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Description
Sabotaged cars, suspicious accidents, and a desperate letter to an advice column figure into Nancy's summertime mystery.Tags
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Member Reviews
An above-average Files read. Pretty much anytime bratty newspaper journalist Brenda Carlton is featured in the story my interest increases incrementally. She is the perfect foil/adversary to Nancy. Love it.
*spoilers!*
I definitely have mixed feelings about this book. The ending was great and very unexpected... I certainly never would've suspected the truth about Mrs. Keating.
However, it was a very slow plot. The back-cover and inside-summaries make it seem much more centered on Mrs. Keating then the actual book is... Roughly the first half of the book is Nancy following Brenda, focusing on Brenda, trying to figure out if there even is a mystery.
I definitely have mixed feelings about this book. The ending was great and very unexpected... I certainly never would've suspected the truth about Mrs. Keating.
However, it was a very slow plot. The back-cover and inside-summaries make it seem much more centered on Mrs. Keating then the actual book is... Roughly the first half of the book is Nancy following Brenda, focusing on Brenda, trying to figure out if there even is a mystery.
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Author Information
924+ Works 200,906 Members
Carolyn Keene was the pseudonym that Mildred Wirt Benson and Walter Karig used to write Nancy Drew books. The idea of Nancy Drew came from Edward Stratemeyer in 1929. He also had other series, that included the Hardy Boys, but he died in 1930 before the Nancy Drew series became famous. His daughters, Harriet and Edna, inherited his company and show more maintained Nancy Drew having Mildred Wirt Benson, the original Carolyn Keene, as the principal ghostwriter. During the Depression, they asked Benson to take a pay cut and she refused, which is when Karig wrote the books. Karig's Nancy Drew books were Nancy's Mysterious Letter, The Sign of the Twisted Candles, and Password to Larkspur Lane. He was fired from writing more books because of his refusal to honor the request that he keep his work as Carolyn Keene a secret. He allowed the Library of Congress to learn of his authorship and his name appeared on their catalog cards. Afterwards, they rehired Benson and she wrote until her last Nancy Drew book (#30) was written in 1953, Clue of the Velvet Mask. Harriet and Edna Stratemeyer also contributed to the Nancy Drew series. Edna wrote plot outlines for several of the early books and Harriet, who claimed to be the sole author, had actually outlined and edited nearly all the volumes written by Benson. The Stratemeyer Syndicate had begun to make its writers sign contracts that prohibited them from claiming any credit for their works, but Benson never denied her writing books for the series. After Harriet's death in 1982, Simon and Schuster became the owners of the Stratemeyer Syndicate properties and in 1994, publicly recognized Benson for her work at a Nancy Drew conference at her alma mater, the University of Iowa. Now, Nancy Drew has several ghostwriters and artists that have contributed to her more recent incarnations. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Poison Pen
- People/Characters
- Nancy Drew; Brenda
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, Tween, Young Adult
- DDC/MDS
- 813.54 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American fiction in English 1900-1999 1945-1999
- LCC
- PZ7 .K23 .P — Language and Literature Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Juvenile belles lettres
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 91
- Popularity
- 350,997
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (4.25)
- Languages
- English, Swedish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 7
- ASINs
- 1
