Although my research paper ended up showing that media developed for Fundamentalist Christian Children is far more complicated than my initial reaction to the pieces provided, it’s difficult not to take a first look at such work and be overwhelmed by its literary shortcomings.The characters are flat to the extent that they are sometimes unintentially racist and/or sexist, the author struggles to balance ongoing action with a forgone conclusion which can lead to bizarre pacing and contrived events, the writing is simplistic with stunted sometimes forced sounding dialogue, there is a strong black-and-binary that works its way into the narration and the story’s premise and key character information is repeated every three or four pages instead of once or twice in a novel if at all, like in other works. I wondered whether these weaknesses  related to fact that these works are like this because they cater people that want to reinforce evangelical values or because  they cater to young people. I was stunned when I realized how similar the writing style of Jerry Jenkins and Tim Lahaye was to that of Carolyn Keen, the pseudonym adopted by the writers-for hire that worked on Nancy Drew.  A quick read through of “The Hidden Staircase” and “Stories for Girls,” an anthology of 20’s and 30’s short youth novels that I actually did receive while cleaning out my grandparent’s vacation home, was enough to convince me that the serialized children’s detective novels published between the 1920’s and 1960’s suffer the exact same comings that modern children’s religious apocalyptic fiction does. However, their shared sense of self righteousness be darned, I feel that there is a sense of paranoia that plagues religious works and their characters, that Nancy Drew and her peers escape. For my creative project, I brought that paranoia into the world of a girl detective by making implicit religious and apocalyptic themes relating to the period-appropriate red-scare explicit through an original short story that parodies both genres of writing.

This story is presented to the audience with a framing device that states it to be a long lost, unsuccessful contemporary of Nancy Drew. Doing so acknowledges the complex, sometimes hostile, often co-dependant relationship between mainstream and religious media. It also allows me to distance my self from my work as writers for serialized detective novels and biblical prophets often did, while granting me the opportunity to show that while I think this sort of fiction might exist in this world even if my google searches for “Christian Girl Detective” fell short. One of the benefits to writing in this style was that names and places could relate to either the bible or existing teen detective novels and alternate between doing so and being almost completely random. This is a deliberate mockery of the idea of a “meaningful name” that children’s writing often demonstrates. I believe that LeHaye, Jenkins or Keene also often relied more on the “feel” of a name than a deep, heavily, researched meaning. They style of its predecessors also frees “Revelation at the Schoolhouse” from needing a steady stream of evidence before the detective reaches her conclusion. Although I am much more familiar with the “Girl Detective” soft cover stories  written in the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s than the Hardback Original Nancy Drew series, I remember chapters of red herring sprinkled with the occasional relevant sentence or two to be quoted verbatim at the end of the book. I feel that this sort of plot development appears more contrived when a biblical prophecy is worked into the conclusion. The disappearance of desks seems like a rather petty crime to liken to thousand-year-old legend. Yet, time and time again, people relate apocalyptic belief to their own needs and concerns. This “presence of god” might make a story more believable for one indoctrined to the Christian faith and the knowledge that “the public might not believe” creates a force to continue to rally against.

Yet, the “every-girl” hero, Mary Lou, is but an aspirational model that creates a devout follower. The leader “god”-figure in any story is the writer. I am glad that Professor Quinby granted us the opportunity to create this sort of work. It was a strange and yet empowering experience.