The Vanishing Judy

By Leigh Newman The Mystery of Vanishing JudyThus begins The Vanishing Shadow by Marget Sutton, volume one in the Judy Bolton Mystery Series. Judy Bolton, high-school girl detective, surfaced in American publishing in 1932, via the publishers Grosset and Dunlap. There were other girl detectives out there: Nancy Drew (also a teenager), Cherry Ames (a nurse), and Vickie Barr (an airline stewardess). All of them, in fact, sold more copies and earn their protagonists more fame. Judy, however, was my mother’s favorite. She collected all 38 volumes and kept them intact, down to their covers. I was presented with the full set on the day of my birth, along with all the other items mother had collected for her daughter-to-come: A set of costumed dolls from each country she had visited (Argentina tango lady through Yemen tunic lady), a set of green Amelia Earhart luggage (including a smart little toiletry box with a magic golden key), not to mention Bermuda bag, a wood-handled purse that came with a 100-odd covers that you could changed daily to match your outfit. Each trimmed in fetching rickrack.I was small, dirty tomboy. Dolls were creepy, purses dorky, and the luggage perfect for running away on a steam freighter to Madagascar…except that I was too chicken to do it. But the Judy Bolton books always intrigued me. For most of my childhood I had an unhealthy, queasy relationship with their covers that was more about fear than sex, but nevertheless felt vaguely pornographic. Regularly before bed, I would look at The Mystic Ball, which features a dramatic, skeletal gypsy gripping a crystal ball with her long, grabby-looking fingers. Then I would put the book down, turn off the light, and picture her in my bed until I was shaking with the terror, about to pee my nightgown. Ditto for The Ghost Parade, which portrayed various primitive (an perhaps slightly derogatory) masques in mid-grimace and moan. Timeless qualitiesBy the time I cracked open my first Bolton mystery, I was eight and Judy was 47. In human years. In book years, she was still sixteen. And though she was not cool, or not even not-cool, since no other kids I knew had ever heard of her, I liked her immediately. Take that first passage. “Hey Judy,” said Lanky Edna Jenkins. “Get your nose out of that book!”Judy was a reader. I was a reader. We both were plagued by ding-dongs always telling us not to read, for some reason or another. She had to solve mysteries. I had to scoop up the dog poop on the lawn.Then there were her other qualities, all of them admirable. She was rude. (Note how she disses Lanky Edna Jenkins). She loses her temper, not just with her darling grandmother but with a surly roadworker who soon after kidnaps her. She gets regularly furious at her invalid brother, Horace, because the whole family gives him whatever he wants, and, once, dares him to ride a horse – a trip that almost kills him. Then again, when Lanky Edna Jenkins makes fun of Horace, Judy defends him. Because she is also loyal. And honest. And smart. And good at figuring out that the hand of a ghost waving in the window of her house, is actually the tail of white stray kitten leaping across the room (The Haunted Attic).Judy, like most girls, has a mother, a father and a sibling she holds in medium esteem. Her dad is a doctor but not a successful one, in terms of wealth and power. She never has money to buy the ticket to the fancy dance or the spelling bee. Her hair is red, which Marget Sutton half-heartedly tries to convince us is “auburn.” She gets older. She, in fact, gets married (turning down a rich boy for a poor one) and has an adopted daughter for a while, until the editors realized how unsexy it was to have their girl detective have a child and edited the girl out.On the other hand, Nancy Drew, Judy’s main girl detective competitor, lives with her dad, a famous lawyer. Her mother is deceased. She has a housekeeper who cleans and makes dinner, but nevertheless cannot tell Nancy what to do or not do. It’s an Electra dream come true. Add to this: Nancy drives a roadster. She had no job, nor does she go to school (even during the Great Depression, when the books were originally published). She remains somewhere in the age of 16 to 18, during all 80 years of her published adventures.It’s not hard to understand why one one--dimensional heroine would be more successful than another. Who would you rather be?  Ever young, rich, and gleaming blond? Or lower-middle class, a carrot-top, and openly aging? Different worldsNancy Drew is the Beverly Hills 90210 of 1930’s mystery novels. And personally, as a young, pimply adolescent I liked 90210, just as I liked Barbie a boobless 8-year old girl.  On 90210, a television show that ran on Fox from 1990 to 2000, a group of bronzed, airbrushed, sculpted teenagers ran around dating each other (and not have sex…at least for a while), only to have their parents pop up every now and then to hug them for making “the right life choices.” Even when characters like Brenda and Brandon (Shannon Doherty, Jason Priestley) were supposed to be poor, or even just middle class, they drove smoking-hot vintage cars and dressed like pop stars appearing in traffic court (short skirts, high heels but no gratuitous cleavage). Basically, the show was a commercial that sold abstractions like plastic surgery and dental whitening and The Great American Way. I drooled over every episode. So why couldn’t I fall for Nancy Drew?  How I wish it had been my mother’s influence. But at that age, I was into doing the opposite of whatever my mother suggested. She owned three Nancys, and 38 Judys. By all daughterly logic, I should be gushing over Nancy. Going back, I looked at the first passage of Nancy Drew’s first book, The Secret of the Old Clock. “It would be a shame if all that money went to the Tophams! They will fly higher than ever!” Nancy Drew, a pretty girl of sixteen, leaned over the library table and addressed her father who sat reading a newspaper by the study lamp. “I beg your pardon, Nancy. What where you saying about the Tophams?”Carson Drew, a noted criminal and mystery-case lawyer, known far and wide for his work as a former district attorney, looked up from his paper and smiled indulgently upon his only daughter. Now, as he gave her his respectful attention, he was not particularly concerned with the Richard Topham family but rather with the rich glow of the lamp on Nancy’s curly golden bob. Not at all the sort of head which one expected to indulge in serious thoughts, he told himself.Solving the mysteryHmm… Was my failure to relate due to the raging, overt sexism? I doubt this too. Both these book series are hugely dated. Judy’s pin money is given to her brother to buy a suit for his job—and she’s in the wrong for complaining. Nancy graduates high school but is never expected to go to college. It’s a hurdle, as reader, that you have to leap over, in order to enter a world of cashmere sweater sets and leafy Main Streets and characters named, no joke, Joy Holiday (The Yellow Phantom). The idea of being a reader, I suspect, is the real clue (sorry for the pun) to this mystery. When it comes to television and movies, the more simplistic the character, the more appealing. Television happens to you. Barbies happen to you, which is why even though girls love them, they eventually pull off their heads and cut their blond hair and make Ken rape them. Books, on the other hand, happen with you. Judy wasn’t just somebody I wanted to be, she was somebody I was, because I was inventing her as I read – how she looked, the color of her new felt hat, the smell of the dark cement room where she lay, helpless and bound by rope before attempting to enlist a dog to save her (The 
Vanishing Shadow). The more imperfect Judy was, the more she and I could actually merge, instead of remaining in a static, one-way relationship: me simply wanting to be her, the way I and every girl couldn’t help but want 
to be Nancy. Aspiring for a perfection you will never attain isn’t friendship. And books are friends, even ones with stubble-cheeked, dark-eyed villains and young vivacious heroines who – after a predictable plot, an overuse of adverbs, and several smart wardrobe changes – send those villains to jail, whimpering.