Prologue of the book "Kelly's Mysteries"

The literary genre known as Girl Detective is characterized by the fact that it's primarily aimed at a teenage audience. The content of these works is usually limited by the age of the main character: the youngest ones solve thefts, people vanishing who are eventually found, or dedicate themselves to finding lost wills; the older ones, on the other hand, can solve homicides or kidnappings. Personally, I would not categorize Miss Madelyn Mack, a character created in 1909 by Hugo Cosgro Weir as a representative of this genre, since the term has been defined in favor of the youth or extreme youth of those who are part of this stream; therefore, 16-year-old Phoebe Daring, created by L. Frank Baum, who appears in The Daring Twins: A Story for Young Folk (1911), would be the first of this literary genre, followed by high society teenager Violet Strange, created by Anna Katherine Green, who stars in the collection of short stories The Golden Slipper: And Other Problems for Violet Strange (1915). This collection is organized into nine "problems," as the title suggests, which are merely exercises in deduction, four of them with a small phrase added to the title, for example, the segment titled Problem Two: The second bullet – You must see her. This segment is also the first in which a Girl Detective is involved in a homicide investigation, although she is not responsible for finding the killer.

Nancy Drew, conceived in 1930 by Edward Stratemeyer, who outlined the plot of the first three novels in the series to be put on paper by Mildred Wirt under the collective pseudonym of Carolyn Keene, was originally 16 years old, daring, drove a blue convertible and at times was even rough. Stratemeyer died that same year; in 1953 they changed the character’s hair color, in 1959 they raised her age to 18 and finally the publisher decided that the first stories should be rewritten, softening the detective’s personality. By the way, Nancy Drew was the only Girl Detective to come to Peru to solve a mystery in The Clue in the Crossword Cypher (1961) after a young Lima woman, Carla Ponce, invited her to go to South America after showing her a mysterious wooden plaque, on a journey that takes them from Carla’s father’s home in Lima, a mansion typical of a landowner, to entering the Larco Herrera Museum in search of clues. 

Thus, we come to Trixie Belden, who appeared in 1948 at the hand of Julie Campbell Tatham. This detective was the youngest to star in a series of mystery books as she was only 13 years old in Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion. This series, initially clearly aimed at a female teenage audience, was published until 1986. At one point in the series, the author decided to expand her possibilities by joining her with a group of boys called “The Bob-Whites of the Glen” who were helpful to her, even in her first steps in romance. Only the first six books were written by Campbell, with the series being continued by ghostwriters under the collective pseudonym of Kathryn Kenny.

After reading a few books and watching a few TV shows, the detective Kelly Sailor who is the focus of this book came into being. These reviews helped me define, above all, the time period in which her stories are set. I decided that the year 1986 was ideal since there was no internet, no accessible cell phones like now, no fully developed DNA tests, no laptops, that is, none of what appears in current detective series where agents seem more like computer experts than anything else. In 1986, when someone was on the street and wanted to make a phone call they had to look for a booth or a coin phone in some business; and people had to use paper to leave a message when they wished to. Thus, the time forces the young woman to solve things based on her deduction skills. Although it's never said what happened to her father, her stepfather is a homicide lieutenant, a profession similar to that of Ellery Queen’s father, a detective created by Frederick Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee in 1929.

As for her age, I decided to lower it compared to most other members of the genre. Kelly Sailor is 14 years old and, despite her young age, she only solves murders. Likewise, the stories are not of the whodunit type (“who did it”), that is, in which the killer is not known until his identity is revealed after evaluating a series of clues. In the stories that make up this book, it is known who the culprit is from the beginning and in most cases the crime is also graphically depicted. This type of construction is known as howtocatchem (how to catch him or them). There are early works of this type by authors such as Anthony Berkeley Cox or Freeman Wheelis Croft, but the most popular example is in the television series Columbo, a character created by Richard Levinson and William Link and played by Peter Falk in two television pilots released in 1968 and 1971 and from that year on in a regular series for NBC until 1978, returning on ABC in 1989 through specials, with the last one being broadcast in 2003.

As for the writing style, I've taken certain liberty that other people would not when writing juvenile literature. There may not be curses in the text, but there are dialogues that can be questionable by people who have read some similar publications. I will say this: the champions of political correctness and other pearls of censorship can get as offended as they want. And I take the opportunity to make two things clear: first, if I had to give an age rating to this volume it would be +13, and second, everything I have written in my life is fantasy. Because literary realism was never my thing, I've never tried it, and when I write fantasy, I approach the stories in the most creative way that comes to mind. And that's enough for me.

The intention of writing these first three stories of a series of seven that will make up the universe of Kelly Sailor is to show that juvenile literature can be done with a language and an approach that differs from the rest of the examples in most features. The carefree attitude, the controversial dialogues, the entanglements, the references to the eighties are traits that cannot be replaced. In her stories, both in these ones and in the ones to come, Kelly Sailor’s path will remain unchanged, devoid of external influences or any other impediment that strives to change her way of being or acting in any manner.