KELLAND'S WOMEN OF WORLD WAR II MYSTERIES - INTRODUCTION: WOMEN IN THE WORKPLACE

WOMEN OF WORLD WAR II MYSTERIES INTRODUCTION

      "Bright and breezy mystery and romance." 

                                         --Kirkus Reviews (1943)

 

Not long after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and U.S. entry into the Second World War, the government realized it would need to draft so many able-bodied men that it would seriously deplete the country’s entire workforce, including entry-level labor, skilled trades, office staff and management. The only possible replacement was to be found in the ranks of the nation’s women. But for women to join the workforce, major changes would have to occur.

Traditionally characterized as an emotional and caregiving labor force—homemakers, mothers, nurses, teachers and the like—women would have to adopt

a whole new view of themselves and their capacities (as would men of them), and quickly. In a world without TV or internet, a radical revisioning of woman’s capabilities would have to be promulgated via radio, newspapers and magazines. So the U.S. government called together leading writers and journalists, asking them to help by printing and broadcasting stories, novels, and factual reports supporting the heretical notion that women could make great factory and office workers—and even run those factories and offices—without losing their “natural” urge to be homemakers, mothers, and wives.

This effort “to recruit women into the labor force,” as Nancy F. Cott writes in Women and War, was the “major propaganda campaign” directed toward American women during World War II. Thus, in the form of fiction and fact, the magazines and books of the era “devoted much space” to “encouraging women to enter male fields that were short of workers,” such as “manufacture of aircraft and electrical equipment, work in shipping, metal trades” and of course munitions. “To make war jobs look attractive … magazines published romances in which women who entered defense industries and found fulfillment in performing important work for the nation.” In such tales of romantic adventure, the heroines “were rewarded for their dedication to difficult jobs with admiration from their communities and love from desirable men.” These women “were praised for bravery, loyalty to soldiers, intelligence, steadfastness, and competence.”

As Cott and others have reported, this campaign began in the May 29, 1943 Saturday

Evening Post with a two-part kick-off: exploding off the cover, Norman Rockwell’s overpowering, goddess-proportioned painting of Rosie the Riveter in overalls, with a touch of lipstick and blush, a rivet gun balanced across her thighs, a look of unflappable nonchalance, the Stars and Stripes unfurled behind her, and a copy of Mein Kampf crushed beneath her feet. And, to her left, boxed text beckoned readers to discover the initial installment of “A New Kelland Serial—Heart on Her Sleeve, the story of a patriotic American college girl who steps up to run her father’s war plant; and when he is hospitalized by saboteurs...” the first novel written and published in response to the government’s request that “authors portray women war workers as enthusiastic defenders of democracy” and “bring out the spiritual satisfaction of serving the common cause,” and, we like to think, one of the best.

While in the prewar years Kelland typically contributed two or three novels per year to the Post, and one or two others to publications such as The American, Colliers, and Ladies Home Journal (in addition to a few dozen short stories), he became so consumed with war work that he produced only five novels and two short stories between 1942 and 1945. Four of the five novels (Heart on Her Sleeve, Murder for a Million, Alias Jane Smith, and Taxi! Taxi!) were written to fulfill the government request for stories that would inspire women to take up the jobs left empty by male recruits. So engrossed was Kelland in his war work, that it's likely he only wrote at all in order to answer his country's call for such stories.

Digital Parchment Press is proud to bring all four of these novels back into print as The

Women of World War II Mysteries. Only two were ever printed in the U.S. in book form (Heart on her Sleeve and Alias Jane Doe), while one (Murder for a Million) was issued only in the U.K. in a small hardcover edition, and none were ever reprinted in paperback—and one (Taxi! Taxi!) has never been published in book form at all (although it was a hit Saturday Evening Post serial), due to wartime paper shortages. This first-ever edition of Clarence Budington Kelland's quartet of mysteries portraying strong women answering the call to WWII homefront work is a treat for readers, offering a unique historical peek at the era—and at a massive recruitment campaign of cultural and literary importance—as seen through Kelland's signature style of romantic suspense.

In each novel, you will meet a woman who had been living out traditionally-proscribed “women’s” roles before the war, but found herself unexpectedly plunged by the conflict into situations requiring a quickly-learned array of new skills—running a plant, solving a mystery, starting a business, outwitting spies, taking over a highly competitive organization—and discovering within herself the wit, strength and resourcefulness needed to perform them as well as, or better than, any man.

THE WOMEN OF WORLD WAR II MYSTERIES 
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Heart on Her Sleeve (1942)

Murder for a Million (1943)

Alias Jane Smith (1944)

Taxi! Taxi! (1945)