In past episodes, Brook and Sarah have discussed examples of younger sleuths such as Nancy Drew. In today’s episode, Brook and Sarah explore other early examples of younger sleuths including Trixie Belden; Nell, the Boy-Girl Detective; and Violet Strange.
Discussed and mentioned
Read New York Nell Niblo: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/deadwood_dick/37
The Golden Slipper (1915) Anna Katherine Green
The Rivals (2013) BBC Radio
The Bobbsey Twins, Mystery at Snow Lodge (1960) Laura Lee Hope
The Bobbsey Twins, Mystery at School (1962) Laura Lee Hope
The Bobbsey Twins, Mystery of the Deep Blue Sea (1965) Laura Lee Hope
Trixie Belden in the Red Trailer Mystery (1950) Julie Campbell
The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1893) C.L. Pirkis
read it here: https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/pirkis/brooke/brooke.html
You might also like
Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys (released March 21, 2023)
Anna Katharine Green (released May 3, 2022)
For more information
Instagram: @cluedinmystery
Contact us: hello@cluedinmystery.com
Music: Signs To Nowhere by Shane Ivers – www.silvermansound.com
Sign up for our newsletter: https://cluedinmystery.com/clued-in-chronicle/
Join the Clued in Cartel for as little as $12 USD/year: https://cluedinmystery.com/clued-in-cartel/
For a full episode transcript, visit
Transcript
This transcript is generated by a computer and there may be some mis-spellings and strange punctuation. We try to catch these before posting, but some things slip through.
| Sarah | Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I’m Sarah. |
| Brook | And I’m Brook, and we both love mystery. |
| Sarah | Hi, Brook. |
| Brook | Hi, Sarah, how are you doing today? |
| Sarah | I’m doing really well. How about you? |
| Brook | Yeah, I’m great, and it’s always fun when it’s time to talk about mystery. And you know our listeners will remember that back in March of 2023, we discussed some of the most popular young sleuths that many of us grew up reading, such as Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. |
| Brook | And during our research for that episode, you and I discovered several other young fictional detectives, and we knew that we wanted to come back and talk about them as well. So today, we’ll cover four more younger sleuths, um or or possibly more than that, that have helped shape mystery for kids and adults alike. |
| Brook | First up is New York Nell Niblo, the Boy-Girl Detective. And Edward Lytton Wheeler created this young detective and the story that she is featured in is called “Old Blakesly’s Money”. And this was published in March of 1899 in an American dime novel called The Deadwood Dick Library. |
| Brook | And this story is available to read online via digital commons, and we can link that for you so you can go out and look at it. It’s great because it’s an actual PDF image of the dime novel, and you get to see the typesetting, and it’s really fun too to look at. But New York Nell Niblo is a 17-year-old female character who dresses as a boy in order to work as a newspaper salesman. |
| Brook | She’s extremely scrappy, stubborn, and independent. um When we first meet her, she’s having a conversation with Old Blakesly, and she explains to him that she poisoned a dog and the police were after her back in New York. And so that’s why she’s here in Philadelphia. And in the story, it goes back and forth between the two cities. But she tells Blakesly at that time that she is a detective. |
| Brook | And she does end up saving him from an inheritance fraud that is being placed against him and reinstates the rightful heir. um It’s an incredibly adventurous story, including her rowing out to a burning boat to rescue a woman. And you know the other characters do describe her as a daredevil as well as a detective. |
| Brook | ah She does save the day and old Blakesly’s money. So, Sarah, did you get time to read, at least in part, the Nell Niblo story? |
| Sarah | I did and I thought it was really interesting. So she has all of this independence throughout the story until the end. |
| Brook | Right. It gets all turned on its head, doesn’t it? |
| Sarah | Absolutely. Which, you know, I think is probably indicative of the time, right? That we can’t allow this woman to be, or this young woman to be completely independent. |
| Brook | Right. And we look at it and think, “Oh, she lost her independence,” but perhaps in that timeframe that that would have been like the happy ending, right? That she gets married and it put like a little bow on her story. |
| Sarah | So Brook, you mentioned that it, the New York Nell story was published in 1899, but I found a version from 1880. So, I wonder if that might’ve been a reprint. |
| Brook | Oh, interesting. And and ah New York Nell was that popular, apparently, that like you know they wanted to republish it in another dime novel. How fun. |
| Sarah | But interestingly, I think that’s the only New York Nell story. So, you know, it may have been very popular. I wonder why there wasn’t a follow up. |
| Brook | Right. And you know Edward Lytton Wheeler did write other adventurous characters. Whether any of those were detectives, maybe we’ll have to poke around and find that out. |
| Sarah | Well, and so I really like that the story opens with her already being a detective, right? Even though she ends up getting married at the end of this story, there could have been other stories, you know, he could have written prequels to ah to this story. And it’s interesting that that doesn’t appear to have happened. |
| Brook | Exactly. Yeah. And I love that she’s a self-proclaimed detective. She tells him, you know, that this is what I do. I love her. |
