over the edge. (25)

She also hauls up the mysterious steel box, enabled to do so by her remarkable preparedness: “Kate always had little appliances ready for emergencies, and she produced a stout cord from somewhere about her clothing” (25). All ‘Round Kate, indeed!

As is true of most women detectives, Kate’s success depends upon her willingness to behave in ways condemned by her society as unfeminine. To plan their collaboration, she and Trivet retire to a saloon, one of several occasions in the story when she enters this space forbidden to respectable women. Her skill at disguise also helps her to move freely and tail the criminals on whom she is spying. At one point, she saves Trivet by appearing among a group of murderous anarchists disguised as a Frenchman; two pages later, she’s disguised as a laborer when she tails a villain. When Kate shows up in a saloon dressed as a “lumber shover” (don’t ask me) and Trivet asks, “Is it you, Kate?” she quips, “Don’t I look like myself?” (27). To save one threatened young woman, she impersonates her and confronts a would-be murderer. Kate’s own unladylike spying is justified by the crucial information women learn in this story by listening to what they aren’t supposed to hear and watching what they aren’t supposed to see — information that saves their lives. Even before we know the extent of one miscreant’s villainy, we are prepared to dislike him because he thinks, “Who can this woman be? A female detective, forsooth! She would better be darning stockings for some lover or husband, I think” (6). This villain will eventually be put to death by the poisoned sword of another woman (yes, reader, not one but two master swordswomen in this story), a satisfying conclusion that displaces the violence we may both wish and fear for Kate to inflict on him.

Given Kate’s character as it has been developed throughout, readers may be taken aback by a bet she makes with Trivet about whether he’ll catch the man they’re both after, “If he doesn’t tumble into your lap I’ll lose a box of cigars, and if he does, you owe me a box of Sunday gloves” (27). It’s an odd moment; we’re invited to speculate whether Kate has a pair of gloves secreted somewhere about her person and put to use when she attends church on Sundays in the guise of a proper young woman. Of course, by waiting where Kate has told him to wait, Trivet finds the missing man and Kate wins her gloves.

I should caution prospective readers that when I say this novel contains “everything that sold dime novels to a reading public eager for sensationalism,” that includes the racial stereotyping and cringeworthy dialect endemic to this genre. The evil Italian has his literary roots in the gothic novels of Anne Radcliffe, but he also has cultural roots, as do the villainous Chinaman and Negro in this story.

All ‘Round Kate is available online from the University of Minnesota’s digital collections here.

Nancy’s Grandmother: Patsy Carroll

April 1, 2021 By D.B. Borton 2 Comments

Suppose I asked you to name a girl detective in her teens, Titian-haired and beautiful, motherless but dearly loved by her lawyer father, a skillful driver who travels to places all over the map and solves mysteries with her chums. How many of you would answer “Patsy Carroll”?

Yet the first Patsy Carroll book, Patsy Carroll at Wilderness Lodge (1917), pre-dates Nancy Drew’s debut in The Secret of the Old Clock (1930) by thirteen years. The number of common elements in the Patsy Carroll and early Nancy Drew books (including a clock concealing a secret) strongly suggests that Edward Stratemeyer and Mildred Wirt (Benson) — the creative duo behind Nancy Drew — were familiar with these books. They are, in fact, an intriguing branch on the family tree of the girl detective because they illustrate the gradual emergence of the girl detective from the girls’ adventure series. In her classic account The Girl Sleuth (1975), Bobbie Ann Mason writes: “At the turn of the century (after decades of Little Prudy and Elsie Dinsmore and Pollyanna) there was an evident need in girls’ fiction for action, accomplishment, exhilaration . . . . There was a growing market for female adventurers, and eventually the girl detective emerged as the most ‘liberated’ and celebrated of heroines” (10). Under the pen name Grace Gordon, the prolific author Josephine Chase published four girls’ adventure books between 1917 and 1921 that foregrounded their heroine’s travels in their titles; in addition to Wilderness Lodge, these included Patsy Carroll Under Southern Skies (1918), Patsy Carroll in the Golden West (1920), and Patsy Carroll in Old New England (1921). All included a mystery and some detective work, to a greater or lesser degree.

