Author | Frances K. Judd |
---|---|
Language | English |
Series | The Kay Tracey Mystery Stories |
Genre | Mystery |
Publisher | Cupples & Leon |
Publication date | 1934-1942 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | |
Pages | 206 |
The Kay Tracey Mysteries were published under the name Frances K. Judd, a house pseudonym of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, a book packager. The series was conceived as a response to the popularity of the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories and likewise features a teenage girl detective. While the original entries in the series lasted only from 1934 to 1942, the books were updated, revised, and have been re-issued numerous times, most recently by Bantam Books in the 1980s, and have been translated into Swedish and French. Many critics see Kay Tracey as markedly inferior to Nancy Drew, but some find the series to be significant as one of a number of series that provided girls with a feminist role model prior to third-wave feminism.
Kay Tracey is a 16-year-old amateur sleuth who lives with her mother and her older cousin Bill, a lawyer, in the fictional town of Brantwood. Kay is depicted as unfailingly intelligent and courageous; she lives in "a constant shower of praise." [1] Unlike Nancy Drew, the character on whom Kay Tracey was modeled, Kay is a student in Carmont High School. Like the Dana Girls, fictional sister sleuths created by the Stratemeyer Syndicate around the same time as Kay Tracey, Kay deals continually with a jealous schoolmate, Ethel Eaton, [2] who often interferes in Kay's cases. Kay is often aided in solving mysteries by her two best friends, twins Wilma and Betty Worth, [3] and occasionally her boyfriend, Ronald Earle.
Written by four women from 1934 to 1942, the Kay Tracey Mystery Stories were created in order to capitalize on the success of the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories. [4] The series has been reprinted numerous times, often with changes in artwork, format, and series numbering. The series was most recently re-issued in the 1980s. [5]
Meet clever Kay Tracey, who, though only sixteen, solves mysteries in a surprising manner. Working on clues which she assembles, this surprising heroine evolves the solution to cases that have baffled professional sleuths. |
From the jacket to The Shadow on the Door, 1934 |
The series was created and supervised by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, with the actual stories being written by four women over the series' history: Elizabeth Mildred Duffield Ward, Mildred Wirt Benson, Edna Stratemeyer Squier (Adams's sister), and Anna Perot Rose Wright. [6] Ward was responsible for the first two titles in the series; volumes three through 12 as well as volume 14 were written by Benson. Wright wrote the last four volumes. While Squier contributed only one volume, The Forbidden Tower (later dropped from the series), she wrote the plot outlines for nearly all the volumes in the series. [6]
Adams and Squier exercised tight control over the series, ensuring that all outlines were extremely detailed. At one point Benson cited this level of detail as a reason for the abrupt writing style of some of the titles, writing to Adams that "I do think that the last Kay Tracey story had a slightly hurried and abrupt tone, although I spent fully as much time and thought on the manuscript as usual.... Recent plots seem to be running somewhat long on detail, and I had difficulty in getting all of the scenes into the story even by cutting some of them short." [7] Adams and Squier continued, however, to supervise every detail of the books; in particular, they expressed concern over the way that Benson characterized the title heroine and her friends. As Squier wrote to Benson at one point, "Kay and her chums at times speak too sarcastically and audaciously for growing girls. The story has a boyish ring throughout which we will temper to conform to more girlish ideals." [8]
The Kay Tracey Mystery Stories have been reprinted multiple times in a number of different formats and with different artwork. The series was originally published by Cupples & Leon. These editions featured a glossy frontispiece and a full color illustration on a yellow dustjacket. Later runs of the dustjackets were red and blue as well as yellow.
The series was later updated and revised, first in 1951 and 1952 by Doubleday's Garden City Books, [9] although the only title to be substantially re-worked was the first volume, The Secret of the Red Scarf. [10] During this time, wrap-around style dust jackets, that is, jackets where the cover art continued over to the spine, in full-color, were introduced. A new frontispiece in pen-and-ink was included. A spine symbol of Kay, apparently cheering, was introduced on the jackets, as was a binding symbol on the book spine, which was a picture of Kay peeking from behind a curtain. The volumes were slightly revised in most cases, mainly to updated slightly outmoded vernacular, and to re-sequence the books. Three titles – The Forbidden Tower, The Mystery of the Swaying Curtains, and The Shadow on the Door – were dropped from the series for reasons which are unclear.