| Brook | All right, next we have Anna Katharine Green’s girl detective Violet Strange. And um you’ll remember that we have a whole episode on Anna Katharine Green, who is known as the mother of the detective story. So you won’t want to miss that. But it’s really not hard to believe that she’s earned that title since she did create a spinster amateur detective in her character, Amelia Butterworth decades before Agatha Christie ever imagined Miss Marple. And here in Violet Strange, we have the first debutante detective, a type of Victorian-era Nancy Drew. So, Violet Strange appeared in nine short stories contained in a collection called The Golden Slipper, and it was published in 1915. The stories are interconnected but can be read as standalones as well. |
| Brook | Violet Strange comes from an affluent family, but she took work from a detective agency in order to earn her own money and have some of that autonomy and independence. She’s described as a strong girl who’s always able to figure out the truth. In her cases, ah because she is a younger person, mostly involved lost items or missing people rather than any violent crimes. |
| Brook | The BBC radio series The Rivals adapted one of the Violet Strange stories, “The Intangible Clue”, in 2013. I listened to a part of that in preparation for today and I I really enjoyed this character. I can see why she would have been really popular. |
| Sarah | So do you know, Brook, if Violet Strange was written, intended for younger audiences? |
| Brook | I’m guessing that it was not just by, you know, the way that the language that’s used, I mean, it’s, you know, I believe written for adult readers, you know, it’s not simple so that a child could read it themselves. Um, and I guess that is something that she has in common with New York Nell. These were stories about younger people solving crimes, but not necessarily for younger readers. |
| Sarah | When I was reading some of the Violet Strange ah short stories, I thought of a lot of the characters that we see from, say, the 1920s, written today as historical fiction, but those strong, independent women, sometimes of means, sometimes not. But I I think that there’s, ah a line that you can draw between Violet and some of these other characters. |
| Brook | I agree. And I’ve shared on a previous shows that I really enjoyed the PBS series, Miss Scarlet and the Duke. And when I was reading and learning about Violet Strange, it made me wonder if the producers of that show were at all influenced. I think that they would have to be because that it’s even the the correct era, right But um I think we see again this, um just like in Nell, this opportunity, this time in their lives that these young women had to do all these adventurous, independent things before they settled down. Because I don’t believe that Anna Katharine Green ever marries ah Violet Strange off, but there is like a romance going on and the assumption that you know one day she’ll settle down, but she’ll have these adventures to look back on. |
| Brook | Next, we’ll talk about the Bobbsey twins. The Bobbsey twins are two sets of fraternal twins, Bert and Nan Bobbsey, who begin the series at age eight and Flossy and Freddie Bobbsey, who are four when the stories begin. The children aged as the series continued until they finally remained perpetually 12 and six. There were 72 books published featuring the siblings from 1904 to 1979, and then a separate 30-book series with the twins published from 1982 to 1992. |
| Brook | It’s not surprising that the series was so successful or prolific as it is another of the Stratemeyer syndicate productions. You’ll remember that Edward Stratemeyer was the mastermind behind this commercial way of producing lots of titles and lots of series, including Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. And just like those series, the Bobbsey twins were written by a variety of in-house authors under one pen name, Laura Lee Hope. |
| Brook | The stories began as action-adventure tales, but once Stratemeyer recognized the popularity of his detective series, the Bobbsey twins began to solve mysteries as well. And some of their titles include Mystery at Snow Lodge, Mystery at School, and Mystery of the Deep Blue Sea. Again, their cases center on missing objects or stolen money no violent in crimes, ah but many of the titles were still rewritten over the years to account for changing social standards and then the new technology. These stories began when they were in horse and buggy and by the 60s and 70s that seemed odd, so things got changed to automobiles. |
| Brook | I did read these as a kid because I’ve I’ve shared before that at my grandparents’ house, they had a shelf in the basement with my dad and his sister’s children’s books and the Bobbsey twins were there. So, I I did get a chance to read those as a kid. And a twist on what we’ve been talking about, these obviously were intended for children. However, the way they were written would have been meant to be read to children, not the children reading them themselves. They weren’t easy readers, in other words. |
| Sarah | So I’m like you, Brook, I have read some, ah you know, I I read some of the Bobbsey Twins when I was younger and very similar to you. I think it was a stack of books that were either at my grandmother’s house or one of my aunt’s houses. And, you know, spent some summer afternoons reading these stories. I didn’t remember that the kids were so young. |
| Brook | I didn’t either, and I didn’t remember there were two sets of twins. I was thinking it was just a set of twins in a family. So obviously, even though I read them, maybe they didn’t stick with me really, really well. |
| Sarah | Yeah, I wonder how they would read now, even the versions that were updated in the 1960s. I wonder how they would read now. |
| Brook | Mm-hmm. |