Three of the books involve a search for missing documents, including the missing will in the first book that ties girls’ detective fiction to Gothic fiction. Two of the books feature false hauntings, as will the Nancy Drew mysteries later. Patsy and her friends are usually motivated to do their detective work by sympathy for a young woman in trouble. Yet despite references to Sherlock Holmes — to whom Patsy twice facetiously compares her Aunt Martha in Wilderness Lodge — and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as Patsy’s own declaration, “I have always fancied I would make a good detective” (Old New England 88), the girls do not make particularly good detectives. Like their predecessors in the dime novels, they often chance to be in a position to overhear conversations that give them useful information, but these occasions are the result of happenstance, not intent. And while their investigations have them searching high and low for crucial documents, in the end these documents are always discovered by chance. Patsy borrows a backpack in Wilderness Lodge and finds inside it the will they’ve scoured the house for. Her friend Mabel spends hours trying to locate a secret drawer in an antique desk in Southern Skies, but her friend Bee finds a secret drawer by accident when she bumps an antique table. And although Patsy and Bee have tried and failed to account for the haunting of an old house in New England, a puppy uncovers the mechanism responsible when he chases a feather under an old clock. Also behind the clock is an important codicil to the deceased owner’s will. Only once does Patsy find something because she went looking for it. In Golden West, Patsy’s determination to find a child presumed dead results in success when she finds the little girl in a nearby Indian village. That no one else faced with a missing, presumed dead, child and no body thought to go looking for her strains credulity, though.

That these books are firmly rooted in the girls’ adventure genre is evident in their disparate settings, which represent travels north, south, east, and west from the girls’ home in a town in New York. The girls call themselves “The Wayfarers.” The books feature extensive accounts of history and descriptions of scenery; in fact, these dominate long stretches of New England. These, too, will be echoed in Nancy Drew’s travels to exotic places. That sixteen-year-old Patsy should be the long-distance driver on at least one of these trips (Wilderness Lodge) shows her to be a pioneer that Nancy will follow in her blue roadster. In Golden West, her driving skills are called upon to extract a car from a precarious position after an accident.

However, the geographical scope of the Patsy Carroll books also provides ample scope for racism and cultural bias, as well as classism. Southern Skies is populated by untrustworthy, hostile Hispanics and credulous Black maids, as well as other benign “darkies.” The maid in Golden West is a “darling . . . little Chinese girl” (122) to whom Patsy talks baby talk. There are bad “Injuns” (232), Apaches, and good Indians, Hopis. In this, too, the books prepare the way for the Nancy Drew mysteries, in which villains tend to be swarthy, if male, and if female, gypsy. The poor orphan girl who engages their sympathies in Southern Skies, whom the girls style a “wood nymph,” is identified as Spanish, not Mexican, and is, says Bee, “as white as Patsy or I.” When Aunt Martha reacts favorably to this waif, Patsy declares, “Auntie isn’t the least tiny bit snobbish,” a statement so patently untrue throughout the series as to call attention to its source.

And here I feel compelled to add ageism and sexism to the books’ sins. Aunt Martha, the maiden aunt who will be replaced by housekeeper Hannah Gruen in the Nancy Drew books, has been caring for Patsy since she was a baby. She constitutes an important object lesson in the inconvenience of mothers and maternal figures to girl adventurers. She is most often characterized by her disapproval or outright banning of any venture she considers risky, which extends to most ventures, and her suspicion of anyone not of her race and class. She’s described in Golden West as “an energetic, elderly lady” (9). You may be surprised, then, to learn that Patsy’s father is her older brother. She is the target of much solicitude on the part of Patsy and her fellow Wayfarers, who often express the hope that their travels will provide her with an opportunity for rest. Perhaps the greatest mystery in the Patsy Carroll series involves precisely what it is that Aunt Martha needs rest from. On two occasions in the books, the group is left without a cook — a crisis of no little proportion. In Southern Skies, Aunt Martha heroically undertakes to produce a dinner. Little wonder that she’ll be retired long before Nancy arrives on the scene.

You can read these books online for free here:

Wilderness Lodge: https://archive.org/details/patsycarrollatwi00gord

Southern Skies: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53361

Golden West: https://archive.org/details/patsycarrollingo00gord

Old New England: https://archive.org/details/patsycarrollinol00gord

Here’s a reminder of the generations of girl readers who devoured mysteries featuring girl detectives: the inside cover of my copy of Patsy Carroll in Old New England.