The series was re-issued in digest size paperbacks by Doubleday/Books, Inc. [11] in the late 1950s, and the titles were again re-sequenced. From 1960 to 1964, eight titles were released by Berkley Medallion/Berkley Highland in paperback. Six books were released in 1978 by Lamplight in picture cover format with artwork very similar to the Garden City books. In the 1980s, Bantam re-issued six of the titles in the series (re-numbered again), and at least seven titles were printed in the United Kingdom in 1984, again with new artwork. [5]
The Kay Tracey Mystery Stories were renumbered repeatedly; below is a complete list of volumes in original publication order with the original numbering by Cupples & Leon. A 19th and 20th titles were planned for the series, but never came to fruition, as the series was canceled in 1942.
|
|
While the Kay Tracey books were intended to be similar to the Nancy Drew series, Kay Tracey was never as popular a character as Nancy Drew. Various critics have attempted to explain how a series so superficially similar should have been so much less successful.
Some commentators have cited the stories themselves and the style in which they were written as a reason for the series' comparative lack of success. The series is written at a much more break-neck pace than other series books of the time; their style has been called "formula-writing at its most flaccid." [13] Others have compared the series to comic books, arguing that the stories are "lurid, but too cartoonish to be frightening." [14]
Others have pointed to the character of Kay Tracey herself. The character has been described as much less focused than Nancy Drew on rational detective methods. While a Nancy Drew mystery at least "tells readers that Nancy works by logical reasoning," Kay "lurches from coincidence to happenstance." [1] Some call Kay a "Nancy Drew imposter." [15] Anne Macleod and others argue that the series was less long-lasting than Nancy Drew, despite its superficial similarities, because "the stories fail to support the kind of authority and autonomy that Nancy enjoys without question." [1] Kay lacks her own car, but must instead borrow her cousin Bill's, and her authority is "undercut by her clear identification as a schoolgirl." [16] Kay lives with her mother, not her father; while Kay's mother does not interfere in Kay's mystery-solving, she "carries non-interventionism to the point of idiocy" [1] and fails to provide the series with the cachet that Carson Drew provided for Nancy.
In general, however, critics often see Kay Tracey as simply one of a number of girls' series that are important because they provided girl readers with role models, particularly girls who grew up before third-wave feminism. [17]
Nancy Drew is a fictional character appearing in several mystery book series, movies, video games, and a TV show as a teenage amateur sleuth. The books are ghostwritten by a number of authors and published under the collective pseudonym Carolyn Keene. Created by the publisher Edward Stratemeyer as the female counterpart to his Hardy Boys series, the character first appeared in 1930 in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series, which lasted until 2003 and consisted of 175 novels.
Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson was an American journalist and writer of children's books. She wrote some of the earliest Nancy Drew mysteries and created the detective's adventurous personality. Benson wrote under the Stratemeyer Syndicate pen name, Carolyn Keene, from 1929 to 1953 and contributed to 23 of the first 30 Nancy Drew mysteries, which were bestsellers.
Carolyn Keene is the pseudonym of the authors of the Nancy Drew mystery stories and The Dana Girls mystery stories, both produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. In addition, the Keene pen name is credited with the Nancy Drew spin-off, River Heights, and the Nancy Drew Notebooks.
The Stratemeyer Syndicate was a publishing company that produced a number of mystery book series for children, including Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, the various Tom Swift series, the Bobbsey Twins, the Rover Boys, and others. It published and contracted the many pseudonymous authors who wrote the series from 1899 to 1987, when it was sold to Simon & Schuster.
The Bungalow Mystery is the third volume in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series written under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. It was the last of three books in the "breeder set" trilogy, released in 1930, to test-market the series.
