May

In 1930 and 1931, the first seven volumes of the Nancy Drew series were written by Mildred A. Wirt Benson, the first Carolyn Keene. But the series spawned more mysteries than the identities of the ghostwriters. For one, where exactly is River Heights? On a rainy day in Buffalo last month, I was at the coop building at Antiques World and bought a set of 25 vintage Nancy Drews. That was enough to start me sleuthing.

Iowa, Benson’s home state, is most often guessed by Nancy Drew aficionados on an online survey on Nancydrewsleuths.com. Some others think Ohio, Illinois, or New Jersey. Others believe that the location, like other myths, shifted to meet the requirements of each storyteller who followed the publisher’s outlines. Besides, the first 34 volumes were revised by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who with her sister, Edna, continued their father’s Nancy dynasty after his death.  

You haven’t a clue what you are getting into when you start seeing Nancy Drew books as a meta-trove of clues about River Heights. Some Nancy mysteries are solved more easily than its location. We find out pretty quickly that Ned Nickerson wasn’t in the first six Nancy Drew books because Nancy didn’t meet him until Volume seven, The Clue in the Diary, published in 1932. At first she thought he was stealing her car. But Ned was interested in solving the mystery she was involved in, and used it as a reason to drop her house. She liked him enough to ask Dad what he thought of him.

“Nice boy,” he said. Inwardly he was thinking that she seemed to be more interested in Ned than in her other dates. But as Mildred A. Wirt Benson has Nancy tell us at the Lilac Inn in 1930, “For the present, my steady partner is going to be mystery.”

And close chums Bess and George didn’t show up until Volume 5 in 1931, in The Secret at Shadow Ranch. Right in paragraph one, we find out that, although we have never heard of them before, Bess and George are her two best friends. At a time when national spirits often mimicked the Great Depression, Nancy arrived by plane in Phoenix to meet them for a dude ranch vacation far from River Heights.

Dates, chums, and economic doldrums aside, what Nancy is interested in is deductive thinking--whether or not it is because losing Mom at age three propelled her into a young adulthood of looking for her. The same deductive thinking can produce River Heights for generations of readers for whom River Heights is never definitively pinpointed.

Let’s start with “Where is Twin Elms?” More about the context for this shortly, but first clue: It is located just a couple of miles out of Cliffwood, which we can figure out was situated between River Heights and the airport. Second, we are actually told that Twin Elms was “old Colonial home” built in 1785. That’s what Helen Corning says on page 25 of The Hidden Staircase, and she has street cred: the place belongs to her great-grandmother.

The third clue that completes the triangulation: The second ghostwriter, Walter Karig, in Volume 8, Nancy’s Mysterious Letter offers a detailed narration from start to finish of a drive Nancy takes with her chums, Bess and George. They are on their way to spend a weekend with their boyfriends away at college. Karig lasted only through volumes 8, 9, and 10, and then revealed to the Library of Congress that he had written them, a no-no for Carolyn Keene ghostwriters.

We have to use deductive reasoning like Nancy’s accompanied by a little of her intuition and preparedness to find the clues. Once we have River Heights by the scruff, then we can call them “evidence.” But not before, as her criminal lawyer father might have cautioned her.

When Nancy takes Dad to the airport the morning she and her friend Helen go to Twin Elms, he says that when he returns, he will stop off at Cliffwood on his way home. He doesn’t say he will detour to get there or go out of his way to get there, or that it will be a nuisance but he will get there.

“Stopping off” has a nice, casual, unhurried, “It’s on my way, anyway” ring to it, clearly a clue that it will take place enroute to River Heights. It is entirely likely that Nancy would drive maybe three quarters of an hour from River Heights to the airport to see Dad off, and that Helen lives somewhere in between but closer the airport. Cliffwood is about three-quarters of an hour from there, in 1930 probably 20 miles going 35 miles per hour.

We know this because after Nancy sees Dad off, she drives to Helen’s house. They drive a bit while Helen tells her she had gotten engaged just the evening before. There is the obligatory stop at the curb for a hug, and then the discussion of wedding plans for the rest of the drive to Cliffwood. But they are there “before they knew it.” True, times flies when you are having fun, but “before they knew it”?  Maybe twenty minutes? A half hour?

