Messenger of Truth, the Agatha Award Nominee for Best Novel by Jacqueline Winspear is now available in paperback from Picador.

London, 1931. On the night before the opening of his new and much-anticipated exhibition at a famed Mayfair gallery, Nicholas Bassington-Hope falls to his death. The police declare it an accident, but the dead man’s twin sister, Georgina, isn’t convinced. When the authorities refuse to conduct further investigations and instead close the case, Georgina takes matters into her own hands, seeking out a fellow graduate from Girton College: Maisie Dobbs, psychologist and investigator.

The case soon takes Maisie to the desolate beaches of Dungeness in Kent, and through the sinister underbelly of the city’s art world. But to solve the mystery of the artist’s death, she will have to remain steady as the forces behind his fall come out of the shadows to silence her.

Messenger of Truth is another vivid, thrilling, and utterly unique episode in the life of Maisie Dobbs.

Author

Jacqueline Winspear is the author of three previous Maisie Dobbs novels, Maisie Dobbs, Birds of a Feather, and Pardonable Lies. A finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Novel, Maisie Dobbs won the Agatha, Alex, and Macavity Awards, and Birds of a Feather won the Agatha Award. Originally from the United Kingdom, Winspear now lives in California.

For more information, please visit www.jacquelinewinspear.com

The gang has a scheme to trick the Lottery computer into issuing a winning Powerball ticket minutes after the numbers have been drawn. Soon they hold the sole ticket for the $310 million jackpot, but before their banker can launder the money, things go terribly wrong.

Meet young journalist Keith Evans, who comes to Philadelphia to interview Rodger for a story on the lottery. Along with Rodger’s daughter Melissa, he becomes entangled with the gang in a web of mystery, murder and mayhem. As the police follow their own leads and the gang struggles to hold onto their prize, the young couple closes in on the truth.

The villains in this murder mystery are a gang of experts — respectable citizens confronted with a chance to scam the lottery to make a lot of easy money. Their high-tech theft scheme uses the Riemann hypothesis of prime numbers to compromise lottery security and heist a big draw; in their view, they aren’t really stealing.

The twenty-something heroes are unprepared for the chaos. They muddle their way to the truth when the police are blindsided by international law and can’t help. No one can escape his fate or the tough moral dilemmas each one is forced to face.

Get ready to savor the predicament of ordinary people snared by greed in a world spinning out of control.

Download an excerpt of Powerball 310 at http://www.powerball310.com/.

People ask me how a boy who was raised by a mobster grew up to become Press Secretary to the President of the United States. The answer is, when reporters started hammering me with questions about my pedigree, I did something sly that caught the Washington press corps off-guard: I admitted everything.

The Times: “Jonah, is it true that upon the death of your grandfather, Mickey Price, you attended a Mafia summit?”
Me: “Who do you think called the meeting?”

Follow up: “Would you say your relationship with Mr. Price was of the conventional see-Grandpop-on-Sunday kind?”
Me: “It was the opposite of conventional. He and my grandmother virtually raised me after my parents died. They were my best friends.”

Global Wire Service: “Mr. Eastman, it’s been rumored that you arranged for the murder of a mob figure who was said to have crossed you?”
Me: “Absolutely not. I handled it personally.”

As Henry Kissinger once said (but did not abide), “What will come out eventually must come out immediately.” People were stunned by my answers. Sure, I was using candor as a spin device, but Washington found it “refreshing.” Washington likes to think it finds candor refreshing, but honesty in this town is a novelty mint, not sustenance.

Nevertheless, the same frankness and irreverence that had been the “Jonah Eastman brand” for the last two years of the Truitt Administration had finally become my undoing. I was fired this morning.

Before I took my job as the President’s spokesman, I had been a Republican pollster. I specialized in handling difficult elections, ones that needed an unconventional boost. And, yes: My grandfather was the late Moses “Mickey” Price, the Atlantic City gangster known as “the Wizard of Odds.”

Despite its Nixonian whiff, let me be perfectly clear about something: I am not a gangster. My Edie wouldn’t have married a gangster, but she wouldn’t have married a choirboy either. She had choices and, at some level, knew what she was doing. I couldn’t have gotten to the White House being a cherub, and some of the runoff from Mickey’s jungle of shadows had crept into my frequency. While I am tempted to reinvent myself for the reader, I am no more immune from my environment than the mirror prophet with whom I share a name, the one in the Bible who tried to run from God and was swallowed by a big fish. Jonah was chosen by God to be in a sea of trouble and, in my more philosophical moments, I believe I was genetically predisposed to scandal. Anyhow, spinning at this stage would be a lie that runs counter to the spirit of my forced retirement from the lying business.