The Dana Girls was a series of young adult mystery novels produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. The title heroines, Jean and Louise Dana, are teenage sisters and amateur detectives who solve mysteries while at boarding school. The series was created in 1934 in an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of both the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories and the Hardy Boys series, but was less successful than either. The series was written by a number of ghostwriters and, despite going out-of-print twice, lasted from 1934 to 1979; the books have also been translated into a number of other languages. While subject to less critical attention than either Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys, a number of critics have written about the series, most arguing that the Dana Girls' relative lack of success was due to the more dated nature of the series.
The Hardy Boys, brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, are fictional characters who appear in a series of mystery novels for young readers. The series revolves around teenage amateur sleuths, solving cases that often stumped their adult counterparts. The characters were created by American writer Edward Stratemeyer, the founder of book packaging firm Stratemeyer Syndicate. The books were written by several ghostwriters, most notably Leslie McFarlane, under the collective pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon.
Franklin W. Dixon is the pen name used by a variety of different authors who were part of a team that wrote The Hardy Boys novels for the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Dixon was also the writer attributed for the Ted Scott Flying Stories series, published by Grosset & Dunlap.
Edward L. Stratemeyer was an American publisher, writer of children's fiction and founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate. He was one of the most prolific writers in the world, penning over 1,300 books and selling more than 500 million copies.
The Bobbsey Twins are the principal characters of what was, for 75 years, the Stratemeyer Syndicate's longest-running series of American children's novels, written under the pseudonym Laura Lee Hope. The first of 72 books was published in 1904, the last in 1979, with a separate series of 30 books published from 1987 through 1992. The books related the adventures of the children of the upper-middle-class Bobbsey family, which included two sets of fraternal twins: Bert and Nan, who were eight years old, and Flossie and Freddie, who were four when the first book was written. The two sets of twins aged as the series went on. As the series continued, the two sets of twins were perpetually aged at 12 and 6.
The Mystery at Lilac Inn is the fourth volume in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series. It was first published in 1930 under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. Mildred Wirt Benson was the ghostwriter of the 1930 edition.
The Clue of the Velvet Mask is the thirtieth volume in the original Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series. It was Mildred Benson's final ghostwrite for the series. The plot and story take place largely in Nancy's hometown of River Heights. Nancy tries to solve a mystery about a gang of event thieves robbing homes during parties, lectures, musicals, and other social occasions planned or catered by Lightner's Entertainment Company. Much of the original story contains elements of dramatic crime dramas; the villains are darker in tone than many other entries in the series.
The Judy Bolton Mystery Series, written by Margaret Sutton, follows a realistic young woman who solves mysteries. Although the series was not quite as popular as Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton has been called a more complex and believable role model for girls. Judy was also unique in that halfway through the series, she married The 38-volume series was written from 1932 to 1967 and is the longest-lasting juvenile mystery series written by an individual author.
The Mystery of the Ivory Charm is the thirteenth volume in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series. It was first published in 1936 under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. The actual author was ghostwriter Mildred Wirt Benson.
The Spider Sapphire Mystery is the forty-fifth volume in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series. It was first published in 1968 under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. The actual author was ghostwriter Harriet Stratemeyer Adams.
Mystery of the Glowing Eye is the fifty-first volume in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series. It was first published in 1974 under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. The actual author was ghostwriter Harriet Stratemeyer Adams.
Penny Parker is the heroine of a series of 17 books written by Mildred Benson and published from 1939 through 1947. Penny is a high school student turned sleuth who also sporadically works as a reporter for her father's newspaper, The Riverview Star. Her mother, similarly to Nancy Drew's, died some years before, so she was raised by the Parker housekeeper, Mrs. Weems. On her cases she is sometimes aided by her close friend, brunette Louise Sidell, and occasionally Jerry Livingston or Salt Sommers who are, respectively, a reporter and photographer for her father's paper.
The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories is the long-running "main" series of the Nancy Drew franchise, which was published under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. There are 175 novels — plus 34 revised stories — that were published between 1930 and 2003 under the banner; Grosset & Dunlap published the first 56, and 34 revised stories, while Simon & Schuster published the series beginning with volume 57.
Girl detective is a genre of detective fiction featuring a young, often teen-aged, female protagonist who solves crimes as a hobby.