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.

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.

Laura Keen, the Queen of Detectives

April 1, 2021 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

This story, which appeared in The New York Detective Library in 1892 (I won’t say “first appeared” because these stories were frequently published in several venues), is a prime example of the dime novel and a prime exhibition of the qualities that made these novels so popular. Therefore, its girl detective is a model of the young women who feature in this genre — a girl detective on steroids, if you will.

To give you a flavor of these novels, let me describe the first page. In the opening paragraphs, two slang-spouting miscreants seize hold of a woman who’s been following them and threaten her with a pistol and a knife. When they recognize her as “Laura Keen, the queen of detectives” (2), the one with the knife lunges for her throat, but after some verbal defiance, she trips the prospective knifer and:

Click! Like a flash a pistol appeared in Laura Keen’s hand.

Bang! the weapon was discharged.

Ring! the blade of the dirk-knife fell upon the pavement.

The wonderful shot had shattered the knife at the handle. (2)

And then:

Laura Keen’s clear, musical voice rang out in a mocking laugh, as she whipped out an immense bowie-knife, and while she kept “the drop” on the Englishman with her pistol, coolly picked her teeth with the point of the weapon. (2)

That was column one. Column two has Laura enjoining the villain to “give up your dreadful plot to ruin and blast the lives of innocent people, or I swear, in the sight of Heaven, here and now, that I will be a Nemesis upon your track to thwart you and hunt you to your doom” (2). Unfortunately, his sidekick takes a shot at her and ducks into a saloon. Undaunted, Laura steps into a nearby barber shop and changes her appearance from that of an Irish servant girl (in a red wig) to that of a fashionable lady (blonde wig) and follows the miscreant into the saloon, where she is again seized and de-wigged. Things are looking bad for Laura, despite a conspiratorial look exchanged with a small Negro bootblack, when she pulls a third (but who’s counting?) pistol “from some place of concealment upon her person” (2) and fires at the main villain, cutting off a lock of his hair. But then a woman (aptly named Jezebel) springs out from her hiding place and knocks her out with a slingshot. Thus endeth page 1.

The busy plot is pretty standard and involves various attempts by two criminal gangs to get their hands on a fortune by killing or marrying off the heiress against her will. The latter scheme entails framing her fiancé for the theft of some diamonds. Laura, recognized as the “detective queen” not only by the miscreants in the story but also by severable notable male detectives whose paths she crosses (she saves them or they save her), has been hired by the heiress to find her missing fiancé and clear him of the charges against him.

Laura, who is “about 22” and whose background is unrevealed in the story, displays many of the qualities common to girl detectives in the dime novels and after: she is fearless, determined, daring, cool, intelligent, courageous, and beautiful. She travels between New York and Baltimore, and even to Dakota, which introduces a Western setting so beloved of dime novel readers. Apart from her considerable skills at disguise and mimicry, she can pick a lock, row a boat, and climb a telegraph pole. And if you were impressed by the three pistols and one bowie knife she had secreted on her person, there’s more. Also stashed in her pocket are a small wireless set which she uses on two occasions to send and intercept telegraphs, and —wait for it! — a carrier pigeon. The latter is quite handy to a young woman who is captured and imprisoned as much as Laura is.

Even handier, however, are Laura’s sidekicks, who appear to be employees. In many ways, these two exhibit the racial and cultural stereotypes prevalent in the dime novels. Scud, most often referred to as “the little darky,” and Le Loup, the Dakota Indian, both speak in cringe-inducing dialect meant to provide comic relief. Yet both are portrayed as intelligent and quick-witted; Laura depends on them and gives both important assignments. In fact, Laura owes her life to their intelligence and courage on several occasions. Moreover, Le Loup has his own dramatic story and his own mission. Once that mission is accomplished, he disappears.

Another surprise is Kate Estabrook. Typically, these stories have room for only one heroine, and that’s the girl detective. The role of the female victim is to be victimized — to be terrorized, abducted, imprisoned, threatened, and rescued. Once Kate is rescued, however, she falls in with Laura’s plan for her to return to her house disguised as an Irish maid to spy on the man who is plotting her death, the man whom we presume to be her father. When she disappears again, we fear that she’s been recognized and recaptured, only to discover that she has set off for Dakota alone to free her real father from captivity.

