Heredity is a strange thing. As a bookish little girl with a desperate desire to write, I grew up with a reputation for being the slightly eccentric one in our family. So you can imagine my surprise when I recently discovered that no—I am not the only writer in the family, not by a long chalk!
Family tradition had always strongly suggested that we might have relatives in America. Well, it turns out that there are heaps and heaps of relatives, descended from several Kilmartin family members who settled in Iowa in the 1850s and 60s. I have lost track of the number of authors, journalists, publishers and editors who have cropped up in that line of the family, but the discovery that staggered me the most was that of my two second cousins twice removed, Nicolete Meredith Stack and Gertrude Williamson. Nicolete was a children’s author, and her sister Gertrude was an illustrator. Not only that, Nicolete (who was born Mabel McGuire in Des Moines, Iowa in 1893) is well known to girls of my generation by one of her pseudonyms, Kathleen Kenny, author of the girls’ detective story series Trixie Belden.
All right, here is my dark confession: I was never much of a fan of Trixie Belden. But my sister, Kim had the entire set, and if I had known a relative of mine had actually written some of them I would certainly have sat up and taken notice. From what I have been able to find out about Nicolete, she was a very competent jobbing children’s author who could turn her hand to a lot of different things. James Keeline, who is a specialist in mass-market children’s fiction of this era, has very kindly shared a page from one of Nicolete’s manuscripts for another series, Robin Kane: The Candleshop Mystery (I wasn’t familiar with this one, but James describes it as a “West Coast Trixie Belden”). James commented, “This manuscript has fewer editorial marks than others we have from Whitman/Golden Press. It is probably an indication that she was a better writer…Authors with extensive marks on the MSS were usually ones who only wrote a single book.” (Nicolete sounds like a woman after my own heart.) Nicolete’s professional background as a an editor and journalist may help account for this. As well as various non-fiction books, Nicolete also wrote at least one title in the Little Golden Books series, (which were among the very first books I ever owned), a story called Corky’s Hiccups.
The Trixie Belden books were published by Whitman in the United States, and Dean & Sons in the UK and Commonwealth, with the first book coming out in 1948. There was, of course, no such person as Kathleen Kenny. The name was a pseudonym used by a stable of writers, with the first six books written by series creator, Julie Campbell Tatham. According to James Keeline, Nicolete wrote the next six, plus titles 15 and 16. There were 39 books in all, the last of which came out in 1986, a pretty impressive run for a series that first appeared not long after the Second Word War.
So, maybe my being a children’s writer is not such an odd thing after all. Was there something in the water back in that ancestral village in East Galway? Cousin Nicolete wrote lots of other things which I will share in future blog posts, but if you’re interested in the Trixie Belden connection, here is a list of the titles James Keeline believes she contributed.
TRIXIE BELDEN NOVELS WRITTEN BY NICOLETE MEREDITH STACK
7. The Mysterious Code (1961)
8. The Black Jacket Mystery (1961)
9. The Happy Valley Mystery (1962)
10. The Marshland Mystery (1962)
11. The Mystery at Bob-White Cave (1963)
12. The Mystery of the Blinking Eye (1963)
15. The Mystery on the Mississippi (1965)
16. The Mystery of the Missing Heiress (1970)
(A big thank you to James Keeline https://keeline.com, Chris Volk, and Robyn Collins for helping me research this post.)
