Beverly Gray Mysteries Overview
The Beverly Gray Mystery Series written by Clair Blank began in 1934 with the first four books in the series being released and continued through to a total of 26 volumes until its cancellation in 1955.
At the series inception Beverly is a Freshman at Vernon College. The series progresses with Beverly progressing through her college years and on to a career as a Reporter and writer living in New York City.
Beverly Gray was one of the first "career girl" sleuths of teenage fiction.
Today although there are certain things that date the books, [Larry Owens who becomes Beverly's fiance during the series is an aviator and when he and Beverly fly in his modern airplane they have to wear aviator helmets and goggles.] the essence of the books has retained a fresh quality of melodramatic adventure, with mystery, romance, friendship and excitement formatted in a soap-opera style format.
One of the characteristics of The Beverly Gray Series is the number of friends and minor characters that appear in the books. This difference between Beverly and a lot of other "Career Girl Sleuths" is the interest that is created in the contrast of interaction between Beverly and other characters with a range of personalities and interests. The result is a more realistic college environment, with scope for a broad range of friendship issues and love-life problems.
Volumes #1-8 were originally published by A. L Burt and later reprinted by Grosset & Dunlap. Volumes #1 to 5, and #7to 23 were published by G&D. Volumes 24 to 26 were published by Clover Books.
The sixth volume of this series, ‘Beverly Gray at the World's Fair,’ was not picked up by Grosset & Dunlap as the publisher’s felt the ‘World Fair” theme dated the book too much. This title therefore today has become extremely hard to find, highly collectable and expensive to purchase an original version of in good condition. Volumes 7 and 8, were re-numbered accordingly in the reissue by Grosset & Dunlap. The removal of ‘Beverly Gray at the World's Fair' from the series meant that vital information to the continuity of the series was missing which author Clair Blank was said to not be happy about. The books however are able to be read in any order.
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