Officially, I wasn’t fired. I resigned. I did so after a few unfortunate catalysts put me in play. It began when the head of the Republican Party declared the current recession to be a “communications problem.” As Press Secretary, communications strategy fell under my purview. Then there was The Remark.

I made The Remark two days ago during a press conference after a suicide bomber — an erstwhile taxi driver from Yemen — blew himself up at a Phillies game killing twenty four people. Even though I was technically a Jerseyan, Philadelphia was the provenance of my “hometown” sports team. When asked by the White House correspondent for the Philadelphia Bulletin how I felt about the attack as a man who hailed from the region, I said, “It’s hard to believe Western civilization is going to be taken down by a bunch of cab drivers.”

To make matters worse, a network correspondent aboard Air Force One claimed to have overheard the President bark, “Aw, hell, we always negotiate with terrorists,” in a discussion about potential response options. Moments before taking off, the Big Guy had finished giving a speech where he echoed every other recent president with the canard, “We do not negotiate with terrorists.” (FIRST POUND/CONVEY RESOLVE — PAUSE FOR APPLAUSE) The President totally said it, too. I was standing right next to him. Like the Secret Service agent who is trained to throw his body into the line of an assassin’s bullet, I defused a potential crapstorm by instinctively telling the correspondent that I had made this remark, too. I was known for doing a mean Truitt impersonation — the molasses Mississippi drawl, literary allusions, tractor-seat wisdom. The network, terrified of a White House freeze-out, agreed to make me the lightening rod.

excerpted with permission from the book Spinning Dixie by Eric Dezenhall Published by Thomas Dunne Books, An imprint of St. Martin’s Press; December 2006;$24.95US/$31.00CAN; 978-0-312-34063-6

Eric Dezenhall is the CEO of Dezenhall Resources, one of the nation’s leading crisis management firms. He is the author of four other novels and the nonfiction study Nail ‘Em! Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland. For more information on Eric Dezenhall and his books, go to www.dezbooks.net.

The following is an excerpt from the book The Oxford Murders
by Guillermo Martínez
Published by Penguin Books; September 2006;$13.00US; 9780143037965
Copyright © 2005 Guillermo Martínez

Chapter 1

Now that the years have passed and everything’s been forgotten, and now that I’ve received a terse e-mail from Scotland with the sad news of Seldom’s death, I feel I can break my silence (which he never asked for anyway) and tell the truth about events that reached the British papers in the summer of ‘93 with macabre and sensationalist headlines, but to which Seldom and I always referred — perhaps due to the mathematical connotation — simply as the series, or the Oxford Series. Indeed, the deaths all occurred in Oxfordshire, at the beginning of my stay in England, and I had the dubious privilege of seeing the first at close range.

I was twenty-two, an age at which almost anything can still be excused. I’d just graduated from the University of Buenos Aires with a thesis in algebraic topology and was travelling to Oxford on a year’s scholarship, secretly intending to move over to logic, or at least attend the famous seminars run by Angus MacIntyre. My supervisor, Dr Emily Bronson, had made all the preparations for my arrival with meticulous care. She was a professor and fellow of St Anne’s, but in the e-mails we exchanged before my trip she suggested that, instead of staying in the rather uncomfortable college accommodation, I might prefer — grant money allowing — to rent a room with its own bathroom, kitchen and entrance in the house of a Mrs. Eagleton, a delightful and discreet lady, she said, the widow of her former professor. I did my sums, as always a little optimistically, and sent off a cheque for advance payment of the first month’s rent, the landlady’s only requirement.

A fortnight later I was flying over the Atlantic in the incredulous state which overcomes me when I travel: it always seems much more likely, and more economical as a hypothesis — Ockham’s Razor, Seldom would have said — that a last-minute accident will send me back to where I started, or to the bottom of the sea, than that an entire country and the immense machinery involved in starting a new life will appear eventually like an outstretched hand down below. And yet, exactly on time, the plane cut calmly through the layer of cloud, and the green hills of England appeared, undeniably true to life, in a light that had suddenly faded, or perhaps I should say deteriorated, because that was my impression: that, as the plane went down, the light was becoming increasingly tenuous, as if it were weakening and languishing, having passed through a filter.

