Welcome to the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot where we offer a place for bloggers to link up and get a fresh set of eyes on their posts. We also feature one blog a week, letting our readers know about the blog, and providing a link so readers can learn more about it.
Look for the post to go live about 9:30 PM EST on Thursdays.
First, let’s introduce our hosts for the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot:
Marsha from Marsha in the Middle started blogging in 2021 as an exercise in increasing her neuroplasticity. Oh, who are we kidding? Marsha started blogging because she loves clothes, and she loves to talk or, in this case, write!
Melynda from Scratch Made Food! & DIY Homemade Household – The name says it all, we homestead in East Texas, with three generations sharing this land. I cook and bake from scratch, between gardening and running after the chickens, and knitting!
Lisa from Boondock Ramblingsshares about the fiction she writes and reads, her faith, homeschooling, photography and more.
Sue from Women Living Well After 50 started blogging in 2015 and writes about living an active and healthy lifestyle, fashion, book reviews and her podcast and enjoying life as a woman over 50. She invites you to join her living life in full bloom.
We would love to have additional Co-Hosts to share in the creativity and fun! If you think this would be a good fit for you and you like having fun (come on, who doesn’t!) while still being creative, drop one of us an email and someone will get back with you!
WTJR will be highlighting a different blogger each week this year! We invite you to stop by their blog, take a look around and say hello!
Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I have been watching movies that take place in Paris for the last couple of months.
For our last week, we watched Charade with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.
Directed by Stanley Donen this movie was released in 1996 and tells the story of Reggie Lambert (Hepburn) and Peter Joshua (Grant) who meet briefly on vacation in the Alps. When Reggie returns home, she finds that the husband she’d planned to divorce has been murdered, but before he was murdered, he sold the contents of their apartment, including all of her possessions.
A mystery ensues and what follows is a movie that was good but was very confused about which genre it should be in.
When Reggie returns to Paris and her empty apartment, a police officer approaches her and tells her that her husband was found in his pajamas dead by the train tracks and that he was apparently trying to leave Paris quickly.
While Reggie was discussing her husband at the beginning of the movie with a friend, and we learned he was wealthy, we learned very little about him and now it is clear that Reggie also learned very little about him. As the police show her several different passports from different countries with his face on them, she begins to realize she didn’t know the man at all.
Reggie is bewildered later when Peter Joshua shows up to her empty apartment and says he read about the murder in the newspaper and wanted to check on her.
She believes the police think she murdered him.
Peter offers to find her a hotel room until she can find a new job and apartment.
Peter asks what she’s going to do now that her husband has been murdered and she says she’s going to try to get her old job as a translator back.
At his funeral, Reggie is even more bewildered, because there aren’t any guests other than her and her friend. Three American men (James Coburn, George Kennedy, and Ned Glass) show up and either spit on him, poke his body, hold a mirror to his nose, to make sure he is dead, or say something inappropriate. James Coburn approaches her and doesn’t offer condolences. He just says, “Charlie had no reason of doing it thatta way. No siree.” and walks away.
Um..okay…poor Reggie is even more bewildered.
A large man then approaches, handing her a letter requesting she visit the American embassy the next day to discuss the death of her husband.
She shows up to meet with Walter Matthau who seems to know her husband. He informs her that her husband was wanted by the CIA and his real name was Charles Voss. He also tells her that her life might be in danger.
He suggests that she somehow has the money her husband earned from selling all their possessions. That money is the same amount he stole from the United States government during World War II, he says. He instructs Reggie that she needs to find the money and return it to him before the other, dangerous men find her. Looking for help and someone to talk to, Reggie contacts Peter, who decides one way to help is take her out for a night on the town to cheer her up. What results is a very strange game where people have to pass an apple down a line of people only using their chins and necks.
So..yeah..that was strange and uncomfortable to watch. *laugh* I am not sure how the actors did the scene without totally falling apart in laughter or embarrassment.
It was nice to see Cary’s familiar goofy expressions in this scene. I’ve noticed watching his later movies that he doesn’t loosen up the same way he did when he was younger which is natural, but also hard to watch sometimes.
The game leads Reggie and Peter in some compromising positions where they pause to look at each other for a long time and you can tell in that moment that Peter is thinking about what it would be like to kiss her and vice versa.
It’s all fun and games until all three men track Reggie down at the club and begin to threaten her for the money they think she has.
This movie is categorized as a comedy/thriller which makes it a little hard to figure out at times. I sometimes wondered if I was supposed to laugh or feel dread during certain scenes. There is a terrifying scene where one of the men (Coburn as Tex) keeps lighting matches and dropping them on her lap while she screams and cries and I couldn’t laugh at that scene so I don’t know what the director and writers were going for – maybe that was it — to have the viewer not sure what to think.
When Peter convinces Reggie to tell him what he is going on, he decides he will help her find out why she is being pursued and tells her that he will keep the men from hurting her. Now we viewers have to decide with Reggie who Peter is and if he is really a good guy or not.
I read that Cary actually didn’t want this role at first because he said he felt like a predator, going after the younger Audrey.
That’s funny since he was in many movies in his older years where he was “going after” younger women and he married a woman much younger than him, but I digress….
Cary turned 59 during filming and it was this movie that made him decide it was time to stop playing the romantic lead. The reviews focusing on the 26 year age difference between him and Audrey was one big driving factor in this decision, he later said.
He was so uncomfortable with the idea of their age gap he asked for the script to be changed so screenwriter Peter Stone made Audrey the aggressor and Cary the man trying to fight her off.
Stone said he wrote things like “Can’t you just think of me as a woman?” and have Cary say, “I’m already about to get into trouble for transporting a minor above the first floor.”
He then says, “Come on, child, let’s go.”
Stone said, “Cary made me change the dynamic of the characters and make Audrey the aggressor. She chased him, and he tried to dissuade her. She pursued him and sat in his lap. She found him irresistible, and ultimately he was worn down by her. I gave him lines like “I’m too old for you, get away from me, little girl.’ And ‘I’m old enough to be your father.’ And in the elevator: ‘I could be in trouble transporting you beyond the first floor. A minor!’ This way Cary couldn’t get in any trouble. What could he do! She was chasing him.”
