Nancy Drew

Bicycle Bess, the Boulevard Detective

February 28, 2023 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

Cover illustrations for the Bessie Blake mysteries.

I’ve had a lifelong love affair with bicycles. My current heartthrob is a retro Electra girl’s bike with coaster brakes and baskets on the back. The baskets are collapsible and it’s black instead of pink, but otherwise it’s very similar to the bike I had as a kid and teenager. You can probably tell from this description that I don’t use it for 20-mile cross-country treks, but just now, in early February, I’m dreaming of leisurely summer jaunts on the bike trail. As a kid, I loved the sense of mobility my bike gave me — a freedom of movement that today’s kids can’t even imagine. And when I lived in a small town as an adult, I could do many of my errands on my bike. Now that I live in suburbia, my options are more limited, but I still appreciate the altered perspective on my neighborhood offered by moving through it on two wheels instead of four.

So here I’m paying homage to Bicycle Bess, the Boulevard Detective, who made three appearances in the pages of Beadle’s Half Dime Library in the fall of 1896. Her creator, Jesse C. Cowdrick, was a prolific writer of dime novels for both Beadle’s and Street and Smith, and is perhaps best known for continuing the Deadwood Dick series after the death of Edward L. Wheeler, whom you may remember as the creator of New York Nell and Santa Fe Sal. Bicycle Bess is hardly the most prominent or flashiest girl detective to appear in this blog, but I like to think that her intelligence, professionalism, and mobility were inspirational.

Bessie Blake, a sometime partner of Scorcher Sam (presumably named for his speed on a bicycle), makes her brief debut as an undercover agent in Scorcher Sam the Detective on Wheels; or, The Sensation at Washington Heights. By the second Scorcher Sam adventure, she has been promoted into the subtitle: Scorcher Sam’s Sweep-Stakes; or, Bicycle Bess, the Boulevard Belle Detective. In the third novella, what today we would call a “spin-off” (no pun intended, honest), the roles are reversed: The Girl-Cyclist’s Winning Hand; or, Scorcher Sam’s Death-Hole Drop.

I’ve introduced Bessie as a “bicycle detective,” although that representation of her seems only to have occurred to Cowdrick after the first novella. Her main assignment as a police detective seems to involve riding her bicycle up and down the boulevard to attract mashers and then have them arrested. In the second novella, she appears on the scene when she passes Scorcher Sam on her bicycle: “It was a young woman, jauntily attired and mounted on a fine wheel, coming toward him” (Sweep-Stakes 7). When she passes him with a covert sign, the narrator tells us:

She it was, the dauntless little boulevard detective, Scorcher Sam’s ally. As she came nearer, she looked irresistably [sic] bewitching. (Sweep-Stakes 7)

Sam follows to observe her at her work. She’s stringing along a notorious boulevard masher, nicknamed “Don Quixote” or “Donkey,” who takes advantage of the opportunity she gives him to collide with her and then pretend to examine her bike for damage. When he moves in to steal a kiss, Bessie is ready for him: “she brought him a couple of stinging slaps with her gauntleted hands, first on one side of the face and then on the other” (Sweep-Stakes 8). She screams as a signal to Sam, who chases down the fleeing Donkey on his bike and arrests him, despite this acknowledgment: “Sam would have been willing to bet that Bessie herself could overtake and arrest him single-handed, had the occasion required” (Sweep-Stakes 8). Bessie vows to press charges “not on my own account, for I think I rather got the best of him, but on account of the many others he has assaulted” (Sweep-Stakes 8). In fact, the Bicycle Bess stories all focus on female victims.

Bessie’s dual nature is typical of portrayals of early girl detectives. We are often reminded of her beauty, and even more often reminded, usually by Sam himself, of her small stature. In the above scene, she “shook her dainty fists at the masher” (Sweep-Stakes 8) and Sam calls her “my little lieutenant” (Sweep-Stakes 8). In the third novella, Sam calls her “little one” (Girl-Cyclist 3) and “my brave little ally” (Girl-Cyclist 14), just as the narrator has called her “the dauntless little boulevard detective.” But like other girl detectives, Bessie has more than her dainty fists to use against bigger, stronger opponents. In Sweep-Stakes, she holds a masher at gunpoint. In Girl-Cyclist, she uses a gun, first against a bully, and then during a police raid, when she captures a second pistol and shoots the chief criminal. The sight of a beautiful young woman brandishing two pistols seems to be particularly alluring: “with flushed face and flashing eyes she made a pretty but terrible picture” (13) (one that I wish they had chosen to paint in the cover illustration, but more of that later).

Bessie’s intelligence is commented on from the start, when she’s introduced as “one of the cleverest female detectives in New York City” (Scorcher Sam 13). In the context, this appears to refer to her facility with disguise, and her undercover assignments seem to occupy her time when she’s not cruising the boulevard to attract mashers. In the first novella, Sam has used her as a spy in a household where he suspects criminal activity. In Girl-Cyclist, she takes the place of a young woman threatened with a forced marriage. When the criminals get the drop on Sam and her, she assumes the role of a weak woman:

Bess covered her face with her hands and her form shook as if with sobbing, and she did not act much like the girl who had so spunkily handled a revolver so short a time before. (12)

Yet we have already been reassured that “Bicycle Bess was clever, and was seldom at a loss” (10).