My supervisor had instructed me to take the bus from Heathrow straight to Oxford and apologized several times for not being able to meet me when I arrived as she’d be in London all week at an algebra conference. Far from bothering me, this seemed ideal. I’d have a few days to wander around town and get my bearings, before my academic duties began. I didn’t have much luggage, so when the bus arrived at the station I carried my bags across the square to get a taxi. It was the beginning of April but I was glad I’d kept my coat on: there was an icy, cutting wind, and the pallid sun wasn’t much help. Even so, I noticed that almost everyone at the fair occupying the square, as well as the Pakistani driver who opened his taxi door for me, was in short sleeves. I gave him Mrs. Eagleton’s address and as we drove off I asked if he wasn’t cold. ‘Oh no, it’s spring,’ he said, waving towards the feeble sun as if this were irrefutable proof.

The black cab advanced sedately towards the main street. As it turned left, I saw, on either side, through half-open wooden gates and iron railings, neat college gardens with immaculate, bright-green lawns. We passed a small graveyard beside a church, with tombstones covered in moss. The taxi went a little way along Banbury Road before turning into Cunliffe Close, the address I had written down. The road now wound through an imposing park. Large, serenely elegant stone houses appeared behind privet hedges, reminding me of Victorian novels with afternoon tea, games of croquet and strolls through the gardens. We checked the house numbers along the road but, judging by the amount of the cheque I’d sent, I couldn’t believe that the house I was looking for was one of these. At last, at the end of the road, we came to a row of identical little houses, much more modest but still pleasant, with rectangular wooden balconies and a summery look to them. Mrs. Eagleton’s was the first house. I unloaded my bags, climbed the small flight of steps at the entrance and rang the bell.

From the dates of her PhD thesis and early published work, I guessed that Emily Bronson must be about fifty-five, so I wondered how old the widow of her former professor might be. The door opened and I saw the angular face and dark-blue eyes of a tall, slim girl not much older than me. She held out her hand, smiling. We stared at each other in pleasant surprise, but then she seemed to draw back cautiously as she freed her hand, which I may have held a little too long. She told me her name, Beth, and tried to repeat mine, not entirely successfully, before showing me into a very cosy sitting room with a rug patterned with red and grey lozenges.

Mrs. Eagleton sat in a floral armchair and held out her hand, smiling welcomingly. The old lady had twinkling eyes and a lively manner, and her white hair was carefully arranged in a bun. As I crossed the room, I noticed that there was a wheelchair folded up and leaning against the back of her armchair. A tartan blanket was laid over her legs. We shook hands and I felt her frail, slightly tremulous fingers. She held my hand warmly for a moment, patting it with her other hand, and asked about my journey and whether this was my first visit to England.

‘We weren’t expecting someone so young, were we, Beth?’ she said with surprise.

Beth, standing by the door, smiled but said nothing. She took a key from a hook on the wall and, after I’d answered a few more questions, she suggested gently: ‘Don’t you think, grandmother, that we should show him to his room now? He must be terribly tired.’

‘Of course,’ said Mrs. Eagleton. ‘Beth will explain everything. And if you don’t have anything else planned this evening, we’d be delighted if you’d join us for dinner.’

I followed Beth out of the house and down a little flight of steps to the basement. She stooped slightly as she opened the small front door and showed me into a large, tidy room. Though below ground level, it received quite a lot of light from two windows, very high up by the ceiling. Beth began explaining all the little details as she walked about the room, opening drawers and showing me cupboards, cutlery and towels, in a kind of recitation that she must have repeated many times. I checked out the bed and the shower, but mainly I looked at her. Her skin was dry, tanned, taut, as if she spent a lot of time outdoors, and although it made her look healthy, it also made her look in danger of ageing early.

At first I’d thought she was in her early twenties but now, seeing her in different light, I realised that she must be nearer twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Her eyes were particularly intriguing: they were a very beautiful deep blue, but they seemed more still than the rest of her features, as if reluctant to express emotion. She was wearing a long, loose peasant dress with a round neck, which didn’t give much away about her body other than that she was thin, although looking more closely I saw hints that, luckily, she wasn’t thin all over. From the back, especially, she looked very huggable. Like all tall girls, there was something slightly vulnerable about her. When our eyes met again she asked me — without irony, I think — if there was anything else I wanted to check out. I looked away, embarrassed, and quickly answered that everything seemed fine. Before she left I asked, taking much too long to get to the point, whether I really should consider myself invited to dinner. She laughed and said that of course I should, and that they’d expect me at six-thirty.