It might be pleasant to speculate that the author of this novel, “C. Little,” might be a woman, but the Edward T. LeBlanc Memorial Dime Novel Bibliography identifies this pen name as one belonging to H(arvey) K(ing) Shackleford, who wrote under several names. As Allan Arnold, Shackleford had published four years before Laura Keen a dime novel entitled A Diamond Ear-ring; or Nina, the Female Detective, which has many features in common with its successor. The year previous to Laura Keen, he published Belle Boyd, which has already been chronicled in this blog.

I was unable to find a full-text version of this book online. If anyone knows of a source, please let me know and I’ll post it.

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 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.

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 — Sal confronts a roomful of barroom rowdies.

Detective stories and Westerns were two of the most popular genres appearing in 19^th-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 detective, Santa Fe Sal is a Western figure.

The story is set in the Buckshot mining camp in Arizona. It opens in a barroom where a local tough proposes to bully a blind, elderly organ grinder into rolling dice for his organ, which is his sole means of livelihood. In the fashion of all Western heroes, Santa Fe Sal bursts onto the scene to see justice done:

“I’ll see that you ain’t cheated, old man!” cried a ringing voice — a voice that was so strange to the crowd that they wheeled about, simultaneously.

They beheld, standing near at hand, a girl of beauteous face and figure — a girl with midnight eyes and flowing dark-brown hair — a girl attired in [a] stylish, elegant-fitting gray suit of male attire, including patent-leather shoes, and a jaunty white slouch sombrero. She stood there smiling, while she twirled a light cane in her white hand. (2)

The strangeness of this apparition no doubt constituted a large part of its appeal to the reader.

Like New York Nell, Santa Fe Sal appears cross-dressed, the cane a superfluous ornament quickly abandoned by the narrator as an unworthy weapon. Later the villain will try to stir the crowd against her by referencing her male attire:

“She is evidently a desperate character; the very fact that she sports around in men’s clothing is against her, and casts a reproach on the fair reputation of your wives and daughters. I say the woman ought to be strung up without mercy!”

When another woman tries to shame Sal for her clothing, the detective nonchalantly cites economic practicality as her motive: “I’m bobbin’ around all over, and the petticoats I’d have to buy, through gittin’ ‘em tore, would bankrupt me.” Like other girl detectives, and detectives in general, Sal is also a master of disguise and enters one scene as Howlin’ Hank from Hardpan, whose true identity is exposed when an irate gambler makes to cut off Hank’s whiskers, only to have them come off in his hand. Disguise serves deception, another trait that was considered decidedly unladylike.

Like many early girl detectives, Sal invades forbidden space, the all-male space of the saloon; in contrast, the more conventional heroine of the story, the saloonkeeper’s daughter, says that she has tried to talk her father out of “that low business” and declares, “I never enter the saloon” (5). Although we hear of wives and daughters in the camp, its public spaces are dominated by men.

Sal violates feminine norms in other ways, as well. She is a practitioner of that Western art that so captivated Mark Twain: the art of the boast. Here’s her introduction:

“Who am I?” was the pert reply. “Well, if you want to know, I’m an angel without wings — a regular la-lah, you bet! I hail from Texas-way, an’ down there I’m known as Santa Fe Sal, the Slasher. Are you happy to meet me?”

After praising her own marksmanship with a gun, she introduces herself again:

“Down whar I cum from they call me Santa Fe Sal, the Slasher, ‘cause when I git inter a soiree, an’ hev a six-inch bowie, I kin carve the hull crowd, in no time!”

These are remarkable statements for a woman on many counts. They violate feminine ideals of modesty, certainly. They demonstrate an enjoyment of fame and a comfort with publicity that was supposed to be anathema to the Angel in the House, the 19^th-century feminine ideal that Sal may be referencing here. And if they paint her as a woman of action, they also evince Sal’s fluency in slang, language that carried a heavy weight of social disapproval when used by men, much less by women. Indeed, she has the nerve to chastise the villain for his own language, which includes the words “thunderation” and “the deuce”: “You’r’ a reg’lar old hoss on expletives, ain’t ye? (5).”