| Brook | Well, finally, we have Trixie Belden and of today’s list, Trixie is likely the sleuth most people will recognize, but even her books are more difficult to find than say, Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. And one reason for this is likely that Trixie is not a creation of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, but a competing brand. Julie Campbell wrote the first six books featuring this young sleuth and her friends, and then 33 more were written by in-house writers of Western Publishing Company under the pen name Katheryn Kenny. And Western Publishing Company, I thought this was interesting, is the company that ah created Little Golden Books. |
| Brook | But later, Random House obtained rights to the Trixie Belden series and republished the first 15 books ah from 2003 to 2006. Many readers find Trixie Belden more relatable than Nancy Drew. Um you know, in part, this is because Trixie’s younger and comes from an average middle-class family. |
| Brook | I also think the friendships that Trixie has with her best friend Honey Wheeler and all the members of their club called the Bob Whites of the Glen are just very wholesome and likable. This week I read The Red Trailer Mystery from 1950, and it is very 1950. It was pretty dated. But as you said about the Bobbsey twins, I would like to see what Random House did in the 2003 version and see if you know it felt a little more a little more up to date. |
| Sarah | So I really struggled to find a copy of any Trixie Belden books. And I will admit that until we started this podcast, I had never heard of Trixie Belden. She wasn’t one of the series that was you know at my grandmother’s house. And as you say, it probably was a result of not being part of the Stratemeyer syndicate. |
| Sarah | So I went to a couple of local used bookstores and ah the booksellers told me, “they’re very rare when they come in, they go out right away”. So, I think people have a lot of nostalgia for them. I did manage to find a copy at my library, but it was in the special collection room where I had to request it. They brought it to me. It couldn’t leave the room. So, I spent an afternoon you know, skimming through the story. It just was really, really interesting that it was so difficult to to get my hands on. I did think, you know, ah the book that I read was later in the series. So, it talked about her reputation for attracting trouble and and ah kind of the hijinks that her her group of friends who, as you say, Brook, were were very likable, but the you know kind of trouble that they would would find themselves in. And yet, their parents had no qualms about sending these kids on a trip. They were staying in a hotel. They boarded a boat to New Orleans. |
| Brook | Precisely. |
| Sarah | I loved the independence that these kids had. |
| Brook | Yes, The Red Trailer Mystery is book two in the series and that’s the one that I happened to get my hands on. The very beginning is Trixie’s asking her dad if she can go on this RV trip with the governess. Honey’s governess is going to be taking them because they’re going to go look for their friend who ran away. Again, I’m like, there these are young young people and her dad says, sure, I know you’ll have have a great time. And they likewise, do some very adventurous things that are maybe that’s what made it feel like 1950s to me. But as you mentioned, this was even later in the series. |
| Sarah | Anyway, I like I liked it. And I could see what um what would have made it quite popular at the time. And just unfortunately, it’s it’s not very easy to get um to get a hand on. |
| Sarah | I knew what we were going to be talking about today, and I i was doing a little bit of of research, and I came across Loveday Brooke, who actually Mystery Manon mentioned in a previous episode, and I had not come across Loveday Brooke before. She is a little bit older, she’s in her 30s. |
| Sarah | Um, so not necessarily a young sleuth, but she is this independent female detective. She’s joined a detective agency. Um, and I thought it was really interesting. Have you come across any Loveday Brooke books, Brook? |
| Brook | No, and until Mystery Manon mentioned her, she was not a character that I had on my radar. |
| Sarah | Her book, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, was written by C.L. Pirkis and was ah published, as so many books of the time were, published serially in 1893. |
| Sarah | um But her author, the the the author, C.L. Pirkis, stopped writing after 1894. So, this is, I think, the only time that Loveday Brooke appeared. |
| Brook | How interesting. It’s like a one-hit wonder. |
| Sarah | Yeah, yeah. um But I i mean, i I read a little bit of um ah the stories, and I think I’d I’d like to read more. and And this is, again, another one of those ah characters that I would like to learn a little bit more about. And I think there were, I think this is not the only example of a female detective that appears once or twice. I mean, we talked about New York Nell, same thing, right? Who, um you know, get the, have this opportunity to ah solve crimes and then disappear. |
| Brook | Yes, yes, so interesting. And I love the fact that um, she’s being kept alive because Mystery Manon was discussing for her gift list that it’s a game, right? So um someone has been a fan of this character and now reimagined it into like ah a mystery game that you can play. So, that’s really that’s really fascinating. And you think about the impact that that author who wrote for just a short period of time has continued to have on mystery fans. It’s pretty great. |
| Sarah | Yeah, exactly. Well, Brook, this has been really fun to talk about some early detectives, some of them young, some of them for young readers. And I’m sure we’re going to continue part of this conversation at some point in the future. |
| Brook | Yes, as we discover more, we’ll definitely need to revisit the idea of young sleuths in in fictional mystery. And thank you all for joining us today on Clued in Mystery. I’m Brook. |
| Sarah | And I’m Sarah, and we both love mystery. |
