The Madge Sterling series, written under the pen name of Ann Wirt and published by Goldsmith, was a short breeder set that unfortunately went no farther. This was a good series that Millie wrote, combining mystery, light romance, and adventure. The last book in the series, The Secret of the Sundial, was the best of them all. These were shorter books than most at the time, at only 15 chapters. The boards range in color from red to blue to brown. Madge, whose mother is deceased and her father strangely missing, lives with her aunt and uncle. Madge likes the outdoors and has a talent for solving baffling mysteries:

• volume #1 The Missing Formula 1932
• volume #2 The Deserted Yacht 1932
• volume #3 The Secret of the Sundial 1932

I have written extensively on the Madge Sterling and there are two articles you can read as PDFs by clicking the following links:

Mysterious Madge Sterling - an overview of the 3 volumes with information on the series and the writing of it plus character lists and synopses of each of the three books. First published in The Sleuth in the July/August 2011 and September/October 2011 issues.

The Great Madge Sterling Caper…Or how Nancy Drew might have been out-sleuthed by the mid-1930s - We've got forces beyond most of Nancy Drew's control - the stock market crash and the Great Depression and then we had the force that is Mildred Wirt Benson, whose stand on taking a pay-cut and the events that played out surrounding that, could have changed the face of Nancy Drew's history were it not fate that intervened in a way that got us here today, 94 years later. There's a lot of Nancy Drew history - some very interesting tea if you will - that many of you may not be aware of who haven't visited the Stratemeyer Syndicate archives at the New York Public Library - over 300 boxes of materials and very revealing letters - and so many treasures to be discovered! I'm using some letters from those archives from the very early days before Nancy Drew and into the mid-1930s to tell a very interesting story that many of you might want to get clued into - some can only be found on the microfilm and are less well known. It's one of those mysteries behind the history that has never been so fully fleshed out using the letters to tell the story and it will be even more fleshed out in my biography of Benson. This essay is lengthy but is written in a fun style and includes a lot of interesting facts and quotes from the letters that reveal a lot about the cast of characters involved in creating Nancy Drew!

This article was published at my Nancy Drew Blog on April 27th, 2024.