In spite of her sobriquet, Sal’s first weapons are a pair of revolvers, as depicted in the cover illustration. On the second full page of the story, she kills a man, one of a threatening mob, who disregards her warning to stay back. Nor does she show any remorse, saying, “That man earned his fate! . . . And if any of the rest of you want a funeral just notify me” (3). When she is later called a “murderess,” she objects: “I put a pill in that feller’s cabeza, ‘ca’se I’d told him if he come for me he was a dead man. He came, and you bet he went, quicker’n he came” (5). But eventually Sal feels forced to draw her knife and justify her moniker, addressing an angry mob:

“Ef you’re bound to crowd on me, all I ask is that you leave yer shootin’-irons alone, and draw yer carvin’ tools, an’ meet me more on terms of equality. I’d ruther not have any scrimmage with you at all, fer some one’s bound to get dissected, but ef yer bound ter all pit yerselves ag’in’ one lone girl, you’ll be pretty apt to find Santa Fe Sal right to home, and the latch-string out!”

This speech so shames her would-be attackers that they back off and we never get to see a demonstration of Sal’s carving skills.

SPOILER ALERT. It may not surprise you to learn that Wheeler’s imagination only extends so far in the matter of gender-bending. Sal’s male client tells her at one point:

“This is no life for one to lead who is so beautiful and accomplished as yourself. If I live, we will take little Bertie and go to my home in the East, where your sole business will be to act as his governess.”

The modern reader may well wonder if little Bertie is quite prepared to learn shooting and knife fighting at the hands of his new governess, not to mention why the speaker believes that this vision of domestic life would appeal to Sal the Slasher. Our skepticism is further aroused when the narrator observes:

He spoke earnestly and kindly, but not passionately, yearningly, as a lover might have spoken.

So imagine our surprise when Sal blushes and considers the proposal in language devoid of slang:

“I wonder if I ought to take advantage of it, and give up this wild, roving existence? He is a true gentleman, and offers me a home, and — and maybe —”

The color came faster into her cheeks, and her eyes glowed bright as the stars that twinkled in the blue dome above. (12)

Yes, reader, she marries him, in a single sentence that strips her of her colorful sobriquet: “And Santa Fe Sal (otherwise Sara Wilmot) came with him, and became his wife” (15). This event marks the end of “the detective firm of Santa Fe Sal & Green” (15). A disappointment, surely, but perhaps we ought to acknowledge that a writer as prolific as Wheeler knew his audience and presumed that they wanted the ending that readers are said to have wanted from many generations of storytellers: a wedding.

Santa Fe Sal is not available in full text online.

Augusta Huiell Seaman, A Founding Mother

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

THE SAPPHIRE SIGNET: Sisters and Friends — THE SAPPHIRE SIGNET: Sisters and friends

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 boys.

The typical Seaman protagonists were a pair of teenage girlfriends (“chums” is a word that appears often) or sisters, sometimes with a male cousin thrown in to provide colorful language (see below). These girls often present a contrast in appearance and temperament, as in The Dragon’s Secret (1921): “Leslie was slight and dark in appearance, rather timid in disposition, and inclined to be shy and hesitant in manner. Phyllis was quite the opposite—large and plump and rosy, courageous and independent, jolly, and often headlong and thoughtless in action.” Think plump Bess and boyish George, with some attributes redistributed. What the best of friends in these books have in common is their passion for reading. The invalid Margaret Bronson (whose favorite book is Little Women — did you guess?) in The Sapphire Signet (1916) “loved books—loved them with the passionate delight that only confirmed invalids can feel for the printed magic that takes them out of themselves and makes them forget their bodily ills” and “read voraciously everything that came her way.” In The Shadow on the Dial (1927), sixteen-year-old Naomi says that her sister Enid “adores mystery and detective stories.” Fourteen-year-old Doris shares books with her new friend Sally in The Slipper Point Mystery (1921), and fifteen-year-old Bernice shares books with her new friend Delight in The Mystery at Number Six (1922).

THE BOARDED-UP HOUSE: "Oh, I wish I were Sherlock Holmes!" — THE BOARDED-UP HOUSE: “Oh, I wish I were Sherlock Holmes!”