When I first started the movie, I was afraid I wasn’t going to like this film at all. Cary’s acting was stilted and “off” for me right from the start.
I found some parts of the movie confusing and odd because of its identity crisis, or inability to choose between being a comedy or a thriller, but I don’t want to spoil too much of the movie by commenting on which parts.
What I will say is that it was just weird to that Audrey’s character continued to throw herself at Cary’s character even when she isn’t sure who he really was. And this is just after her husband has been murdered and she is being pursued by people who want money her husband stole.
I enjoyed the action and the movie overall but really would have liked it the movie had picked a lane and stayed in it.
This was Cary’s chance to finally work with Audrey, by the way, after turning down leading roles in at least four movies she’d been in — Roman Holiday (1953), Sabrina (1954) and Love in the Afternoon (1957). He’d turned them all down because of the quarter-century age difference between them, according to TCM.com.
The rumor at the time was that he’d also turned down the role of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady because he didn’t want to work with Audrey. This wasn’t true, but instead was a decision made out of respect of Rex Harrison who had created the role on Broadway.
The article on TCM.com reads: “In the Barry Paris biography, Donen recalled that “Cary thought he was going to do a picture with Howard Hawks called Man’s Favorite Sport? [so he] said no to Charade. Columbia said get Paul Newman. Newman said yes, but Columbia wouldn’t pay his going rate. Then they said get Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. So I got them and Columbia decided they couldn’t afford them or the picture. So I sold Charade to Universal. In the meantime, Cary had read Hawks’s script and didn’t like it. So he called me and said he would like to do Charade.”
I want to share another quote from the TCM article because it is such a funny story: “ In Audrey Hepburn: A Biography by Warren G. Harris, the director recalled: “I arranged a dinner at a wonderful Italian restaurant in Paris. Audrey and I arrived first. Cary came in, and Audrey stood up and said, ‘I’m so nervous.’ He said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘Meeting you, working with you – I’m so nervous.’ And he said, ‘Don’t be nervous, for goodness’ sake. I’m thrilled to know you. Here, sit down at the table. Put your hands on the table, palms up, put your head down and take a few deep breaths.’ We all sat down, and Audrey put her hands on the table. I had ordered a bottle of red wine. When she put her head down, she hit the bottle, and the wine went all over Cary’s cream-colored suit. Audrey was humiliated. People at other tables were looking, and everybody was buzzing. It was a horrendous moment. Cary was a half hour from his hotel, so he took off his coat and comfortably sat through the whole meal like that.”
Despite that awkward first meeting, the pair apparently hit it off very well, even ad-libbing some of their lines.
Do you ever look up trivia like this for movies when you watch them or am I just the weirdo in the group?
Have you ever seen this one? What did you think of it?
If you wrote about today’s movie, or any of the movies we watched during this movie event, you can post your links below.
Also, thank you so much for participating and I hope you all had fun taking part! Do you have an idea for a themed movie event? Let us know in the comments!
I hope you will join us for the next one, though I am not sure when we will do it. Erin and I both have a lot going on in our personal lives with family health situations so we might not hold one until autumn. Not sure yet. We will have a meeting of the minds on it at some point.
We are, however, holding Drop In Crafternoons where we meet on Zoom and do crafts of any kind while chatting.
I had planned to try one this weekend but things are a bit up in the air right now with my parents’ health and the fact my whole family came down with a cold/virus and I am waiting to see if I am next, so we are sticking with one on May 24th for now.
Whose Body? was my first book by Dorothy Sayers, and I enjoyed it more than I thought I might when I first started it. Ironically, the book was also Dorothy’s debut book, written in 1923.
As I got into the book there were some references to ethnicities that I thought were a bit inappropriate but when I found out that Sayers wrote this series, featuring Sir Peter Whimsy, with satire in mind, I hoped that the references were meant to show the incorrect attitudes of the characters and not show what Sayers really thought about Jews.
One article I read said that her goal was to poke some fun at the upper crust and their attitudes about Jewish people but other articles disagreed. Some literary critics said they weren’t really sure what Sayers thought about Jews but that she did perpetuate quite a few stereotypes while also appearing to paint Jews in a positive light.
Before we get into all that, though, let’s talk a bit about the plot of the book.
Lord Wimsey is a nobleman who has developed an interest in solving murders and mysteries as a hobby. At first, he seems rather stuck up and proper, but as the book continues, there is much more to Peter Wimsey than meets the eye.
Thipps is an architect who finds a body in his bathtub wearing nothing but a pair of glasses. He looks to Lord Wimsey to help him solve this murder before he contacts the police.
Wimsey agrees to privately investigate the matter but still suggests the police be called. An Inspector Sugg shows up and believes the body may belong to famous financier Sir Reuben Levy, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances the night before.
His disappearance is being led by Inspector Charles Parker, who Wimsey knows.
The body in the bath does somewhat resemble Reuben, but not exactly and soon it’s clear the body isn’t his and the two cases probably are not connected. Despite the lack of connection, Wimsey joins Parker in his investigation.
Wimsey’s connections to other wealthy people will help Parker in his investigation, he decides. Together with Wimsey’s manservant Mervyn Bunter, who he just calls Bunter, the three work to find the identity of the one man and to find out if Reuben was, in fact, murdered.
Like any mystery with a lighter flair there are red herrings and complex twists and turns aimed at confusing the reader and delaying the revelation of the true killer
Eventually Wimsey and Parker visit a teaching hospital near Thipps’s flat to see if one of the students had been trying to play a practical joke on Thipps.
Evidence later given at an inquest by Sir Julian Freke, who runs the teaching college, reveals that no bodies were missing from his dissecting room, which leads Wimsey to believe he is on the wrong trail.