Like others in this sisterhood, she does manifest some traits considered to be feminine at the time. She is said to be “something of a tease” (Sweep-Stakes 9) and shows some pity for the masher she entraps in Sweep-Stakes. And in a curious footnote, she chides Sam for his use of slang at one point; slang is often presented as a problem in early detective fiction, perhaps because it’s considered a sign of class in a society that is anything but classless, and the Angels in the House were often entrusted with the purity of the English language.

But I’ll end where I began, with Bessie as “the queen of wheelwomen” (Sweep-Stakes 15). This reputation is confirmed when Bess identifies her partner to the intended woman victim in Girl-Cyclist, and the latter responds, “Then you must be Bicycle Bess” (6). This victim, also an accomplished wheelwoman, has apparently heard of the detective who patrols the boulevard to make it safer for women on bicycles. In fact, all three of these characters take their wheels with them when they travel on the train. So closely identified with her bicycle is Bess that Sam infers her movements from the presence or absence of her bicycle in her room at one point.

I regret, therefore, that I cannot show you a picture of Bessie with her wheel. The women who appear in the cover illustrations are all victims of crime. Sam, on the other hand, appears in all three illustrations, accompanied by his bicycle in two of them. And yes, Reader, she married him.

The novellas are available here: Scorcher Sam, the Detective on Wheels; Scorcher Sam’s Sweep-Stakes, The Girl-Cyclist’s Winning Hand.

Thanks to Beth McGowan of the Northern Illinois University Libraries for furnishing information on Jesse C. Cowdrick.

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.

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 center of interest was the detective Josie O’Gorman, which Sampson and the publishers recognized by giving Josie her own book, Josie O’Gorman, in 1919. Josie is one of the candidates for the title of first modern girl detective, in part because her books were written for girls, not adults (though sadly, not illustrated).

In the first book, Mary Louise, 15-year-old Mary Louise Burrows discovers that her mother and her adored Gran’pa Jim, with whom she and her mother live since her father’s death, have disappeared in the middle of the night, and that he is wanted by the government for giving state secrets to the enemy. Before this happens, her grandfather has told her to write to him care of his attorney. After a brief interrogation by a blustering Secret Service agent, she leaves school and travels on her own to see the attorney, an old family friend named Conant, but she is followed. The detective who follows her turns out to be the famed John O’Gorman of the Secret Service, who speaks kindly to her, pays for a hotel room, and treats her to breakfast, telling her that she reminds him of his own daughter.

The Conants invite Mary Louise to spend the summer with them at Hillcrest Lodge, their rented summer place, which they hope will be remote enough to discourage the government’s unwanted attentions. Their new neighbor is a fashionable single woman, accompanied by a secretary, whom Mary Louise and her new friend Irene Conant come to know and like. When a dull-witted Irish girl shows up at the door claiming to have been offered employment by the house’s owners, the Conants hire her for the summer. In fact, the plan to avoid government agents fails because the woman neighbor and her secretary are crack Secret Service agents, and the dull-witted Irish girl is none other than Josie O’Gorman, John O’Gorman’s daughter, who has been trained in detective work from her infancy. It is Josie who brings back Gran’pa Jim and establishes his innocence to the astonishment of the two women agents. They have heard of Josie, but never met her: “Everyone who knew O’Gorman had often heard of his daughter Josie, of whom he was accustomed to speak with infinite pride. He always said he was training her to follow his own profession and that when the education was complete Josie O’Gorman would make a name for herself in the detective service” (1^st World Library edition, p. 181).

In subsequent books in the series, Mary Louise continues to encounter various mysteries that need solving, and to engage Josie, now a good friend, to solve them. In fact, after the death of her father, Josie moves to the same town to be close to Mary Louise, even though her increasingly busy detective career often takes her away. We learn more about her training, carefully supervised by her father, and her passion for her work: “Josie O’Gorman loved mysteries for their own sake. She loved them because they required solutions, and to solve a mystery is not only interesting but requires a definite amount of talent” (Mary Louise Solves a Mystery, 1917, Echo Library Edition, p. 74). Published during the war years and soon after, these books are often patriotic, even jingoistic.

Nancy Drew and my own girl detective, Dizzy Lark, are direct descendants of Josie O’Gorman, and students of girl detectives will be interested in both similarities and differences. Most notably, Baum does not make Josie beautiful, like Titian-haired Nancy Drew: “Josie O’Gorman was small and ‘pudgy’—her own expression—red-haired and freckle-faced and snub-nosed. Her eyes redeemed much of this personal handicap, for they were big and blue as turquoises and as merry and innocent in expression as the eyes of a child” (Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls, 1918, Biblio Bazaar edition, p. 52). Like girl detectives who came before her, Josie is a master of disguise, with a talent for deception not generally encouraged in girls and young women. And Mary Louise and her friends are referred to as “chums” (Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls, 1918, Biblio Bazaar edition, p. 40, for example)—a word that I will always associate with Nancy, George, and Bess.

Some of the Mary Louise books are available from Project Gutenberg:

Mary Louise, 1916

Mary Louise in the Country, 1916

Mary Louise Solves a Mystery, 1917

Mary Louise Adopts a Soldier, 1919 (with Emma Speed Sampson)

Josie O’Gorman, 1919 (Emma Speed Sampson)

Mary Louise at Dorfield, 1920 (Emma Speed Sampson)

Mary Louise Stands the Test, 1921 (Emma Speed Sampson)