When they get to Cliffwood, Helen tells her that Twin Oaks is about two miles out of town: “Go down Main Street and turn right at the fork.” It takes ten more minutes, the narrator says, until the girls see it from the road, with its stone wall and tall elms, oaks, and maples. So they must have had to ride down Main Street through Cliffwood for a few miles before taking the fork, at maybe 35 miles an hour on the average--no interstate with a 65-mile speed limit.

So Cliffwood might reasonably be a half-hour from the airport, on the way back to River Heights. And what is Twin Elms like? It’s an old Colonial mansion build in 1785. Out of the towns suggested on the Nancy Sleuth site, only New Jersey would satisfy the location of an old Colonial mansion built in 1785. Ohio and Iowa don’t make it for the same reason that New Jersey does: There couldn’t have been an old Colonial home in those states built in 1785.

Surveyors were sent into Ohio in 1796, according to an annotated atlas, and they had to camp along the Cuyahoga River in what now is Cleveland. So a 1785 Colonial mansion didn’t welcome them. The British had warships on Lake Erie until the War of 1812. In the 1800’s, settlers from Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky moved in to establish farms near the borders of their home states, and onto land already set aside in the Western Reserve for Connecticut settlers.

Iowa housed a major trail that ‘49er’s took west through Des Moines, spawning a wagon-train station in Council Bluffs. Settled by immigrants who moved west between 1850 and 1880, Iowa was hardly the spot where an old Colonial home would have been erected in 1785.

More corroboration: In volume 8, Nancy’s Mysterious Letter, the first one written by someone else, Nancy stops by the postal inspector’s office in River Heights to have some letters X-rayed. To a Nancy reader, this is just an ordinary sleuthing errand, but nonetheless one that can be mined for clues. It doesn’t disappoint us. Immediately afterward the efficient X-ray, on page 105, she picks up Bess and George so they can all visit their boyfriends at college for the weekend, and “they rode toward Emerson.” That’s where Ned goes to school, and we already know he belongs to a fraternity there because he was wearing his pin when Nancy met him in Volume 7.

As the girls drive along, Nancy tells them what she found out at the post office. Plump but pretty Bess spots a tearoom where they can stop for lunch and says that it has been a long time since breakfast. Now, we know that Nancy had been ready to leave the house since 8, because we are told that on page 103. How long could X-raying the letters take at the post office? Nancy asks that very question of Mr. Wernick, the postal inspector. He advises her to wait, and it takes the technician just a few minutes to get the results.

Let’s say that the post office in a town in the 1930’s might have opened at 8:30 or 9. So perhaps it’s 9 or 9:15 by the time she leaves there to get Bess and George at their houses. They load their luggage, Nancy says hi to their moms, maybe there is a five or ten minute drive from one to the other, and they are off, riding toward Emerson by 9:45 or10.

There is chatter that deserves direct quotes in the text before Bess gets hungry, so maybe there is also more small talk that didn’t make it into quotation marks. It could reasonably be a little before noon when they stopped for lunch because, as Bess says, it’s a long time since breakfast. Nancy even cautions Bess and George that they “must not spend too much time” and the narrator confirms that “They ate quickly.” (105).

The plot thickens. Still riding two hours after lunch at the tearoom, the girls see the towers of Emerson College (105). As young Nancy Drew fans find out when they are old enough to start their college tours, Emerson College is in Boston, about a four-hour ride from the New York City suburbs. Of course, in the 1930’s, Nancy and her chums would have had a longer ride because cars didn’t go as fast and speed limits were different.

If they left the tearoom around 12:30 and arrived at Emerson College at say 2:30, Ned comments that they made good time make sense (106). Then a short time later, Burt, George’s date, has to go to a rehearsal for the play he will be in that evening. An afternoon rehearsal the same day as the play might go for over two hours, perhaps a run-through with notes from a previous dress rehearsal. If it started at 3:00, the cast would have dinner at 5:30 or so and be back by 7 to dress. The play would start at 8.

There are clues to New Jersey again in Volume 10, Password to Larkspur Lane, when Ned and his two buddies just happen to be hired as camp counselors at the same time that Nancy and her two chums have made arrangements to be on the same lake solving another mystery.