What do they most like to read? Mysteries, of course, and Sherlock Holmes mysteries in particular. Reading fuels their longing for adventure, and Holmes is the model they attempt to follow in exploring mysteries. In The Boarded-Up House, Joyce tells her best friend Cynthia, “Why, it’s an adventure, Cynthia, like the kind we’ve always longed for. You know we’ve always said we’d love to have some adventures, above everything else.” The invalid Margaret in The Sapphire Signet confides to her mother, “Oh, I want some adventures — just one nice, big, beautiful adventure would do!” One can’t help thinking of Jane Eyre, who wrote, “It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity [sic]: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. . . .Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do.” Conan Doyle’s Holmes mysteries may also explain the frequent inclusion of codes and ciphers in these books.

And speaking of Jane Eyre, there are plenty of Gothic houses in these books, often forbidden spaces that the girls explore, their consciences taxed but not overtaxed by the knowledge that they are trespassing. These houses conceal secrets from the past, including papers, journals, and artifacts that reveal the turbulent histories of their former residents. A favorite theme is a family torn apart by a violent quarrel, later regretted, sometimes having to do with opposing sides in the Civil War. (Contemporary readers should be warned that Southern settings often feature stereotypical black characters.)

As to the protagonists’ own families, these are interesting, too. I’ve written before about the inconvenience of mothers to the development of a girl detective. According to Christine M. Volk, though, Seaman’s own mother died when she was nine, and she spent time living with relatives, so that may provide a more obvious explanation for the missing mothers in Seaman’s novels: some are dead, some are ailing, and at least one is a working single mother, so they are rarely around to interfere with their daughters’ adventures. Fathers, when present, can also suffer poor health or be absent on business. But the father in The Sapphire Signet is an interesting case. While the father of the Bronson sisters is dead, their friend Corinne’s father is actually permitted entry into the girls’ secret society, the Antiquarian Club, on Corinne’s enthusiastic recommendation: “He and I are such chums! . . . He romps around with me as though he were only sixteen!” Mr. Cameron is also in poor health, however, and it is this poor health that enables a trip to Bermuda to solve the club’s mystery. Mr. Cameron is a clear forerunner of Carson Drew.

Brothers in these books are mostly a nuisance, but boy cousins and boy friends occasionally come in handy. Along with a wider geographical range than the girls, these boys sometimes introduce a wider verbal range as well. The horrid Alexander, a thirteen-year-old who

THE DRAGON'S SECRET: Girls Trespassing — THE DRAGON’S SECRET: Girls Trespassing

spies on them, is permitted into the Antiquarian Club grudgingly by his cousins, again at the urging of Corinne, who exclaims, “Did you ever hear such a glorious collection of slang!” Alexander’s cousin Bess has a very different reaction: “His language is so dreadful and slangy! It irritates me to pieces.” When sisters Naomi and Enid first meet their new friend Ronny in The Shadow on the Dial, “his slang somewhat took the girls’ breath away.” These boys’ speech adds color to the books, but it also follows a recurring theme in girl detective fiction generally. The young women sleuths who populated the dime novels of the nineteenth century had to master slang in order to become masters of disguise; in order to impersonate men and enter spaces forbidden to women, they had to talk the talk as well as walk the walk, and the impropriety of their speech is often commented on.

Seaman’s long career demonstrates the success of her formula, but for a more personal tribute, read Christine Volk’s “Nancy Drew for Smart Kids: Mysteries by Augusta Huiell Seaman.” She describes her reaction to the typical Seaman plot, a reaction similar to mine when I, an avid Nancy Drew fan, discovered the more commonplace pleasures of Judy Bolton: “This was a situation in which my friend – another reader of Seaman’s books – and I could easily imagine ourselves becoming involved. While we read, and liked, the Nancy Drew mysteries, Nancy’s ability to travel on a whim almost anywhere in the world was so far outside of our own personal experience that we never really expected to live in one of her stories.”

Some of Seaman’s books are widely available free from Project Gutenberg, Hathi Trust, and Amazon, as well as in low-cost reprint editions. You should know, though, that many of these editions do not include the original illustrations, although the Project Gutenberg versions do.