I enjoyed the twists and turns of this one and I especially enjoyed Wimsey’s tricks, verbal sparrings with suspects, and how he seemed to mock his own class throughout much of the book.
His character was created by Sayers during a time when she was low on money and prospects. She’d also had a few failed love affairs, according to historians.
Of her creation of Wimsey, Sayers said, “Lord Peter’s large income… I deliberately gave him… After all it cost me nothing and at the time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler double-six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it. I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes. It relieves the mind and does no harm to anybody.”.
In their 1989 review of crime novels, the US writers Barzun and Taylor called the book “a stunning first novel that disclosed the advent of a new star in the firmament, and one of the first magnitude. The episode of the bum in the bathtub, the character (and the name) of Sir Julian Freke, the detection, and the possibilities in Peter Wimsey are so many signs of genius about to erupt. Peter alone suffers from fatuousness overdone, a period fault that Sayers soon blotted out”
Going back to the antisemitism that seems to be in this book — and from what I read, other Sayers books: this was prevalent in books written by British crime writers, especially those who came from upper class families. There was a deep-seeded distrust and dislike of Jews among the rich of Britain. We can see this most clearly in Agatha Christie’s novels where, to me, it is clear she wasn’t a big fan of Jewish people and often made them the villains of her novels.
Sayres views of Jews are complex, muddled and confusing, wrote Amy Schwartz of Moment Magazine. Sayers was once in an affair with a Jewish man who broke her heart and worked with many. She didn’t shy away from writing characters who married and had children with Jews, even if they weren’t.
She still used many stereotypes, including that they were greedy, or at least good with money, but did she feel that way about Jews herself? There is a ton of evidence that suggests she didn’t and as one commentor on Schwartz’s article writes: “Isn’t it possible that writers reflect in their fiction the world that they observe, rather than create themselves over and over again? The character is not the author.”
In other words, it is very possible that Sayers was writing the characters and how they thought and believed, not saying she believed the same things.
Despite not being sure what Sayers thought of Jews and being a bit uncomfortable with the comments of some characters about them, I did enjoy the book and Sayers writing style. I enjoyed that she writes more descriptively than Christie and therefore helps the reader feel closer to the characters and more involved with the story.
The complexity of this story was just enough to keep me puzzled until very close to the end and even when I knew who the guilty party was, I thoroughly enjoyed Wimsey’s verbal banter with the “villain.”
Have you ever read this book or any of Sayers books?
*Note: If I review Sayers books in the future, I don’t plan to comment on her views of Jews every time. Many writers portrayed people of various minorities in a negative light throughout the years. It doesn’t make it right, but it happened often. Sometimes the writers believed those things about the minorities but sometimes they were showing the true feelings of the characters they were writing for the sake of the story. It’s impossible to determine what a writer’s actual intentions were in most cases. I hate to throw out entire books simply because I don’t know the actual heart and mind of the authors since they are all dead now. Instead, I will try to focus on the stories as a whole.
Mildred, or as many called her, Millie, wasn’t an amateur detective, but she was the co-creator of one of the most famous teen amateur sleuths in the United States — Nancy Drew.
For 50 years very few people knew that Millie helped create Nancy Drew.
Until 1980, many readers of Nancy Drew didn’t know that Carolyn Keene, the woman listed as the author of the Nancy Drew books, wasn’t actually a real person. She was a pseudonym for some 28 authors, men and women, who create and wrote the stories for the series.
It was a lawsuit between Grosset & Dunlap, the original publisher of the Nancy Drew books and the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the owner/creators of the stories, that brought Millie into the spotlight.
Really, though, Millie had been somewhat in the spotlight before that. She’d written some 130 books in children’s series under her own name from the 30s to the 50s and was an accomplished journalist and world traveler.
What she hadn’t really talked about a lot was her involvement with the Nancy Drew Mystery series.
She’d signed agreements saying she wouldn’t talk about how she’d written 23 of the first 30 Nancy Drew books. She’d written the books with the direction and input of Edward Stratemeyer, founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate and the brains behind many juvenile series, including multi-million selling series like Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, The Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, and Rover Boys.
Millie was born Mildred Augustine in 1905 in Iowa, the daughter of a well-known doctor. She wasn’t treated like other girls at the time who were expected to learn how to sew and keep the house.
Instead, Millie was given freedom to explore her own interests and passions. One of those passions was sports. She felt women should have the same opportunities as men to participate and compete in sports she said in an interview with WTGE Public Media in the mid-1990s
“Girls were discouraged from all sorts of athletics,” Millie said. “And I fought that tooth and nail right from the start because I felt that girls should be able to do the same things that boys did.”
While Millie enjoyed sports, such as swimming and diving, she also loved to write, something her mother encouraged her to continue.
Her father, however, said if she wanted to make money, she should do something else and she admits that he was probably right.
She began selling her stories to church papers, but they only paid a few dollars.
She finally sold a story for a whole $2.50.
“That made me a writer,” Millie said in the interview, while laughing. “So, from then on, I was hooked.”
She attended the University of Iowa after school, majoring in journalism and working on the school newspaper. She also worked with George Gallup, the creator of the Gallup Poll.
After graduating, she landed a job at a newspaper, but at the age of 22, she wanted to see what else she could do and traveled to New York City to look for work.
It was there she wrote to Edward Stratemeyer looking for work. Stratemeyer was releasing a book series for juveniles. They were assembly-line type books where he wrote a paragraph detailing what he wanted in the book, including character names and plots. He would send the information he wanted out to writers he knew, and those writers would write the books under the pen name that Stratemeyer controlled and retained the rights to. The writers signed away their rights to credit for the books to Stratemeyer.
While Stratemeyer didn’t have anything for Millie at the time she contacted him, he reached out to her later and asked if she would write a book for the floundering Ruth Fielding series. She did and from there she began to write books for other series for the company. In the midst of all this she also married Asa Wirt in 1928 while attending graduate school.
Millie was reliable, dependable, and a good writer. When Stratemeyer thought about his Hardy Boys series and how young boys liked the boy detectives and then began to wonder if girls would like a girl detective, he turned to Millie.