On page 96, “Tons of ocean sand had been transported overland to make a beach for the camp.”  Nancy would pounce on the words “ocean” and “overland” if she were reading this book.  If she were writing this article, she would say (after offering to set the table),  ‘It is unlikely that ocean beach sand would be taken overland to a camp in the Midwest during the Great Depression. We must be somewhere in the original thirteen colonies, don’t you agree, and not far from the ocean?’  Trucking all that sand to Ohio or Iowa just defies the kind of common sense, not to mention budgetary considerations, that a summer camp owner would have had in the 1930’s, or in 1966 when this volume was revised.

Intrepid explorers will latch on immediately to a shiny clue in Volume 12, The Message in the Hollow Oak, after Benson took back the reins. Nancy has an opportunity to visit her Aunt Eloise in New York City. Of course she flies there. Bess and George arrive at noon to take her to the airport and she has reached her aunt’s apartment house by mid-afternoon. Three hours could mean there was a airport maybe a three quarter of an hour from the Drew residence in River Heights. And just suppose it was at least a half-hour cab ride from a New York City airport to Aunt Eloise’s apartment. That leaves maybe one-and-a-half to two hours for checking in and getting on the plane, the flight itself, and then reclaiming baggage and getting a cab.  New Jersey leaves Iowa, Ohio, and Illinois in the dust.

Deductive reasoning can get you far. Especially if you can unstick your partner’s foot from a rocky crag while skindiving; win a golf tournament with a bandaged hand in the afternoon after chasing a ghost down over a rickety bridge in the morning; and live to confront counterfeiters in a hidden cave because you have tallied the time between a warning bell and rushing waters that would drown anyone else.

Before “24,” McGyver, and Charlie’s Angels, there was Nancy Drew. And because she still exists, River Heights has to have a location, like Neverland does, if only we are brave and smart enough to find it.

The Buffalo Books column writes about authors, events, and books linked to the greater Buffalo area. Linda Chalmer Zemel has been a News Book Reviewer for The Buffalo News on contemporary novels. She retired from SUNY Monroe Community College as adjunct assistant professor of English. Currently she teaches writing at Medaille College, where she has also taught Adolescent Education to prospective secondary school English teachers in the Graduate School of Education. She is also the Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner for Examiner.com.

http://www.examiner.com/alternative-medicine-in-buffalo/commentary-reading-and-the-need-for-belonging-turn-out-to-be-related You haven’t got a clue: Triangulating River Heights

By Linda Chalmer Zemel

In 1930 and 1931, the first seven volumes of the Nancy Drew series were written by Mildred A. Wirt Benson, the first Carolyn Keene. But the series spawned more mysteries than the identities of the ghostwriters. For one, where exactly is River Heights? On a rainy day in Buffalo last month, I was at the coop building at Antiques World and bought a set of 25 vintage Nancy Drews. That was enough to start me sleuthing.

Iowa, Benson’s home state, is most often guessed by Nancy Drew aficionados on an online survey on Nancydrewsleuths.com. Some others think Ohio, Illinois, or New Jersey. Others believe that the location, like other myths, shifted to meet the requirements of each storyteller who followed the publisher’s outlines. Besides, the first 34 volumes were revised by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who with her sister, Edna, continued their father’s Nancy dynasty after his death. 

You haven’t a clue what you are getting into when you start seeing Nancy Drew books as a meta-trove of clues about River Heights. Some Nancy mysteries are solved more easily than its location. We find out pretty quickly that Ned Nickerson wasn’t in the first six Nancy Drew books because Nancy didn’t meet him until Volume seven, The Clue in the Diary, published in 1932. At first she thought he was stealing her car. But Ned was interested in solving the mystery she was involved in, and used it as a reason to drop her house. She liked him enough to ask Dad what he thought of him.

“Nice boy,” he said. Inwardly he was thinking that she seemed to be more interested in Ned than in her other dates. But as Mildred A. Wirt Benson has Nancy tell us at the Lilac Inn in 1930, “For the present, my steady partner is going to be mystery.”

And close chums Bess and George didn’t show up until Volume 5 in 1931, in The Secret at Shadow Ranch. Right in paragraph one, we find out that, although we have never heard of them before, Bess and George are her two best friends. At a time when national spirits often mimicked the Great Depression, Nancy arrived by plane in Phoenix to meet them for a dude ranch vacation far from River Heights.

