More Thoughts about Beverly Gray

Lenora Whitehill is the most fun of any series book chum. She is one of several reasons why I love the Beverly Gray books. From pages 32-33 in Beverly Gray Sophomore:

"It was [exciting]," Beverly assured them. "When I came back and told Allison Cox, she refused to believe there was anything suspicious about the place. She has assigned me to dig up something interesting, if I can."

"Goody, can we help?" Lenora asked excitedly. "A nice juicy mystery is just what I've been looking for."

What more could a sleuth want than a best friend who is willing to jump into any situation at a moment's notice? Even when Lenora gets scared, she is undaunted, as shown on page 37 of Beverly Gray, Sophomore:

"That is what we saw," Lenora said, sitting down and staring at Beverly helplessly. "Needless to say, we got away from there as fast as we could. We came back to the Hall, and I even dreamt about skeletons," she finished.

"Did you tell the other girls about it?" Beverly asked.

"Of course I did," Lenora chattered. "I was so scared I couldn't keep it to myself."

"Do you think we had better give up trying to solve the mystery of the mansion?" Beverly asked.

"No!" Lenora exploded. "I might have been scared last night, but in a day or so I'll be quite ready to go out there again."

In Beverly Gray, Senior, on page 188, Lenora laments that she is not having enough fun:

"Oh, dear," [Lenora] sighed when they had finished. "To think, when you were being shot at and racing about chasing kidnapers, I was calmly eating my dinner."

"We would have gladly changed places with you," Shirley assured her. "I didn't like it at all."

"I did," Beverly declared. "It was thrilling!"

"You can have all that kind of thrills," Shirley yawned.

"I wish I could have some of them," Lenora murmured. "I'm getting rusty from doing nothing exciting. I crave adventures," she said dramatically.

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On page 236 in Beverly Gray's Career, Beverly discusses her writing career:

"What I would really like to do someday, not now, I'm not capable of it yet, is to write a play and see it produced here on Broadway. You've heard the saying you can't write about something you haven't experienced. I'll have to wait a while until I even write a novel."

"That's a lot of bunk," Lenora declared immediately. "That experiencing stuff, I mean. Do you suppose that these writers who write ferocious murder stories have ever seen or even heard of the murders they write about?"

"And I know a writer who wrote a lot of college stories and he had never been to college," added Lois.

This passage is very interesting, indeed. Clair Blank wrote her first four Beverly Gray College Mystery Stories while she was in high school. It sounds rather like Lois was referring to Clair Blank herself. Additionally, Clair Blank never visited any of the exotic locales that she wrote about in the Beverly Gray series, yet she was able to pull the reader into those exotic settings as though the reader was actually experiencing them. And Clair Blank was certainly never almost eaten by cannibals, sucked into a whirlpool, or in multiple plane crashes . . .