Stratemeyer had the basic idea of Nancy Drew, but many literary historians and Nancy Drew fans say it is Millie who flushed her out and made her who she became. Millie created a version of Nancy that Stratemeyer’s daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, later toned down and changed.
Millie’s version of Nancy was a lot like Millie. She was athletic, adventurous, bold and brash, and never backed down from a challenge. Harriet’s version made her a bit more “perfect” — a rule follower who was polite but still adventurous and who little girls could look up to.
Nancy was what so many girls in the 1930s weren’t allowed to be.
Young girls could live vicariously through her.
Stratemeyer passed away 12 days after the first Nancy Drew book was released. His daughters took over the business after they couldn’t sell it in the difficult economy. Eventually Harriet began taking more control of the Nancy Drew series. Other ghostwriters were working on the series in addition to Millie, who wrote 23 of the first 30 books in the series. In the 1950s Harriet began to rewrite Millie’s original books, changing Nancy’s character, updating some of the material, and, in many ways, stripping away the personality of Nancy that Millie had created.
Millie was working on her own books at that time and had dealt with the illness and death of her first husband and then being a single mother. It was disappointing to see the changes being made but she had other irons in the fire.
In the early 1950s, she was working for the Toledo Times, remarried to the editor of the paper, and being a mother to Margaret Wirt.
She was also writing a character she felt was even more Nancy Drew than Nancy Drew — Penny Parker in the Penny Parker Mysteries.
Penny didn’t see as much success as Nancy, but she didn’t have the mammoth marketing effort that Nancy had, says Millie.
In 1959 Millie was widowed again and afterward she began to live a life a bit more like Nancy Drew — international travel, adventures, independence, learning more about archaeology and even taking flying lessons and eventually earning several flying lessons.
It wasn’t until 1980 when Harriet decided to move the printing of Stratemeyer books from Grosset & Dunlap to Simon and Schuster that more of the public learned about Millie’s role in creating Nancy.
She told WTGE that she could have pushed for her to get credit for the books she’d written. She could have gotten a lawyer and demanded more of the royalties.
She simply didn’t have the desire to put up a fight, though, she said.
“I wrote because I liked to write and I wanted to produce books that girls would enjoy,” Millie said. “And so I didn’t care too much but it got to be … my friends knew I wrote the books and that was sufficient for me. Eventually though it got to be that Mrs. Adams put out publicity to the fact that she was the author and people were reading that.”
One person who was reading all those stories was Millie’s daughter, who asked her own mother if she’d been lying all those years about writing the Nancy Drew books.
Millie hadn’t shared her role in the books with many but when her own daughter started to doubt her, she began to be more open about sharing her role in the creation of the character.
“I thought if my own daughter doubts my integrity, then it’s time I let the truth be known so when people asked me, I stuck my neck out and I told them the truth, which was that I wrote the books.”
Millie was subpoenaed by Grosset & Dunlap during the 1980 when the publisher sued the Stratemeyer Syndicate to keep them from publishing Nancy Drew with anyone else.
They wanted to prove that Harriet Adams didn’t have the right to say who could and could not publish past Nancy Drew books because she had not actually written them. As part of the case, the records that showed Millie had helped developed the series were also subpoenaed.
The truth was finally out there. Millie was the original Carolyn Keene.
Harriet, however, continued to claim she’d written the books right up until her death in 1982 and because the court records were sealed for years, it wasn’t until 1993 when the University of Iowa held a Nancy Drew conference, that Millie really became known as Carolyn Keene.
The conference at the university attracted the attention of literary scholars, collectors, and fans who wanted to know more about the original author and Millie was the main speaker.
Millie, incidentally, was the first woman to earn a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Iowa in 1927.
More fame than Millie imagined hit her after the conference. In some ways, life continued as normal despite the extra attention. She continued to write news and feature stories and her column for the Toledo newspaper. Nancy fans began to contact her, though, asking about her role and for autographs. She was also inducted into the Ohio and then the Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame and her typewriter was enshrined at the Smithsonian.
Millie worked first at the Toledo Times, now defunct, and then at the Toledo Blade right up until the day she died, literally. She was writing her column for the paper, at the age of 96, in the Blade office, when she became ill and was taken to the hospital, where she later passed away.
In the article about her death, the Blade wrote about how her writing impacted young girls and women.
“Her books, Nancy Drew buffs have said, allowed teenage girls and young women to imagine that all things might be possible at a time when females struggled mightily for any sense of equality.”
“Millie’s innovation was to write a teenage character who insisted upon being taken seriously and who by asserting her dignity and autonomy made her the equal of any adult. That allowed little girls to dream what they could be like if they had that much power,” said Ilana Nash, a Nancy Drew authority and doctoral student at Bowling Green State University.
The article continues: “Going to work was a way of life for me and I had no other,” she wrote in a December column upon her pending retirement.
In the column, she explained that her legendary work ethic related to being hired by The Times in her third try during World War II.
“I was told after [the war] ended there would be layoffs, and I would be the first one to go. I took the warning seriously and for years I worked with a shadow over my head, never knowing when the last week would come,” she wrote.
Millie’s column was called, “On the Go With Millie Benson.”
Millie was described in the article about her death as fiercely independent and “always willing to go after a story she was assigned or had set her sights on.”
She almost never took a day off. In fact, the day after she was diagnosed with lung cancer in June, 1997, she was back at her desk working on her next column saying her desk was where she needed to be.
Millie once said in an interview that she never looked back on the books she’d written, “Because the minute I do I’m going into the past, and I never dwell on the past. I think about what I’m doing today and what I’m going to do tomorrow.”
I have had the opportunity to read a couple of books written by Millie, before Harriet got to them, and I have to say I did enjoy them. I didn’t know at the time that other books had been revised, and I had an original copy of Millie’s work, but when I found out, I could see the difference between Millie’s writing and other ghost writers/Harriet.
I am going to be purchasing a couple of books from Millie’s Penny Parker series to see what that series was like as well.
