Status Updates From The Secret Of The Stratemey...

(cont'd from previous post) Schooled in the elementary virtues of fiction and having fully discovered all the secrets of the series mysteries for themselves, they are ready, in both senses of the word, to explore what is beyond.

First, Happy Hollisters readers move on to the Hardy Boys and/or Nancy Drew...readers do not simply abandon those books they once regarded so highly...They also carry over the confidence gained from stories about successful young discoverers and a literary template--a sense of how stories are constructed and proceed--that will be helpful later. (cont'd in next post)

Stratemeyer's Success sums up the author's analysis of the business of the Syndicate, after deconstructing individual series and their creation. The Syndicate's willingness to modernize and modify its properties, expand beyond the core book business, and maintain its formulaic satisfaction of juvenile readers' expectations and desires gave it nearly a century of commercial success.

The Happy Hollisters breaks down the Stratemeyer Formula to its simplest essentials. The series offers younger readers, ready for more than picture books, a roadmap to a treasure hunt. It's simple, it's larded with family outings not connected to the hunt, the clues and the people are all big and broad. There are 33 of them, so it worked. IDK if they're still read, since they were dated when I was a kid.

Nancy Drew: Gothic Detection explores the odd parallel universe of an 18yr old (as of 1959) girl with a boyfriend she doesn't canoodle w & a tubby, funlovin' bestie, no ma, pa her slave & protector, super-high-stakes scrapes in low-stakes mysteries. VV Gothic, old houses lost fortunes eville guardians etc. Perfect for 8-12s bc no hint of sexuality lots of flouting society's expectation, gaining personal fame.

The Hardy Boys appealed to me until I was about 12; just read that, in the late 1980s, that was where S&S figured their appeal ended. This chapter's synopsis is The Mystery of the Chinese Junk, 1st vol published after I was born & a least-fave read. The series applies lesson of Fielding, nothing real no slang no aging necessary; by 1970s the boys were 2 years older than in 1927. Enviable, that.

"In short, the Hardys remain locked in that period between childhood and adult life that psychologist Erik Erikson has characterized as a moratorium—the quiet and deep sleep of fairy tale characters that precedes awakening into maturity."

"Psychoanalyst Lili Peller has commented that stories about uncovering secrets are naturals for children, for whom life is full of secrets adults are duarding. More specifically, {another author of psychological studies on the Hardy Boys} has suggested a Freudian fascination in the Hardy Boys series with yawning-mouthed caves."
***
I thought it was just me bein' an ol' perv for seein' that!

Ruth Fielding introduced me to a character I never heard of before, precursor to Nancy Drew, mystery solving orphan and successful career woman. Do what now? In 1915? And she grows up, gets married, has a kid?! Nancy Drew's 17 and has been for 80 years! The lesson was learned in this series' failure (30 books a failure?!?) and now all time is now all places are here the world doesn't change. It works even yet.

Bobbie Ann Mason has said of the Stratemeyer Syndicate output that the books read so inoffensively precisely because of their sparse style: "The series are so carefully styleless that you can't point to bad puns, strained metaphors, overloaded descriptions. There is an absence of language: there is vocabulary, but not language." quoted by Billman, p59

"The Ruth Fielding series was published under the pseudonym Alice B. Emerson..."
...and just like *that* my brain substituted "Toklas" for "Emerson" and a lovely daydream of Toklas outshining Gert Stein as an authoress was born....

The Rover Boys lays out in detail the formal basis for the appeal of adventure stories to adolescent readers. Stratemeyer as Winfield, putative author of the series, is a tediously pompous old stick but a plot-wright extraordinaire. Stratemeyer knew girls read the books too so always included chaste-but-there romances. The series ages w the Rovers, follows up w series of their sons. Cast of villains ages too.

"The reader, like the {roller coaster} rider, submits himself (sic) willingly to the prepared experiences of a closed-circuit system that promises to return him (sic) to the safety of his point of origin after having exposed him (sic) to a series of breathtaking dips and curves."--Dennis Potter, quoted by Billman

What exactly are the thrills awaiting the consumer of the Rover Boys volumes? A summary of a representative title in the series, The Rover Boys Down East, provides a starting place from which to answer that question.
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Worthy of ol' Stratemeyer himself. Manages to be inelegant, pompous, and tempting at the same time. Brava, Author Billman.

Edward Stratemeyer sets up the successful codifier of the series-book formula as the pop-culture guru and business genius that he indisputably was. Overview of critical shrieking. Librarians: Gatekeepers of moral decency or regressive censorship addicts? (Both.) The formula established and explained. The Syndicate's standards and practices led to its longevity. Dominated kids' reading most of 20thC.

Nameless Fortune magazine writer of Stratemeyer's genius from a 1934 profile:
{Leaving a million-dollar estate in the Great Depression} was his reward for discovering in the late nineties that, like many other natural resources of the time, the reading capacity of the American adolescent was limitless. As oil has its Rockefeller, literature has its Stratemeyer.

Like the vacationer who returns to a beloved summer house year after year, the addicted reader opens book three or four or eleven in a given series and is thoroughly at home in the locale—its by now familiar native characters, the verbal shrubbery and the narrative floorboards that occasionally creak. Selma Lanes, Down the Rabbit Hole
quoted by Carol Billman

For young readers, it would seem, mystery fiction represents an especially clear case of what any reading of a story involves. The process of reading is still an uncertain enough proposition. Thus the series mystery {continued in comments}

"The Rise of Series Fiction" this is a companion read to Girl Sleuth, reviewed here, about the business of the Stratemeyer Syndicate. I loved the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and even Tom Swift Jr. when there was one digit in my age. Mama bought them for me uncomplainingly. Probably why I'm a biblioholic now!