Nancy Drew, and Joe and Frank Hardy have friends in high places. On the July 5, 2009 editorial page of “The New York Times,” columnist Nicholas Kristof recommended The Hardy Boys series as one of the 10 best children’s reads ever. He also mentions that Nancy Drew fans include Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. That’s not bad for characters dreamed up by local entrepreneur Edward Stratemeyer in the 1920s and 1930s.

 According to “The Secret of the Hardy Boys” by Marilyn S. Greenwald and “Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women who Created Her” by Melanie Rehak, Stratemeyer was born in Elizabeth, NJ, in 1862. He began writing as a child, selling his first story, “Victor Horton's Idea,” to the children's paper “Golden Days” for $75. As a young man, he moved to Newark, where he owned a stationery store and wrote under several pen names. His work came to the attention of Horatio Alger, then in poor health, and Stratemeyer completed a number of books for Alger.

In 1905 or 06 (accounts vary), Stratemeyer opened his literary syndicate. His business model was this: he drafted a plot for a given story in a series, and a freelancer wrote a specified number of pages and chapters. Each book began with a quick introduction of the character and a review of important information from previous books.

Working from offices first in Manhattan, then in Maplewood and the Oranges, the “syndicate” developed a number of series, starting with The Rover Boys, The Motor Boys and The Builder Boys. The Bobbsey Twins, The Outdoor Girls and The Motion Picture Chums soon followed. Not all survived, but it’s hard to overstate Stratemeyer’s success. In 1926, 98 percent of the boys and girls surveyed in a poll published by the American Library Association listed a Stratemeyer book as their favorite.

Still, Stratemeyer wasn’t finished. Noting the growing popularity of detective stories, he developed The Hardy Boys the same year. Canadian newspaperman Leslie McFarlane was the first ghostwriter; he received payment of $125 for “The Tower Treasure."

In 1930, Nancy Drew came along. Edward Stratemeyer had decided to create a female detective, or “sleuth” as readers of the series know her. According to local legend, he was driving from his daughter’s home in Maplewood when he passed South Orange's Village Hall. The clock in the tower struck and so did inspiration: the first book in the series is entitled “The Secret of the Old Clock.”

Stratemeyer died that same year, and the business was taken over by his daughters. Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, a busy society hostess, moved the offices first to a closer site in Orange and then close to her home in Maplewood.
Several local residents recall that, despite their homegrown roots, Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys books weren’t welcome in the public libraries. However, legend holds that Maplewood and South Orange served as the model for Nancy Drew’s hometown of River Heights. (The earliest books in the series were penned by Mildred Wirt, whose descriptions sound Midwestern. When Adams took over the writing, suburban New Jersey became a likely model, according to “The Nancy Drew Scrapbook” by Karen Plunkett-Powell. She notes the distances and time required to travel to Madison Avenue, for example.)

Local girl Nancy Drew had outlasted not only her creators – Harriet Adams died in 1982 and is buried at the Fairmount Cemetery on South Orange Avenue – but also many of her critics. “The Secret of the Old Clock” has been revised, updated, made into videos and a computer game. It has been in print since its first publication, and can be found at the South Orange Public Library, just steps away from the Village Hall clock that inspired its writing.