The Sleepyside Zone

TThe Trixie Belden Questionnaire

LORA ROBERTS

Lora Roberts is the author of the Liz Sullivan mystery series (Murder Crops Up, Murder Follows Money) and the Bridget Montrose mystery series (A Revolting Development, Another Fine Mess.) The first volume in her new series set in Sussex, England in 1903, is The Affair of the Incognito Tenant: A Mystery With Sherlock Holmes and will be published in March, 2004. Visit her online at www.nmomysteries.com/main.htm.

Q: AS A CHILD, WHAT DID YOU LIKE ABOUT THE TRIXIE BELDEN SERIES, AS A SERIES?
LR: I liked the idea of having wealthy friends opening doors: 'oh, no, we couldn't take that expensive trip, or 'oh, diamond rings, certainly, whatever.' There were those fancy elements that I enjoyed, but they were handled in a realistic way. And, I liked that the teen-agers' club, the Bob-Whites, only used money they earned.

Q: AS A CHILD, WHAT DID YOU THINK ABOUT TRIXIE, THE HEROINE?
LR: I thought she was very admirable. She seemed like a good kid. You would like to have her for a friend. But she was somebody who needed work, like for example being impatient. Or, laughing at people before she understood them. That was very realistic and it got her into trouble. I'm thinking, 'she shouldn't laugh at poor little Honey.' But, that was part of her character, she acted first and thought later. Everyone can see this is a flaw and she feels that it is too, but she has no restraint.

As a kid, you can see that Trixie gets herself into trouble. She was believable. You can identify with her.

Q: BEYOND WHAT YOU LIKED OR DIDN'T LIKE ABOUT THE TRIXIE BELDEN SERIES, WHAT MADE THE SERIES MEMORABLE TO YOU?
LR: One of the things was that the dialogue seemed to me to be very evocative of how kids really talk. I know Campbell wrote them over a long stretch and they're not full of freshly minted slang, but she had an ear for how modern young people talk. I'm still impressed by her skill in doing that. It's hard to make dialogue that sounds natural and sounds like people are really saying that, especially in that age group, especially when you constantly have to jack up the suspense.

In the Julie Campbell books all of those characters had such a sense of themselves. Trixie's voice was consistent - Honey was always Honey; if she did something out of the ordinary - if she didn't faint at the sight of blood - it was noted. The characters grew in ways that were logical for that age group. Trixie learns to concentrate and be a better student. I had a great deal of sympathy with that predicament. It was clever of Campbell to make her bad at math and English. Writers typically don't make their heroines bad at English.

The plotting isn't that great, when you read them as an adult. The genre required the author to end on cliff hangers in the chapters and screw up the suspense even if it turns out that it wasn't that suspenseful. But she did a great job of characterizing. The characters are real and natural.

Q: AS AN ADULT AND AN AUTHOR, LOOKING BACK ON THE TRIXIE BELDEN
SERIES, WHAT DO YOU ADMIRE ABOUT THE BOOKS?
LR: She did a great job in the first 6 books. The plots are not totally memorable. But I think the books hold up quite amazingly on re-reading. (Ms. Roberts had re-read a few of the books prior to this interview.) I was surprised that I still found them fresh and attractive and would recommend them to my nieces.

I just admire the way she managed to get in her own little agenda, that it's good to help other people and good to work hard and have fun while you do these things. She didn't do anything preachy, but the books give a very wholesome model for children which is not always the case.

Q: IN GENERAL, HOW DID YOUR CHILDHOOD READING INFLUENCE YOUR WRITING (OR DID IT)?
LR: Actually, I'd have to say Trixie had a direct effect on my writing. When I began to write novels I paid a lot of attention to how characters spoke which I learned from those books. The characters have a voice and you can't mess with that. The author should be transparent. It's not my job to make everybody admire me as a writer. My job is to make the reader so involved with the characters that you don't realize a writer is doing this. That's something I learned to observe in those books. Be present and bring the characters forward without putting that invisible shield between the reader and the characters.

You have to work really, really hard and nobody must know you did that. Like at a really good party, it's not so fun if you see the hostess sweating away. It has to look easy, but have to be crafted so carefully.

Q: HOW WOULD YOU COMPARE THE TRIXIE BELDEN SERIES TO YOUR OTHER CHILDHOOD READING, E.G., STRENGTHS, WEAKNESSES, ETC.
LR: I read a lot of different things. I stayed up all night reading Pride and Prejudice when I was ten. Probably half of it went over my head. But I very much enjoyed it and it led me into a cycle of early and mid Victorians, the Brontes. And all of that because of Pride and Prejudice.

Then I read the Janet Lambert books, the ones I could find. So I read some of those and somebody else who was writing in the same vein of high school doings, Rosamund Du Jardin. She was interesting. She was one of the arms-length authors, everything seemed to be narrated, nothing seemed to be happening in a fresh way that the reader could participate in.

Certainly Trixie holds up as being fun to read and involving and the characters seem real and fresh. All the books I loved were books that would take me to a different place, whether it was England in 1842 or Sleepyside in 1948.