As president of the Nancy Drew Fan Club, Jennifer Fisher is considered a Nancy Drew and Mildred Benson expert. She operates the website nancydrewsleuth.com and donated her Nancy Drew collection several years ago to the Toledo library and now curates items to be added to the collection.
She is currently looking for information on Millie, from letters to manuscripts, to any memorabilia of hers that someone might have.
On her site Jennifer details the life of Millie and talks about the impact her books (130 of them all together, including the Nancy Drew books) made for young women.
Jennifer wrote about Millie in a special section on the site, including detailing the trial where Millie spoke about the conflict that eventually arose between her and Harriet Adams.
“On the stand when shown letters between herself and Harriet regarding criticisms and difficulties, she recalled that this was “a beginning conflict in what is Nancy. My Nancy would not be Mrs. Adams’ Nancy. Mrs. Adams was an entirely different person; she was more cultured and more refined. I was probably a rough and tumble newspaper person who had to earn a living, and I was out in the world. That was my type of Nancy.”
And it is that type of Nancy, and that type of woman, who so many women over the years have been drawn to despite the changes. Even with the changes later made to the books, the heart of Nancy, created by Millie, always remained.
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.
This past week was a long, rough week with some medical challenges for my elderly parents. I’m pretty wiped out but not as wiped out as my mom who is facing an exhausting situation. If you are a person who prays, we could all use some prayers, but especially her.
Yesterday, The Husband, the kids, and I headed an hour south to picturesque Lewisburg, Pa. for a small break and to visit a comic store for free comic book day. We also visited a couple of bookstores, one independent and another a Barnes and Noble built inside of a three-story former hardware store.
The Barnes and Noble is three stories and features an escalator to reach the second level. It is also a merchandise store for Bucknell University, which is a university that is considered Ivy League, but which I learned yesterday is not officially “Ivy League.”
According to various sites, including College Advisor, Bucknell is considered a “hidden ivy” because of its strong academic reputation and its high rankings in various educational programs.
Regardless, it is a well-known college and, from what we’ve witnessed a few times, quite the party college. There was a noisy frat party going on as we visited a playground after visiting the bookstores and having some lunch. Plenty of young women in sun dresses. There were more girls than boys around, so maybe it was a sorority party instead. Hmmm….
Well, anyhow…we enjoyed our visits to the comic book shop and bookstore. The bookstore, called Mondragon, featured a variety of used books and records.
I didn’t find anything I really wanted but I enjoyed looking at the wide variety. I did find one book of recipes by artist Georgia O’Keefe, and Little Miss found a fiction book about horses.
We didn’t buy any books at Barnes & Noble because I wasn’t super impressed with their selection and rarely buy new. It is, however, a very pretty store.
I finally did it this past week! I finally finished The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien. It took me forever, thanks to life events, and reading a couple of other books.
I enjoyed it despite the wordiness, but I will be taking a bit of a break before I start in on The Return of the King, the final installment of the trilogy.
I’ve been reading Grave Pursuits by Elle E. Kay but it deals with a serial killer and that’s been a bit of a heavy topic with all that’s been going on in my life so I’m setting it aside temporarily. I am really enjoying it, and the writing style, though.
Instead, I am continuing All Things Wise And Wonderful by James Herriot, reading a chapter or two at night before bed.
I also started Two Parts Sugar, One Part Murder by Valerie Burns. I like it so far.
And I plan to finish The Hardy Boys: The Twisted Claw by Franklin W. Dixon this week.
The Husband is reading Snow by John Banville.
Little Miss and I are reading Magical Melons by Carol Ryrie Brink.
The Boy is listening to a Warhammer book. I don’t remember which one.
This week I have been watching Murder She Wrote and The Dick Van Dyke Show. Comfort watches.
This past week I enjoyed a episode on the True Drew podcast about the 95th anniversary of Nancy Drew.
Now It’s Your Turn
What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to, or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
Welcome to the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot where we offer a place for bloggers to link up and get a fresh set of eyes on their posts. We also feature one blog a week, letting our readers know about the blog, and providing a link so readers can learn more about it.
Look for the post to go live about 9:30 PM EST on Thursdays.
We have had some lovely sunshine and weather where we are this week. It’s been a long week, though, because my mom fell at home Monday. She’s okay but has had some other issues and my dad threw his hip out while trying to help her so the kids and I have been over there every day trying to help out as much as we can. It’s been nice to visit with them and be told how to do things again. It’s like living with them all over again. *wink* (Just a joke…it’s been nice to be able to help them.)
On to the show….
Your hosts for the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot
Marsha from Marsha in the Middle started blogging in 2021 as an exercise in increasing her neuroplasticity. Oh, who are we kidding? Marsha started blogging because she loves clothes, and she loves to talk or, in this case, write!
Melynda from Scratch Made Food! & DIY Homemade Household – The name says it all, we homestead in East Texas, with three generations sharing this land. I cook and bake from scratch, between gardening and running after the chickens, and knitting!
Lisa from Boondock Ramblingsshares about the fiction she writes and reads, her faith, homeschooling, photography and more.
Sue from Women Living Well After 50 started blogging in 2015 and writes about living an active and healthy lifestyle, fashion, book reviews and her podcast and enjoying life as a woman over 50. She invites you to join her living life in full bloom.
We would love to have additional Co-Hosts to share in the creativity and fun! If you think this would be a good fit for you and you like having fun (come on, who doesn’t!) while still being creative, drop one of us an email and someone will get back with you!
WTJR will be highlighting a different blogger each week this year! We invite you to stop by their blog, take a look around and say hello!
I love volunteering for disaster relief, delivering meals to the disabled, working for common sense gun violence prevention, and promoting better climate science legislation
Thank you so much for joining us for our link-up, Lisa!
Everyone else, please remember that this is a link-up where you can share posts from the previous week or posts from weeks, months, or even years ago. All we ask is that they be family-friendly!
