Trixie Belden

Trixie Belden is a series of mystery novels written between 1948 and 1986, and intended for the children's market. The creation of Julie Campbell Tatham (1908 - 1999), Trixie Belden is considered one of the most successful children's and youth book series in the world.

History[edit]

In the late-1940s Tatham was an established co-author with her husband, as well as an author in her own right, in addition to running her own literary agency. Through this job she would attend a meeting with the Western Publishing Company; the premise of the meeting was how could Western successfully compete with the comic book market, and one of the ideas suggested for the attending agencies was the creation of inexpensive, fast-moving stories with plots centered around mystery and adventure. Tatham would quickly create an outline for a mystery series centered around a young girl named Ginny Gordon; five of the Gordon novels would be written and published prior to 1956.

At the same time as Ginny Gordon was being applied to paper, Tatham was busy writing about the adventures of a blonde farm girl - a "tousle-haired tomboy"^[1] - in upstate New York who had a penchant for finding and solving mysteries, a girl she named Beatrix "Trixie" Belden. Taking a cue from the Nancy Drew series about a girl detective, Tatham actually started off by hating the Drew series. "I wanted Trixie to be different from Nancy Drew," she said in a 1988 interview. "I thought Nancy Drew books were poorly written and totally implausible."^[2] While Nancy Drew was portrayed as wealthy and picture-perfect, Tatham went the opposite way with Trixie Belden, a girl who is stuck with the foibles of being a young teenager^[3], including chores, teasing from her older brothers, the babysitting of her mischievous younger brother, problems doing schoolwork, and the realization she is stuck getting out of trouble herself^[4]. Thatham would draw on her own experiences in crafting the characters and environment, with her own home of Wolf Hollow in Westchester County, New York, serving as the inspiration for Trixie's Crabapple Farm, near the town of Sleepyside-on-the-Hudson.

Tatham would write the first six Trixie Belden novels, while the remaining books (there are 39 in total) would be written by various authors under a pseudoym. The last one, The Mystery of the Galloping Ghost was published in 1986. Since then, the series has been out of print for a short period of time; Random House currently owns the rights to it, and have done a reprinting of the first 15 volumes beginning in 2003.

Description[edit]

Thirteen year-old Trixie Belden is an ordinary, yet spunky farm girl who is very inquisitive, and always running into a mystery, which more often than not involves theft. Sharing her adventures is her best friend, Madeleine G. "Honey" Wheeler and Honey's adopted brother Jim; Trixie's brothers Brian and Mort, and a schoolmate named Diana. They are tight-knit and close, forming their own club ("Bobwhites-of-the-Glen"). "Yes [my characters are taken from real life]," Tatham said. "I'd think of someone who had a special type of disposition and meld him or her together with maybe two or three other people and there emerges a character who is new. The character takes over and becomes a living human being. Somehow, they exist. Trixie Belden's kid brother, Bobby, was a combination of my kid brother and my younger son...I can talk about my characters without any sense of pride or egotism because to me they are real people. They get involved in a plot I devise, and they make it come to life. If you don't feel that way, then they are just stick figures."^[5]

references[edit]

• Kelly, Ernie, "Meet the Author: Julie Campbell Tatham," The Yellowbook Library, #43, January 1988. Republished as "Interview with Julie Campbell Tatham," The Whispered Watchword: The Newsletter of the Society of Phantom Friends, September 1996 (pg. 27)