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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.

Nellie, the Girl Detective

December 10, 2020 By D.B. Borton 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 …

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Santa Fe Sal, the Slasher; or, A Son’s Vengeance

August 1, 2020 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

Cover illustration for SANTA FE SAL

Detective stories and Westerns were two of the most popular genres appearing in 19th-century dime novels and story papers, so it’s not surprising that they were frequently combined to enhance appeal. E.L. or Edward Wheeler was a prolific writer of dime novels who contributed several entries into the history of the girl detective, as you may remember from New York Nell, the first character whose exploits were reported in this blog. But whereas New York Nell is a good example of the urban …

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Augusta Huiell Seaman, A Founding Mother

May 1, 2020 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

Closer kin to Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton than L. Frank Baum’s professional young Secret Service agent Josie O’Gorman were Augusta Huiell Seaman’s girl detectives. Seaman was a prolific writer who wrote more than forty books, most of them mysteries for girls. In 1915 at the time she published her first mystery, The Boarded-Up House, first as a serial in the children’s magazine St. Nicholas, publishers were only just beginning to recognize girl readers as a viable target market distinct from …

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Belle Boyd, Ex-Pinkerton and Girl Detective

February 28, 2020 By D.B. Borton 2 Comments

In Allan Arnold’s Belle Boyd, The Girl Detective, a dime novel published in the New York Detective Library in 1891, our heroine is a gun-toting, cross-dressing, larger-than-life crimefighter, a former Pinkerton who is described by one miscreant as “the boss detective of Chicago and the West” (4). Full disclosure: this is a ham-fisted potboiler of a novel, complete with ghosts, demonstrating all of the racial stereotyping typical of the dime novels. But it’s useful for our purposes in its …

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Josie O’Gorman, Secret Agent

February 4, 2020 By D.B. Borton 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 …

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