Come Fly with Me
The Vicki Barr Stewardess Series
Ah, Vicki Barr.
No one, it seems, really remembers her anymore—the generic default for kids’ mystery series is always Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys—but Vicki was ahead of her time in many ways. It’s a shame the series never took off the way, say Nancy Drew, did.
Vicki was another one of the series for kids that Grosset & Dunlap did in the mid-1900’s, created by the Stratemeyer Syndicate (who did a shit ton of these series) and written primarily by two different women: Helen Wells and Julie Tatham (who also, as Julie Campbell, created the Trixie Belden series), and they were a lot of fun. I discovered Vicki on that same back table in my fourth grade class that introduced me first to Nancy Drew and then to the Dana Girls; the second Vicki book, Vicki Finds the Answer, was also on that table.
There were also a lot of Vicki books on that 39 cent table at Goldblatt’s Department Store, where I picked up The Hidden Valley Mystery and The Brass Idol Mystery. I collected them over the years, from thrift stores, swap meets, and later eBay—but many of them I was never able to read, because I didn’t have time and had so much else to read.
One of the things I appreciated the most about Vicki was that she actually had a job. She needed parental permission to apply and go to stewardess school, after which she went to work for Federal Airlines, and almost every route she flew from thereon out ended up with her getting wrapped up in some kind of mystery. She loved being a stewardess (yes, sexist and outdated title, but back then, that’s what they were called), and loved flying; so much so that she even got her own small craft pilot’s license and flew herself around when it was necessary, which I also thought was incredibly cool and forward thinking of the series. Talk about inspiring young girls! (Another reason I enjoyed the Cherry Ames nurse series—again, she had a career and was focused on it.) Nancy Drew might have been a privileged lawyer’s daughter who didn’t go to college and instead went around solving mysteries, but Vicki earned her own money, had an apartment she shared with other stewardesses, and often visited her beloved family in Fairview, Illinois—a short train ride from Chicago.
I also liked Vicki because she actually tracked down clues and solved mysteries using her brain, rather than luck or coincidence, which so often seemed the case with Nancy Drew (no shade, I collected and have read all the Nancy series, but it was never really my favorite).
So, when I got sick and my ability to focus on reading seemed to be slipping, I decided to refresh my brain by reading kids’ series books that I have but had yet to read…and The Silver Ring Mystery, one of the later books in the series, happened to be on deck after I finished that execrable Dana Girls’ Mystery at the Crossroads.
“That’s why,” Vicki explained to her family, “the Electra is so challenging. Mary Carter warned us stewardesses, while she was retraining us for the Electra, that this beauty flies so fast there’s hardly time to get all our jobs done.”
“You mean it’s a hard assignment, don’t you?” said Ginny. She was fourteen, and Vicki’s younger sister.
Their mother, Betty Barr, said, “I’m sure if I had your job on a et-prop—or is it a jet? Which is it, Lewis?”
The Electra was a Lockheed plane that actually existed; one of the most interesting (to me) things about the Vicki Barr series was that it originated when planes were small and used propellers, flying wasn’t common, and yet as the book series continued, air travel continued to advance and change; by the time of the last volume, The Brass Idol Mystery, Vicki had moved on to international flights—but the series was cancelled before it could really start getting fun with her getting involved with international espionage or smuggling or the antiquities black market. I’ve always thought it might be interesting to write a series with a flight attendant as the amateur detective, and that has everything to do with loving this series. (Chris Bohjalian did The Flight Attendant, which became the Kaley Cuoco television series; but I don’t think that rules out a series.)
And as a former airline employee, I have often made characters airline employees over the years.
Vicki loved her job, and was always pleasant and polite to all of her passengers, especially those who drag her into a mystery. On her first Electra flight, an older male passenger who was kind of rude has a medical issue, and Vicki helps save him. He and his wife then proceed to drag Vicki into a common kids’ series mystery: they want her to help find their granddaughter, whom they’ve never seen since they felt her mother married beneath her and they cut her off. Now older (they are also rich), they want to reconnect and make things right. They have a lawyer looking for her, but Vicki agrees to help—and as she starts looking around San Francisco, she begins to wonder what the fuck the lawyer was actually doing; because she finds out a lot of information that he didn’t have or share. He of course is crooked and tries to pass off an imposter as the granddaughter (another trope in kids’ mysteries), but Vicki finds the real young woman and all’s well that ends well.
The Vicki books, while a bit dated (obviously; they haven’t been called stewardesses since the 1970s, have they?), are actually very well written, and Vicki never comes across as tiresome as Nancy Drew sometimes does. It’s a shame these books weren’t more popular; but I kind of feel like the series about young women with careers (there was also Cherry Ames the nurse—which was written by the same authors—along with Ginny Gordon, Connie Blair and several others) were, while encouraging girls to consider careers, were a little sexist because those careers were often ones seen as “female” by the society into which the books were published: stewardesses, models, actresses, nurses, etc. While Vicki continued progressing in her career as a “stewardess,” moving eventually to Worldwide Airlines as an international flight attendant (and thus having more exotic style locales in the final three books), even learning how to fly herself…the others seemed content with their jobs and not very ambitious. Vicki’s ambitions, of course, were countered by her incredible sweetness, dedication to her job, and an overwhelming kindness paired with a sincere desire to help people, was kind of advanced for the postwar time period the books were written and published (the first in 1947, the last in 1964).
A shame these books are lost to time.