And now some posts that were highlights for me this past week:
Since we couldn’t get to Paris for Spring, Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I have been watching movies this spring that take place in Paris.
This week we watched The Intouchables, a 2012 movie I suggested when I searched for movies that took place in Paris.
This was a rated R movie and had subtitles so it probably wasn’t the best choice for a movie watching event, but I’ll do a little better next time I choose movies. Despite those “drawbacks”, I really enjoyed this movie and felt it was fantastically acted and presented.
This movie was remade in America and retitled The Upside, starring Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston. I have not seen the remake, but from what I’ve read online and just watching The Upside trailer, the original is much, much better.
The movie is based on the true story of Philippe Pozzo di Borgo and his French-Algerian carer Abdel Sellou, which Philippe wrote about in his 2001 memoir A Second Wind.
In the movie, the characters’ names are Philippe (Francois Cluzet) and Driss (Omar Sy). Driss needs a job after getting out of jail and arrives at Philippe’s mansion after seeing an ad for the job of helping to take care of Philippe, who is a quadriplegic.
Driss doesn’t really want the job, he just needs his paper signed to show his parole officer that he is looking for work. He lets Philippe know that up front and not really in a very polite way. Not much is polite about Driss who has had a rough upbringing and was in jail for stealing.
Driss is in a for a surprise, though, because what Philippe’s assistant and others see as Driss’s rudeness, is refreshing to Philippe and he hires Driss to help care for him. He likes how Driss doesn’t pity him like others in his life. Driss doesn’t care about his disability and treats him as disrespectfully as he does everyone else.
Philippe let’s Driss know that part of the payment for the job includes a room in the mansion.
It’s a win-win for Driss who has recently been kicked out of his family’s home and needs money and a place to stay.
It’s also extremely overwhelming to him. At his family’s home he had to fight for time in the bathroom and to take a shower. At Philippe’s he is given his own bathroom with a large bathtub where he can relax and enjoy himself.
He definitely takes advantage of Philippe’s generosity, but he does begin to take his job seriously as he realizes all that it entails.
As the movie goes on the viewer learns how Philippe became a quadriplegic and more about his family, including his teenage daughter, who Driss often butts heads with, and how he became so rich.
We also learn more about Driss and his background, how he became involved in crime, his family, and what talents and dreams he has.
An unlikely friendship forms as Driss works to encourage Philippe to loosen up and live life again, while Philippe works to have Driss become a little more responsible.
Driss’s one big effort is to encourage Philippe to go on an in-person date with a woman he only writes letters to. Philippe is much more “sophisticated” and academic than Driss. He is “high society” and proper, but Driss dismisses all of this by asking him things like how he is able to feel pleasure if he can’t feel from the neck down, if he wants to be in a relationship again, and other off-colored topics that no one else in Philippe’s life would ask.
There is so much I loved about this movie, with the actors being at the top of that list.
They were both absolutely perfect for their roles.
Sly’s subtle and no-so-subtle expressions to convey his emotions were great. Cluzet’s calm delivery in response to Sly’s more boisterous personality was perfection.
The movie has many messages but for me it shoed how a life can be changed when a person is shown that they are worth more and capable of more than they think they are. Driss and Philippe do this for each other.
Philippe shows Driss he can do more than steal and scrape by for a living. He opens Driss’s eyes to his talents and his intelligence and even a kindness Driss didn’t know he had. Driss opens Philippe’s eyes to all that he still has left in life despite his hardships and trials.
Their friendship was unexpected and what both of them needed to survive.
One spoiler I will give to relieve any worries that this movie will take a dark turn and end with Philippe’s death (which was my big worry) is that the real-life Philippe and Driss remained friends for years. Philippe passed away only two years ago at the age of 72, and lived a full, rich life as a philanthropist, friend, father, and husband.
From what I read online, this movie is beloved in France..
According to an article on Wikipedia: Nine weeks after its release in France on 2 November 2011, it became the second highest-grossing French film in France, after the 2008 film Welcome to the Sticks. The film was voted the cultural event of 2011 in France with 52% of votes in a poll by Fnac. Until it was eclipsed in 2014 by Lucy, it was the most-viewed French film in the world with 51.5 million tickets sold.
Film critic Roger Ebert reviewed the film shortly after it came out.
He did and he didn’t like it.
“The success of the film, despite its problems, grows directly from its casting,” Ebert wrote. “Francois Cluzet, who acts only with his face and voice, communicates great feeling. Omar Sy is enormously friendly and upbeat. He reminded me of the African immigrant played by Souleymane Sy Savane in Ramin Bahrani’s “Goodbye Solo” — a film that avoided the traps that “The Intouchables” falls into.”
Ebert continues, “The appeal of a film like this, and it is perfectly legitimate, is that when we begin to feel affection for the characters, what makes them happy makes us happy. Caught up in the flow of events, we allow many assumptions to pass unchallenged. The writer-directors, Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, are cheerfully willing to go for broad gags, and their style is ingratiating. But at the end, by looking through the foreground details, what we’re being given is a simplistic reduction of racial stereotypes.”
Umm…okay? He wrote this a year before he died so maybe he was sick at the time.
Did I ever mention that sometimes I thought Ebert was a pretentious jerk? If not, then I have now.
I enjoyed this film immensely and did not see the things Ebert saw.
Up next, Erin and I will be watching Charade. We both have a ton going on with our families and have had to cancel the group watch of the movie we had scheduled for this Sunday. Instead, we will be watching it on our own and invite all of you to do the same and share your thoughts on our blog, and then link up here.
If you want to share your thoughts on any of our movies and have links to your blog you can share at the link up below.
She’s looking pretty good for someone her age, isn’t she?
The first Nancy Drew book, The Secret of the Old Clock, was released on April 28, 1930. Two more books, The Hidden Staircase and The Bungalow Mystery. Since then, there have been millions of books published, TV shows and movies produced, spin-off series launched, and culture impacted.
Who would have imagined that children’s stories about a teenage girl sleuth would launch a worldwide phenomenon? I doubt even Nancy’s creator Edward Stratemeyer would have imagined it.
