The Mystery of the Fictional Sleuth

MARENGO — Nancy Drew, the young, fictional sleuth admired by teenage girls for decades, has solved many mysteries since her debut in 1930.

But Drew herself was the subject to vast sleuthing after readers learned that Carolyn Keene, the author who told her stories, wasn’t a real person. It wasn’t until 1980 that Ladora native Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson was recognized as the original author of the first books in the series.

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Mildred’s story is featured in the December newsletter of the Iowa County Historical Society. Information published in the newsletter was compiled by Patricia Hinrichs from the Iowa History Journal, an article by Barbara Lounsberry, the University of Iowa Women’s Archives and Mildred’s great-niece, Lois Kay Morgan Kovar.

Mildred was born to Dr. J.L. and Lillian Matteson Augustine in Ladora July 10, 1905, the youngest of two children. Her brother, Melville Augustine, was seven years older.

Mildred preferred athletics and adventures, in real life or in books, to playing with dolls, the Historical Society newsletter says. She was also quite musical: newspaper articles praised her xylophone performances at community events.

Mildred loved to read and write and, by the age of 13, had sold her first story to Saint Nicholas Magazine.

In 1922, Mildred graduated from Ladora High School with three other students. She enrolled at the State University of Iowa, now the University of Iowa, and joined the yearbook and college newspaper staffs. She participated in soccer, track, basketball, swimming and diving.

Mildred graduated in three years with a degree in English and spent the following year as a reporter for the Clinton Herald on the banks of the Mississippi River.

Mildred returned to the State University of Iowa in 1926, the only graduate student in the journalism program. In 1927, she became the first person to earn the journalism school’s master’s degree.

In the summer before her return to the university, Mildred visited New York and met Edward Stratemeyer, owner of Stratemeyer Syndicate which published popular juvenile series such as The Bobbsey Twins and The Hardy Boys.

The Syndicate hired ghost writers, giving them plot outlines and chapter summaries from which the authors wrote books. The ghost writers received a flat fee and signed away all rights to the works.

Mildred received an offer from Stratemeyer to write a novel in the Ruth Fielding series under the pseudonym Alice B. Emerson. She wrote the book at her childhood home in Ladora and finished a second book in the series while working on her master’s thesis at the University of Iowa.

In 1928, Mildred married Asa Alvin Wirt, a telegraph operator for the Associated Press. The couple moved to Cleveland, Ohio where Mildred wrote books on a typewriter that sat on an overturned orange crate.

In 1929, Stratemeyer offered Mildred a new series, Nancy Drew. He sent her three outlines from which Mildred produced “The Secret of the Old Clock,” “The Hidden Staircase,” and “The Bungalow Mystery.” She wrote “The Secret of the Old Clock” in just over a month.

Stratemeyer initially thought the character Mildred had created was “too flip” and would never be well received. But Stratemeyer sent the manuscripts to Grosset & Dunlap for publication, and the books were on store shelves by April of 1930.

The books were so popular that the publishing company requested more titles. Mildred wrote 23 of the first 30 books in the series, receiving $125 for each one.

During the Depression, the publisher offered Mildred $75 per book, but she refused it.

In 1936, Mildred gave birth to a daughter. Shortly after, Asa was transferred by the AP to Toledo, Ohio, and the family moved there.

Mildred continued writing youth books, adding the Dana Girls and Kay Tracey mysteries to her portfolio. She created Ruth Darrow and Penny Parker, a girl sleuth that Mildred preferred to Nancy Drew.

Mildred wrote more than 120 children’s books and many magazine stories under her own name as well as under pseudonyms. She worked as a reporter for the Toledo Times during World War II when much of the male workforce was engaged in war overseas.

Later Mildred wrote features and a column for the Toledo Blade.

Asa died in 1947. In 1950, Mildred married George Benson, an editor at the Times. He died in 1959.

Like Agatha Christie, the famed British mystery writer of the same era, Mildred was fascinated with archaeology. She earned her pilot’s license in 1964 after she tired of hiring bush pilots to transport her to remote archaeological digs.

During one dig in Guatemala, Mildred was kidnapped. But, like Nancy Drew, she outwitted her captors and escaped.

Mildred flew her own Piper Cherokee plane and held six different pilots’ licenses, including one for a sea plane, the same kind that appears in Nancy Drew volume 14, “The Mystery of the Whispering Statue”

Mildred’s passion for flying is also found in the clue in “The Crumbling Wall.”

More than 200 million copies of Nancy Drew mysteries have been sold, and the books have been translated into 45 languages. Mildred’s authorship was a secret until a 1980 court case between Grosset & Dunlap and the Stratemeyer Syndicate revealed her role.

In 1993, Mildred reached an agreement with Simon and Schuster under which she is given credit for authoring the original stories. Since that time, Mildred has been acknowledged in all printings of the 23 books she wrote.

The same year, the University of Iowa celebrated the journalist and author with a Nancy Drew conference that made international news.

Mildred died in 2002 at the age of 97, hours after turning her weekly column, “On the Go,” at the Toledo Blade.

Many of Mildred’s personal effects were donated to the University of Iowa’s women’s archives, and last summer the Pioneer Museum in Marengo exhibited several historic photos of Mildred, items from the Nancy Drew Conference and copies of several books Mildred wrote. The items were lent to the museum by great-niece who owns the home in Ladora where Mildred grew up — and where a famous fictional sleuth was born.