I unpacked my few belongings, piled some books and copies of my thesis on the desk and put my clothes away in the drawers. After that I went for a walk around town. At one end of St Giles, I spotted the Mathematical Institute straight away: it was the only hideous modern building. I looked at the front steps and the revolving door at the entrance, and decided that I could give it a miss on my first day. I bought a sandwich and had a solitary and rather late picnic lunch on the banks of the river, watching a rowing team train. I browsed in a few bookshops, stopped to admire the gargoyles on the cornices of a theatre, followed a tour group around the courtyards of one of the colleges and then went for a long walk through the University Parks. In an area edged by trees a man on a machine was mowing large rectangular sections of grass and another man was marking out the lines of a tennis court. I stood and watched nostalgically. When they stopped for a break I asked when the nets would be going up. I’d given up tennis in my second year at university and hadn’t brought my rackets with me, but I promised myself I’d buy a new one and find a partner.

On the way back I went into a supermarket for a few supplies and then took time finding an off-licence, where I chose a bottle of wine for dinner more or less at random.

When I got back to Cunliffe Close, it was only just after six but it was already dark and there were lights on in all the houses. I was surprised to see that nobody drew their curtains; I wondered if this was due to (possibly excessive) faith in the spirit of discretion of the English, who wouldn’t stoop to spying on the life of others; or perhaps to an equally English certainty that they wouldn’t do anything in private that was worth spying on. There weren’t any shutters anywhere and I had the feeling that most doors weren’t locked.

I had a shower, shaved, selected my least crumpled shirt and, at exactly six-thirty, went up the little flight of steps and rang the bell, carrying my bottle. The dinner passed in an atmosphere of polite, smiling, rather bland cordiality which I’d get used to in time. Beth had smartened herself up a little, though she still wasn’t wearing make-up. She had changed into a black silk blouse and brushed her hair so that it fell seductively over one side of her face. But none of it was for me: I soon found out that she played the cello with the chamber orchestra of the Sheldonian Theatre, the semicircular building with the gargoyles that I’d seen on my walk. They were having their final rehearsal that evening and some lucky man called Michael was picking her up in half an hour. There was a brief, awkward silence when, assuming that he must be, I asked if he was her boyfriend. The two women exchanged glances but as my only answer Mrs. Eagleton asked if I’d like more potato salad. For the rest of the meal Beth seemed slightly absent and in the end the conversation was entirely between me and Mrs. Eagleton.

The doorbell rang and, after Beth left, my hostess became noticeably more animated, as if an invisible thread of tension had slackened. She poured herself a second glass of wine and for a long time I listened to her talk about her eventful, remarkable life. During the war she’d been one of a small number of women who entered a national crossword competition, in all innocence, only to find that the prize was to be recruited and confined to an isolated little village, with the mission of helping Alan Turing and his team of mathematicians decipher the codes of the Nazis’ Enigma machine. That was where she met Mr. Eagleton. She recounted lots of anecdotes about the war and also the circumstances surrounding Turing’s famous poisoning.

When she moved to Oxford, she said, she gave up crosswords and took up Scrabble instead, which she played with a group of friends whenever she could. She wheeled herself briskly over to a little low table in the sitting room, and told me to follow her and not to worry about clearing the table, Beth would take care of it when she got back. I watched apprehensively as she took a Scrabble board from a drawer and unfolded it. I couldn’t refuse. So that’s how I spent the rest of my first evening in Oxford: trying to form words in English, sitting opposite an almost historical old lady who, every two or three goes, used up all her seven letters, laughing like a little girl.

Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martínez. Copyright © 2005 by Guillermo Martínez

Author
Guillermo Martínez was born in Argentina in 1962. Since 1985 he has lived in Buenos Aires, where he earned a Ph.D. in mathematical science. He is the author of several highly acclaimed novels and short story collections.

Rights to The Oxford Murders, winner of the prestigious Planeta Prize, have been sold in twenty countries.

The following is an excerpt from the book Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her
by Melanie Rehak
Published by Harcourt; September 2005; $25.00US; 0-15-101041-2
Copyright © 2005 Melanie Rehak

The Stratemeyer Clan

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.