Q: JULIE CAMPBELL CREATED THE SERIES AND WROTE THE FIRST SIX BOOKS. VARIOUS WRITERS USING THE PEN NAME, KATHRYN KENNY, WROTE ALL OF THE OTHER VOLUMES. DID YOU NOTICE A DIFFERENCE AS A CHILD? DID IT MATTER TO YOU? IF YOU DIDN'T NOTICE AS A CHILD, DO YOU NOTICE NOW, EITHER IN RE-READING OR RECALLING?
LR: When the series switched to the Kathryn Kenny authors all of this romantic glop was shoveled in. The series was about being friends, not dating. This doesn't make any sense to me. Maybe someday Trixie and Jim would get together, but right now it's a friendship. That was annoying. I read some of those Janet Lambert books where romance was an integral part of the book. That was fine, but it didn't belong in Trixie Belden.

When I was writing my Liz Sullivan books, I thought of her as a dark Trixie. She lives in her VW bus in the first book. She's very poor and hiding from things and she's a writer, which is why she's poor. She changes and grows in six books but had that same kind of a 'let's go out and find out what's happening' quality that Trixie had. I was not consciously channeling Trixie - but the character Trixie and the Trixie Belden series was the first to open my eyes to the difference an author can make. Books aren't hatched, they have to be wrought.

HOW WOULD YOU COMPARE TRIXIE BELDEN AND NANCY DREW?
LR: Trixie is real and has faults. Something about Nancy Drew was so chilly. I read just a few and lost interest. I just felt that those kids (in the Trixie Belden books) seemed very real. The challenges seemed more like the challenges that I would meet as a child - very involving.

They were so bland I just could not understand it. If Nancy knows everything, where is the suspense? The good thing about Trixie is she doesn't know it all, but she does figure this mystery out.

Trixie embodies the word plucky. She's the plucky little sleuth. Nancy Drew was described by the narrator.

And that stupid roadster! What's the deal? They never even said what kind of car. That was one of the other things about Nancy - they were capable of being updated. If you can take the person in the books and stick them in a different era and nothing changes - she's still wearing shirtwaists and driving a roadster but now it's 1988, not 1948, well, something's wrong. That's not a real character.

Q: LOOKING BACK AS AN ADULT AND AN AUTHOR, HOW DID CAMPBELL KEEP TRIXIE LOVABLE, EVEN ADMIRABLE, WHEN SHE WAS SO CLEARLY FLAWED?
LR: I think that's one of the reasons why she's still lovable. She has to work hard in each book to overcome something, often a problem of her own making. That brings us to sympathize with her. She's not perfect and all-knowing and doesn't figure things out right away. But she is observant.

Q: NANCY DREW'S RIVER HEIGHTS SEEMS TO BE LOCATED IN ANYWHERE, MIDDLE-AMERICA, BUT TRIXIE BELDEN CLEARLY LIVES IN A SPECIFIC PLACE, THE HUDSON RIVER VALLEY. CAN YOU COMMENT ON HOW THE USE OF A SPECIFIC LOCALE HELPS TO ENRICH THE BOOKS?
LR: I think Campbell does a great job with the locale. It's clear that it has its own history. In the first one, it talks about the Belden family having been there for a long time and there are these big estates and the Hudson River valley which added a lot of color. She's careful to make sure you understand that there's wood and snow and that these features arise from the landscape. It's not like River Heights - the books have the weather that that area gives you. I just think that enriched the background of those and when Trixie goes on location, she's careful to make sure you understand how Arizona fits into that as well.

Q: YOU'RE WRITING (OR HAVE WRITTEN) A SERIES. WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES OF SERIES WRITING? HOW DOES THE TRIXIE BELDEN SUCCEED OR FAIL IN THESE?
LR: You have to keep the characters consistent while allowing them to change and grow. Each time they are from a cookie-cutter, people get bored. Trixie does evolve. She learns to be more considerate. In every book, she's challenged and learns to meet that challenge and how to make relationships better and how to fix the problems. I like the way Campbell manages to let the characters arc over the course of the series. She allows them to grow and keeps them rooted in what makes them so attractive.

Q: CAN YOU COMMENT SPECIFICALLY ON ONE OF THE BOOKS THAT YOU THINK IS WELL DONE?
LR: I re-read The Secret of the Mansion. I thought they did a pretty good job of trying to find the treasure. They went through all the paper and searched the house through and I loved the way Campbell had the inheritance hidden in the mattress. The mattress is on fire and Trixie hauls it out and that's where the money is. Campbell manages to make them search the whole mansion and she had her red herrings, such as the huge piles of junk and the bottletops. I think she handled that really well. The inheritance was right where you would have expected it to be, but she managed to misdirect us.

The mansion itself embodies all the elements of that book. It has the grandeur, the mystery and suspense which is what Trixie is looking for. It has dangers and secrets and at the end it's all explained. Campbell took a lot of care with that book. The Red Trailer Mystery has that picaresque quality where the hero goes off searching for the good deed. I love the part at the end where everybody turns up at Mrs. Smith's farm.

This site was last updated on February 16, 2004.

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