What was the secret of Nancy Drew, Girl Detective? Millie Benson knew

But the original Carolyn Keene — the first, and best, of the ghostwriters, the one who gave Nancy her personality and keenness, her independence and spunk — is what we’d hope to find. Her name was Mildred Wirt Benson, and she died on Tuesday in Toledo in the US at the age of 96.

Benson went to work on the day that she died, sat at her desk, and went about crafting her monthly column — ‘‘Millie Benson’s Notebook’’ — for her hometown newspaper, the Blade. She was feisty, Millie Benson. She had worked for the Blade, and its predecessor, the Toledo Times, for 58 years, and even in her nineties, she wasn’t ready to give it up. ‘‘Call my lawyer,’’ she’d grouse at anyone who would suggest that it was time to retire.

Benson spent her last years writing about the active lives of local senior citizens — though she never considered herself a senior, according to Luann Sharp, assistant managing editor of the Blade. She golfed up until a few years ago. Got a pilot’s license at age 59. She wrote more than 120 books, and countless newspaper columns, including one that ran the morning after her death. ‘‘She was feisty and acerbic, sometimes funny, and basically took no nonsense,’’ says Caroline Dyer, a University of Iowa professor of communications who knew Benson.

Benson started her career earning $125 a pop for the Nancy Drew novels. She wrote 23 of the first 30 volumes, including the opening threesome — The Secret of the Old Clock, The Hidden Staircase (her favourite) and The Hidden Bungalow. She was hired by Edward Stratemeyer, and, armed with a plot outline but little input on character development, Benson created Nancy and friends — slightly plump Bess, tomboyish George (short for ‘‘Georgina’’) and, of course, Ned.

‘‘She was sort of a full-blown character who had many different qualities that people could latch onto, that they could appreciate, emulate,’’ says Dyer. Writing between 1930 and 1953 (when her final Nancy Drew, The Clue of the Velvet Mask, appeared), Benson abandoned the idea that girls were only seeking romance, and instead gave Nancy a yen for adventure — along with a wealthy lifestyle, an understanding widower dad and a fabulous blue roadster. Still, Benson bristled when asked, as she was frequently, if Nancy was a feminist.

Up until 1980, Benson’s authorship of the Nancy Drew novels was a secret; she had been required to sign a confidentiality agreement by Stratemeyer. She was freed from that restriction after a 1980 court case, and as her name became more widely known, the attention swelled. Readers would come by the Blade offices, asking her to autograph their copies; letters poured in. ‘‘There would be women in their fifties, sixties, who would write, ‘‘You are what changed my mind and made me believe I could be more than a housewife,’ ’’ says Sharp, who helped Benson with her mail in recent years, when she lost much of her eyesight.

In the 1950s, Harriet Adams, Stratemeyer’s daughter, took over the franchise, and rewrote the earlier versions, ostensibly to remove some language and references that had come to be considered ethnically or racially offensive. In rewriting, Adams not only removed the offending references — she recast Nancy, who became more traditional.

‘‘She didn’t break rules and didn’t violate the law like she had done occasionally, and with good reason,’’ says Dyer, who quotes from letters exchanged between Adams and Benson in her 1995 book Rediscovering Nancy Drew. ‘‘She was more respectful of authority and all those things.’’

Nancy went through further updates in the 1990s, when Simon & Schuster spun off parallel series called The Nancy Drew Files and Nancy Drew on Campus in which Nancy and Ned get a little more hot and heavy, and eventually break up. The original books — the ones with the blue covers — are collector’s items now. Hardcover copies of the 1950s versions — with the yellow spines — have been reissued by Grosset & Dunlap.

Benson used to make autograph seekers read the first paragraph of their editions out loud before she’d consent to sign the copy — she didn’t want to autograph books that were not ‘‘hers.’’ But many of them were. Some were bought at used bookstores.

Others, though, came out of attics or basements, where generations of mothers and grandmothers had packed them away, anticipating the day they could pass them along.

(LA Times-Washington Post)