Dates, chums, and economic doldrums aside, what Nancy is interested in is deductive thinking--whether or not it is because losing Mom at age three propelled her into a young adulthood of looking for her. The same deductive thinking can produce River Heights for generations of readers for whom River Heights is never definitively pinpointed.

Let’s start with “Where is Twin Elms?” More about the context for this shortly, but first clue: It is located just a couple of miles out of Cliffwood, which we can figure out was situated between River Heights and the airport. Second, we are actually told that Twin Elms was “old Colonial home” built in 1785. That’s what Helen Corning says on page 25 of The Hidden Staircase, and she has street cred: the place belongs to her great-grandmother.

The third clue that completes the triangulation: The second ghostwriter, Walter Karig, in Volume 8, Nancy’s Mysterious Letter offers a detailed narration from start to finish of a drive Nancy takes with her chums, Bess and George. They are on their way to spend a weekend with their boyfriends away at college. Karig lasted only through volumes 8, 9, and 10, and then revealed to the Library of Congress that he had written them, a no-no for Carolyn Keene ghostwriters.

We have to use deductive reasoning like Nancy’s accompanied by a little of her intuition and preparedness to find the clues. Once we have River Heights by the scruff, then we can call them “evidence.” But not before, as her criminal lawyer father might have cautioned her.

When Nancy takes Dad to the airport the morning she and her friend Helen go to Twin Elms, he says that when he returns, he will stop off at Cliffwood on his way home. He doesn’t say he will detour to get there or go out of his way to get there, or that it will be a nuisance but he will get there.

“Stopping off” has a nice, casual, unhurried, “It’s on my way, anyway” ring to it, clearly a clue that it will take place enroute to River Heights. It is entirely likely that Nancy would drive maybe three quarters of an hour from River Heights to the airport to see Dad off, and that Helen lives somewhere in between but closer the airport. Cliffwood is about three-quarters of an hour from there, in 1930 probably 20 miles going 35 miles per hour.

We know this because after Nancy sees Dad off, she drives to Helen’s house. They drive a bit while Helen tells her she had gotten engaged just the evening before. There is the obligatory stop at the curb for a hug, and then the discussion of wedding plans for the rest of the drive to Cliffwood. But they are there “before they knew it.” True, times flies when you are having fun, but “before they knew it”?  Maybe twenty minutes? A half hour?

When they get to Cliffwood, Helen tells her that Twin Oaks is about two miles out of town: “Go down Main Street and turn right at the fork.” It takes ten more minutes, the narrator says, until the girls see it from the road, with its stone wall and tall elms, oaks, and maples. So they must have had to ride down Main Street through Cliffwood for a few miles before taking the fork, at maybe 35 miles an hour on the average--no interstate with a 65-mile speed limit.

So Cliffwood might reasonably be a half-hour from the airport, on the way back to River Heights. And what is Twin Elms like? It’s an old Colonial mansion build in 1785. Out of the towns suggested on the Nancy Sleuth site, only New Jersey would satisfy the location of an old Colonial mansion built in 1785. Ohio and Iowa don’t make it for the same reason that New Jersey does: There couldn’t have been an old Colonial home in those states built in 1785.

Surveyors were sent into Ohio in 1796, according to an annotated atlas, and they had to camp along the Cuyahoga River in what now is Cleveland. So a 1785 Colonial mansion didn’t welcome them. The British had warships on Lake Erie until the War of 1812. In the 1800’s, settlers from Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky moved in to establish farms near the borders of their home states, and onto land already set aside in the Western Reserve for Connecticut settlers.

Iowa housed a major trail that ‘49er’s took west through Des Moines, spawning a wagon-train station in Council Bluffs. Settled by immigrants who moved west between 1850 and 1880, Iowa was hardly the spot where an old Colonial home would have been erected in 1785.

More corroboration: In volume 8, Nancy’s Mysterious Letter, the first one written by someone else, Nancy stops by the postal inspector’s office in River Heights to have some letters X-rayed. To a Nancy reader, this is just an ordinary sleuthing errand, but nonetheless one that can be mined for clues. It doesn’t disappoint us. Immediately afterward the efficient X-ray, on page 105, she picks up Bess and George so they can all visit their boyfriends at college for the weekend, and “they rode toward Emerson.” That’s where Ned goes to school, and we already know he belongs to a fraternity there because he was wearing his pin when Nancy met him in Volume 7.

