Thoughts on Beverly Gray Part I

Back in April, I made some comments about the Beverly Gray series, and I mentioned the article that appeared in Issue 31 of The Mystery and Adventure Series Review. The reviewer gave his opinion about the final ten volumes of the Beverly Gray series, which are the only ones that he read. The reviewer felt that the books were not all written by the same person since some of the books are better than others, and also because a few of the books do not have the usual large cast of unnecessary characters.

In the past month, I have reread all of the Beverly Gray books, in some cases skimming a title or two, but I have gone back through all of them. This was my fourth time through the entire series, with the exception of World's Fair in which this was my third time. I feel like the same person did write the entire series. The characterizations remain consistent throughout the series, and the interactions between the characters are also consistent. When I read the Ruth Fielding series, the characterizations and interactions between characters shifted slightly each time the ghostwriter changed from Foster to Ward to Wirt. Of course, I knew to look for a difference, since I knew that the Fielding books were written by different people, but the differences in the Ruth Fielding books are tangible.

Some of the Beverly Gray books are better than others, and this was one reason why the reviewer in MASR thought that there were different writers. A point I wish to make is that Mildred Wirt Benson wrote many of the early Dana Girls books, which are generally considered to be not as good as the early Nancy Drew books. It has been speculated that the Dana Girls books received the rejected Nancy Drew plots. The Dana Girls books tend to have wacky stories that can be a bit hard to believe, regardless of which ghostwriter was involved. Even a good writer can produce something that is not quite up to par due to a weak plot, or in Benson's case, a weak plot outline provided by the Syndicate.

Clair Blank had some great ideas for most of the Beverly Gray stories, but she fell a bit short on some of the plots. In my fourth journey through the series, I found that the titles that I did not like quite as much as the rest are Beverly Gray at the World's Fair, Beverly Gray's Mystery, and Beverly Gray's Vacation. I do recall that I loved all of the books in the series the first two times that I read them; I want to make that clear. However, after repeated readings, some books are not going to hold up as well.

I did not like these titles as much because I found that I did not care that much about what happened to certain secondary characters. In Beverly Gray at the World's Fair, I found that I did not care about the man who died, and I did not care about his sister. I also grew tired of the endless descriptions of the World's Fair. In Beverly Gray's Mystery, I did not care about the missing horse, Star of the East, or his owner, and there were too many people running around with foreign-sounding names.

In Beverly Gray's Vacation, the plot centers around Phyllis Tanner, who is a secondary character who does not appear that often. Phyllis is in trouble because her brother, Neal, is accused of theft. Even though Beverly and her friends have never met Neal, they are certain he is innocent, although their host and everybody else is certain that Neal is guilty. It was not a particularly compelling read this time, and I did not care about Neal or Phyllis at all.

—to be continued