The Hidden Staircase [Revised Edition] (Nancy Drew Mystery [Revised] #2)

Harriet Stratemeyer Adams (December 12, 1892 – March 27, 1982) was an American juvenile book packager, children's novelist, and publisher who was responsible for some 200 books over her literary career. She wrote the plot outlines for many books in the Nancy Drew series, using characters invented by her father, Edward Stratemeyer. Adams also oversaw other ghostwriters who wrote for these and many other series as a part of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, and rewrote many of the novels to update them starting in the late 1950s.

With her sister, Edna, Adams took over control of the Stratemeyer Syndicate after her father Edward Stratemeyer's death in 1930. Edna ran the daily business operations, while Adams dealt with publishers and wrote; Edna became inactive when she married in 1942, and Adams took over the business. Adams is credited with keeping the Syndicate afloat through the Great Depression, and with revising the two most popular series, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, in the 1950s and 1960s, removing stereotypes and streamlining plots and characters. She ran the Syndicate for 52 years.

The most famous writer who worked on the Girls’ Books Series was Mildred A. Wirt Benson. She was born Mildred Augustine in Ladora, Iowa, in 1905. She met Edward Stratemeyer in New York in 1925 and began working for his syndicate as a writer who fleshed out his plot outlines for juvenile mystery stories. In 1929, she began to write Stratemeyer’s Nancy Drew Mystery Stories for a reported S125.00 per book. In 1950, three years after her husband Asa Wirt died, she married George Benson, the editor of The Toledo Times, from which point her professional career was focused on newspaper writing.

Mrs. Benson reportedly gained her first series book writing experience with Volumes 23 to 30 of the Ruth Fielding Series. She wrote twenty-three of the Nancy Drew books and several Dana Girls and Kay Tracey books, all for the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Under her own name, she wrote many other series, such as the Brownie Scouts. Penny Nichols, Penny Parker, and the most unusual to carry the by-line of a woman writer, the six Dan Carter Cub Scouts books for boys.

—All About Collecting Girls’ Series Books. John Axe, 2002.