As the girls drive along, Nancy tells them what she found out at the post office. Plump but pretty Bess spots a tearoom where they can stop for lunch and says that it has been a long time since breakfast. Now, we know that Nancy had been ready to leave the house since 8, because we are told that on page 103. How long could X-raying the letters take at the post office? Nancy asks that very question of Mr. Wernick, the postal inspector. He advises her to wait, and it takes the technician just a few minutes to get the results.

Let’s say that the post office in a town in the 1930’s might have opened at 8:30 or 9. So perhaps it’s 9 or 9:15 by the time she leaves there to get Bess and George at their houses. They load their luggage, Nancy says hi to their moms, maybe there is a five or ten minute drive from one to the other, and they are off, riding toward Emerson by 9:45 or10.

There is chatter that deserves direct quotes in the text before Bess gets hungry, so maybe there is also more small talk that didn’t make it into quotation marks. It could reasonably be a little before noon when they stopped for lunch because, as Bess says, it’s a long time since breakfast. Nancy even cautions Bess and George that they “must not spend too much time” and the narrator confirms that “They ate quickly.” (105).

The plot thickens. Still riding two hours after lunch at the tearoom, the girls see the towers of Emerson College (105). As young Nancy Drew fans find out when they are old enough to start their college tours, Emerson College is in Boston, about a four-hour ride from the New York City suburbs. Of course, in the 1930’s, Nancy and her chums would have had a longer ride because cars didn’t go as fast and speed limits were different.

If they left the tearoom around 12:30 and arrived at Emerson College at say 2:30, Ned comments that they made good time make sense (106). Then a short time later, Burt, George’s date, has to go to a rehearsal for the play he will be in that evening. An afternoon rehearsal the same day as the play might go for over two hours, perhaps a run-through with notes from a previous dress rehearsal. If it started at 3:00, the cast would have dinner at 5:30 or so and be back by 7 to dress. The play would start at 8.

There are clues to New Jersey again in Volume 10, Password to Larkspur Lane, when Ned and his two buddies just happen to be hired as camp counselors at the same time that Nancy and her two chums have made arrangements to be on the same lake solving another mystery.

On page 96, “Tons of ocean sand had been transported overland to make a beach for the camp.”  Nancy would pounce on the words “ocean” and “overland” if she were reading this book.  If she were writing this article, she would say (after offering to set the table),  ‘It is unlikely that ocean beach sand would be taken overland to a camp in the Midwest during the Great Depression. We must be somewhere in the original thirteen colonies, don’t you agree, and not far from the ocean?’  Trucking all that sand to Ohio or Iowa just defies the kind of common sense, not to mention budgetary considerations, that a summer camp owner would have had in the 1930’s, or in 1966 when this volume was revised.

Intrepid explorers will latch on immediately to a shiny clue in Volume 12, The Message in the Hollow Oak, after Benson took back the reins. Nancy has an opportunity to visit her Aunt Eloise in New York City. Of course she flies there. Bess and George arrive at noon to take her to the airport and she has reached her aunt’s apartment house by mid-afternoon. Three hours could mean there was a airport maybe a three quarter of an hour from the Drew residence in River Heights. And just suppose it was at least a half-hour cab ride from a New York City airport to Aunt Eloise’s apartment. That leaves maybe one-and-a-half to two hours for checking in and getting on the plane, the flight itself, and then reclaiming baggage and getting a cab.  New Jersey leaves Iowa, Ohio, and Illinois in the dust.

Deductive reasoning can get you far. Especially if you can unstick your partner’s foot from a rocky crag while skindiving; win a golf tournament with a bandaged hand in the afternoon after chasing a ghost down over a rickety bridge in the morning; and live to confront counterfeiters in a hidden cave because you have tallied the time between a warning bell and rushing waters that would drown anyone else.

Before “24,” McGyver, and Charlie’s Angels, there was Nancy Drew. And because she still exists, River Heights has to have a location, like Neverland does, if only we are brave and smart enough to find it.

Linda Chalmer Zemel, Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner and Buffalo Books Examiner. Originally published on Examiner.com