The concept for Nancy Drew was created in the 1920s by Stratemeyer who also created the idea of The Hardy Boys. Well, if it wasn’t Stratemeyer alone who created her, it was a combination of him and those who worked with him at The Stratemeyer Syndicate.
The Syndicate was Stratemeyer’s brainchild, created after he’d already found success writing stories for children, starting when he was a child himself.
According to a 2018 article in The New Yorker, Stratemeyer was born in 1862 in New Jersey. He was the youngest of six children. As a child he spent a lot of time reading the popular rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger and William T. Adams (a.k.a. Oliver Optic). In his teens he bought his own printing press and created his own stories. At the age of 26 he sold his first story, “Victor Horton’s Idea” to Golden Days, a popular boys magazine at the time. He was paid $75 for the story and his father, who previously had seen his writing as a waste of time, suggested he write more.
He did write more, under a variety of pen names. Then he became an editor at Good News, another child magazine. Eventually he became a ghost writer for various children’s book authors, wrote many of his own, and turned out ideas for other authors to create characters. Many said he wasn’t a great writer, but he was great at ideas.
As his ideas began to sell books, he decided to form a syndicate or a publishing company which would produce books in an assembly line style. By 1910 his syndicate was producing ten or more juvenile titles with about a dozen different writers. By 1920 tens of millions of books produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate were circulating with surveys showing that in 1926, ninety-eight percent of children listed at least one Stratemeyer produced book as their favorite.
According to the article in The New Yorker, this is how it worked:
“Stratemeyer would come up with a three-page plot for each book, describing locale, characters, time frame, and a basic story outline. He mailed this to a writer, who, for a fee ranging from fifty dollars to two hundred and fifty dollars, would write the thing up and—slam-bang!—send it back within a month. Stratemeyer checked the manuscripts for discrepancies, made sure that each book had exactly fifty jokes, and cut or expanded as needed. (Each series had a uniform length; the standard was twenty-five chapters.) He replaced the verb “said” with “exclaimed,” “cried,” “chorused,” and so forth, and made sure that cliffhangers punctuated the end of each chapter—usually framed as a question or an exclamation. Each series was published under a pseudonym that Stratemeyer owned. As Fortune later noted, it was good business for children to become attached to a name, but it would be bad business for that name to leave the syndicate with the ghostwriter.”
And this, eventually, would be where the name Carolyn Keene, the “author” of Nancy Drew came from. In reality, there was no Carolyn Keene. There were only a large number of writers who wrote the books the way Edward Stratemeyer, and later his daughter, Harriet, wanted, just like they had all the other titles and series.
Series produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate included Tom Swift, Bobbsey Twins, Rover Boys, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew Mysteries, Motor Boys and some 50 others.
Nancy Drew’s first book came out April 28, 1930. Twelve days later, Edward Stratemeyer, who had already published millions of books was dead of pneumonia at the age of 67.
His two daughters were left with the question of what to do with the company. Should they continue it? Sell it?
Eventually, the daughters would take over the business, but Harriet would become the driving force behind the company, including helping to make Nancy Drew a worldwide phenomenon.
Grossett and Dunlap produced the books produced by Stratemeyer and they greenlighted the Nancy Drew series after receiving this memo from him:
“These suggestions are for a new series for girls verging on novels. 224 pages, to retail at fifty cents. I have called this line the “Stella Strong Stories,” but they might also be called “Diana Drew Stories,” “Diana Dare Stories,” “Nan Nelson Stories,” “Nan Drew Stories” or “Helen Hale Stories.” […] Stella Strong, a girl of sixteen, is the daughter of a District Attorney of many years standing. He is a widower and often talks over his affairs with Stella and the girl was present during many interviews her father had with noted detectives and at the solving of many intricate mysteries. Then, quite unexpectedly, Stella plunged into some mysteries of her own and found herself wound up in a series of exciting situations. An up-to-date American girl at her best, bright, clever, resourceful and full of energy.”
One of the first writers of the series was Mildred Wirt Benson (just Mildred Wirt when she wrote the series). In fact, Stratemeyer had her in mind when he conceptualized the series.
She wrote twenty-three out of the first thirty books in the Nancy Drew series.
This would become a source of controversy in 1980 when Harriet tried to claim she had written all of the Nancy Drew books herself under the Carolyn Keene pseudonym. A court case involving Grosset & Dunlap and Simon & Schuster about who owned the rights to produce Nancy Drew books drew Mildred out of the woodwork and made Harriet admit she’d helped to write the books, and at one point rewrite them, but she was not the primary writer for most of the books.
When Harriet rewrote the Nancy Drew books in the 1950s she changed the sleuth’s personality from Benson’s original vision of her being more spunky and assertive than Benson had made her.
Mildred had been working for the Syndicate since 1926 when she had answered an ad at the age of 21. The ad had stated that the publishing house was looking for young writers who could come up with new ideas for juvenile books.
She wrote for other Stratemeyer series, but it was Nancy that would become the breakout success. Not that Mildred told a lot of people about her role in the books, partially because she was not supposed to as part of her agreement with the syndicate, who she worked with the syndicate until the early 1950s when management changes changed her role.
Mildred wrote the first Nancy Drew book at the age of 24.
In an interview with WTGE Public Media in Toledo, Ohio, the city where Mildred eventually settled down, she said she didn’t know when she was writing those first books that Nancy would become as big as she did.
“In fact, I don’t think anyone ever anticipated the success such as Nancy Drew has had,” she said. “But I did know that I was creating something that was an unusual book. I knew from the way I felt as I wrote that I was writing something that would be popular.”
While Harriet took the opportunity in 1973, after her sister’s death, to claim she helped her father create Nancy Drew, the 1980 court case blew that out of the water and Benson was subsequently credited with helping to create Nancy. Harriet was, however, a contributor to changes to the books Mildred wrote (taming Nancy Drew down readers say) and the promotion of them, as well as helping ghost writers write later editions.