***

In September of 1929 children’s book mogul Edward Stratemeyer sent one of his inimitable typed memos to Grosset & Dunlap, his longtime publisher, describing a new line of books he hoped they would launch the following spring. Though he proved to have an uncharacteristically tin ear when it came to choosing a name for his heroine — any other option on his list of possibilities had a better ring to it than “Stella” — his sense of her life and her intrepid personality were flawless. While they had no way of knowing that Stratemeyer’s girl detective would eventually become a celebrity not only in the children’s book world but in the world at large, Grosset & Dunlap’s editors certainly knew a good thing when they saw it. They accepted Stratemeyer’s series on the basis of his memo, which also included brief plotlines for the first five books in the series, and his reputation, which, by the time “Nan Drew” burst on to the scene with her fashionable outfits and boundless intelligence, had been the source of admiration and envy — and a great fortune for Stratemeyer — for several decades. When his latest proposal reached their Manhattan office, he had been writing for children for more than forty years and was so steeped in the idiom of his chosen genre that he had given even the events of his own life — which were rather straightforward and businesslike when it came down to it — the sheen and thrill of a juvenile story.

This transformation had begun at the moment of his first serious publication in a children’s story paper in November of 1889. It was a fanciful tale called “Victor Horton’s Idea,” and it told of a boy who went out into the world to live life — unsuccessfully, it would transpire — like the characters in his favorite dime novels.

Victor was fifteen years old, naturally bright and lively, and if he had not held so high of an opinion of himself, he would have been a first-rate lad.

Besides being conceited, Victor was dissatisfied with the quietness of country life. He longed to go forth into the great world and achieve fame and fortune.

Now, though this idea is often a very laudable one, it was not so in the present instance. Victor’s idea upon the subject had been gathered wholly from the pages of numerous dime novels and disreputable story papers loaned him by his particular crony, Sam Wilson, and was, therefore, of a deceptive and unsubstantial nature, and likely to do more harm than good.

The details of Victor’s exploits appeared in installments over five weeks, crammed into the narrow columns of a richly illustrated black-and-white children’s broadsheet out of Philadelphia called Golden Days for Boys and Girls (subscription price $3 per annum). Alongside them ran informative articles with titles like “How to Make a Guitar” (”Those who have read the articles on ‘Violin Making’ and have succeeded in making one would, perhaps, like to make a guitar if they knew what a simple matter it is”); interesting trivia; and true stories about heroic rescues of humans by dogs.

Stratemeyer was twenty-six years old, tall, slender, and bespectacled, with a brushy mustache, dark hair combed back off a high forehead, and a preternatural instinct for the arc of a good tale for young people. He had, according to one news report, “a scholarly appearance . . . and his eyes are a trifle contracted from constant application to his work.” Indeed, in person, Stratemeyer betrayed no signs of the flights of fancy that had produced Victor and would go on to invent countless other young scalawags, heroes, and heroines over the next forty years. As one reporter would later describe him, he was “a tranquil-faced man, with kind, good-humored eyes . . . [and] a curiously deliberate manner of speaking. One doubts if he has ever been hurried into a decision or ever given an answer to a question without earnest consideration.” He also had a healthy sense of perspective on his chosen field. By the end of Victor Horton’s travails, the young man announces to his hapless friend Sam: “Dime novels are a first-class fraud!”

Nonetheless, they were the field that Stratemeyer aimed to get into. Myth had it that he had written “Victor Horton’s Idea” on a sheet of brown package paper during quiet moments while clerking at his brother’s tobacco store in Newark, New Jersey. In spite of having recorded very clearly in his own notes that he had written the story at home, Stratemeyer, knowing better than most the value of a good yarn, repeated the entertaining falsehood about its conception whenever he was asked to. As one news feature of the era printed it, complete with the final triumph of will and self-knowledge over discouragement:

His initial long story — 18,000 words — was written on store wrapping paper and later copied onto white paper. The author, who was then twenty-five, was not satisfied with it so he laid it aside. After a year . . . he revised the manuscript carefully and sent it to Golden Days. The check for $75 he received Stratemeyer bore proudly to his father, Henry J. Stratemeyer. “Look at this,” he said. The father, who had told him he was wasting his time writing the tale and might be better engaged in a more useful activity, regarded the check, then jerked up his glasses. “Why, it’s a check made out to you!” he exclaimed. Stratemeyer explained he had received it for the story the parent had tried to discourage. “Paid you that for writing a story?” his father repeated. “Well, you’d better write a lot more of them.”