Later Benson would name the second book in the original series, The Hidden Staircase, as her favorite book to write. Over the years she agreed to sign Nancy Drew books, but only those she had actually written.
Other titles Benson worked on for the syndicate included Kay Tracey and Dana Girls mysteries. After leaving the syndicate she wrote the Penny Park mystery series, which was about the daughter of a newspaper editor who was trying to become a newspaper reporter herself. She called Penny the favorite character she’d ever created, even over Nancy Drew, because she considered Penny “a better Nancy Drew than Nancy is.”
In 1944 Benson began writing for the Toledo Blade and continued to work there for 58 years, focusing mainly on journalism for the rest of her life. It’s why the Toledo Public Library held a Nancy Drew Convention on Friday to celebrate her 95 years.
Benson was a true Nancy Drew and you can read more about her in my separate post here.
Though Nancy Drew was written during the Great Depression, her books didn’t focus on the struggles of everyday citizens. Instead, Nancy was jetting off on trips, driving nice cars, taking flying lessons, learning new skills, being bold. She loved fashion but she also wasn’t afraid of getting her hands dirty.
She could wear pearls and a dress one evening and wear jeans and sneakers the next.
Nancy Drew books never focused on the macabre. Very few books discussed murders. There was very little description of violence. There was absolutely no sex show or even discussed. Nancy had a boyfriend (Ned Nickerson) but they didn’t even kiss.
In other words, Nancy didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and didn’t go out with boys who did.
Nancy’s image was very important to Harriet, who wanted Nancy to be someone young women could look up to and strive to be like.
Cara Strickland wrote in a 2018 article for JTSOR Daily, that Nancy’s books were “intended to be safe for children, but also functioned as an escape from the heavy realities of their cultural moment.”
The mysteries in a Nancy Drew book were simple, yet also featured complex elements, such as red herrings and miscommunications.
They were fast-moving, full of minimal descriptions, and void of deep exchanges among the characters. They didn’t make you think much beyond what mystery was unfolding and how it was being solved.
The goal of the books wasn’t to address current events or push agendas. Their goal was simply to show the book’s heroes prevailing over evil and setting the world right again.
Young readers loved this, and now, many adults do as well.
The lack of mention of current events also made sure the books remained timeless.
Yes, the books, especially the earlier ones, are certainly dated. There are aspects that some in today’s world might see as culturally insensitive, old-fashioned, or out of touch.
They still, however, show us a young woman who is brave, curious, driven, and determined to solve mysteries to help other people.
From that first book in 1930 came 600 different titles, including spinoffs and updates. Later came movies (the first appearing in 1938), TV Shows, video games, comic books, podcasts, and, of course, merchandise of all kinds (lunch boxes, t-shirts, bookmarks, socks, etc. etc.).
Nancy Drew was originally published by Grosset & Dunlap, but during the lawsuit filed in 1980, as mentioned above, Simon & Schuster won the rights to publish Nancy Drew books after the first 56 because in 1979, the Syndicate had switched to Simon & Schuster. Grosset & Dunlap retained the publishing rights to the first 56 books and eventually Simon & Schuster purchased the Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1984.
The Nancy Drew Mysteries (original series) ran from 1930 to 2003 and produced 175 different titles. Nancy Drew Girl Detective ran from 2004 to 2012. The Nancy Drew Diaries started in 2013 and continue through today. Many fans of the original, more sanitized versions of Nancy, haven’t appreciated the more modernized version of Nancy. So much so that some of the series were discontinued.
The original Nancy Drew series, without the more modern social aspects the more modern series might have, remains the perfect escape from a world growing increasingly chaotic and frightening. Now, though, it isn’t only younger readers craving that escape. People, mainly women, of all ages, are losing themselves in Nancy Drew mystery books. Whether they are revisiting them from when they were young girls or finding them for the first time, they are filling a void that other books can’t for them.
“I guess I would say that I’m a fan of the Nancy Drew book series because it is a comfort to me,” Avery wrote to me this weekend. “Reading the books now as an adult instantly transports me back to a simpler time, when I was a girl, and Nancy was a constant companion to me, whether at school, on a road trip, or just laying on a blanket in the backyard on a sunny day and reading one of her mysteries. Nancy Drew showed me from a young age that women can be capable, skilled and smart. She modeled all of the best qualities: how to be a good friend, a good daughter and a good detective! And it always struck me as really cool that my mother and grandmother, who got me into the series, read the books before I did and it was something we could share and talk about together.”
On her website, Avery shares: “In Nancy, I saw a young woman who was not only capable, smart and resourceful when she solved mysteries, but a character that shared my strawberry blonde or “titian” hair color. Back in April 2023, my dad and I happened to go to an estate sale where I bought 70+ Nancy Drew books I had never read or seen before–later paperbacks from the 1990’s–and the idea for @TrueDrewPodcast was born!”
Laura Puckett, a reader and mom, also started reading Nancy when she was young.
“My memories of Nancy Drew started when I was quite young,” she writes. “Right after piano lessons my mother would take me to the library, and I would take the direct path to the sgelf with all the yellow book spines. Finding the next mystery that I hadn’t read, I would barely contain my excitement while looking at the cover to see which adventure I’d get to go along with Nancy on. These books accompanied me on road trips, in my hammock, in my bed before sleep, and so many other places. They are a pleasant part of my childhood and helped me fall in love with reading.”
Mystery author Trixie Silvertale started reading Nancy Drew books when she was five or six years old.
“It was very meaningful to read about a female main character. The fact that she was intelligent and broke a few rules, but did the right thing in the end, was a really great role model… Even though I didn’t realize it at the time! I always think of those books fondly.”
Are the stories in a Nancy Drew Mystery earth-shattering or life-changing? Not usually.
Are they hard-hitting and full of globally impactful wisdom? Nope.
Are they full of gritty stories and swoony romantic scenes? Not at all.
And all those reasons are why so many readers still find themselves reaching for them at libraries, bookstores, and thrift shops today. 95 years after they were first introduced.