In addition to his paycheck, Stratemeyer received something even more valuable: some sage — not to mention prophetic — advice from the editor of Golden Days. “I think you would become a good serial writer if you were to know just what was required, always remembering that each ‘to be continued’ must mark a holding point in the story.” The young author not only took these words fully to heart, but would incorporate them, practically verbatim, into his own advice to writers for years to come.

Born on October 4, 1862, Edward Stratemeyer was the youngest of six children, three of them half-brothers, and all of them musically or artistically talented. His father, Henry Julius Stratemeyer, had come to the United States from Germany in 1837, along with a wave of German immigrants that only got larger and larger as the nineteenth century progressed. Many of them, including Henry Stratemeyer, headed out to the California coast in search of the shiniest, most tempting American dream of them all: gold. By 1851, though, Henry had mined more fool’s gold than the actual metal, and he headed back east to Elizabeth, New Jersey, to visit his brother, George, also an émigré; his brother’s wife, Anna; and the couple’s three sons. Surrounded by family, Henry decided to stay in Elizabeth and settled into shopkeeping, advertising himself as a “wholesale and retail dealer in tobacco, cigars, snuff and pipes.”

Two years after his brother’s arrival in New Jersey, George Stratemeyer was stricken during a cholera epidemic. Knowing death was near, he asked Henry to stay in America and look after his family. Henry agreed, and in 1854, not long after George’s death, he married his brother’s widow, making his three nephews into his stepsons. Henry and Anna went on to have three more children: Louis Charles, born in 1856; Anna, born in 1859; and Edward, born in 1862. The family was well established in the cultured, comfortable merchant circle of Elizabeth and was barely touched by the War Between the States. Neither a military man nor a willing volunteer, the elder Stratemeyer had no trouble staying out of it.

As they grew, the Stratemeyer boys were put to work in their father’s thriving tobacco store, in order that he might teach them the basics of commerce and, especially, entrepreneurship. The children also received musical training. Edward’s sister, Anna, who would become an accomplished pianist, received her entire schooling at a prominent conservatory in town. Edward, on the other hand, was educated in the public schools of Elizabeth, and though he had an ear for music, too, preferred language. “You ask when I first wanted to become an author,” he wrote to an acquaintance in 1919. “I think I must have been about six years old when I attempted to write my first story.” He displayed an early interest in publishing, as well, running around his neighborhood with a toy printing press — an accoutrement that was all the rage at the time — turning out items for the pleasure of his friends and family. He would interview local residents about the goings-on in their lives during the week, then print up their answers in a newspaper that he sold back to them, at the price of one cent, on Saturday mornings.

Two chapbooks followed, with the entertaining, inscrutable titles That Bottle of Vinegar (1877) and The Tale of a Lumberman as Told by Himself (1878). The latter included, in bold black-and-white, the confident statement “E. STRATEMEYER PUBLISHER” on its cover. Stratemeyer was just sixteen years old, but he had grown up reading the books of Oliver Optic (the nom de plume of William T. Adams) and Horatio Alger, the two predominant boys’ fiction authors of the period, and the adventure-filled, rags-to-riches stories, as well as their action-packed dime-novel counterparts, left an impression on him that lasted well into his adult years. As he recalled fondly in an interview: “I had quite a library, including many of Optic’s and Alger’s books. At seven or eight, when I was reading them, I said, ‘If only I could write books like that I’d be the happiest person on earth.’”

Stratemeyer graduated from Elizabeth High School, the valedictorian of his class of three. Afterward, as was the norm for even a middle-class boy — only 1 percent of Americans attended college in the 1870s — he received two years of private tutoring in rhetoric, composition, and literature. He continued to combine clerking in a tobacco store — his brother Maurice’s this time — with writing, refining his stories, and selling them to the story papers that were appearing all over the country, like the Penny Magazine (which paid him $1 for “A Horrible Crime”), the Experiment, and the Boys’ Courier.

Copyright © 2005 by Melanie Rehak

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author
Melanie Rehak is a critic and poet whose essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Vogue, Real Simple, Salon.com, the Nation, and other publications. Her poetry has been published in the New Yorker and the Paris Review. She has held fellowships at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and the MacDowell Colony. She lives in Brooklyn. Girl Sleuth is her first book.

For more information, please visit http://www.harcourtbooks.com/GirlSleuth/