Authors and Books
for Children

Clair Blank: Beverly Gray's Adventures in Career Land

Clair Blank was only nineteen years old and barely out of a Philadelphia high school when she launched the long-running, popular Beverly Gray College Mystery series, starring one of the first "career girl" sleuths.

Clarissa Mabel Blank was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on August 5, 1915, and lived there until her family moved to Philadelphia ten years later. She graduated from high school with honors and attended Pierce Business College.


Blank was only one year out of high school when children's publisher A. L. Burt Company accepted her manuscript for Beverly Gray, Freshman; the publisher did ask her to lengthen her manuscript from forty-one thousand to fifty thousand words and gave her only a few months to deliver three additional fifty-thousand-word Beverly Gray stories: Beverly Gray, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior. For these first four books, all published in 1934, Blank received $175 each, Burt's standard payment for all rights.

Industriously settling in for a long series, Blank penned two more Beverly Gray books in 1935. In 1936 she wrote one new Beverly Gray book and three books in a new series: the Adventure Girls, which had limited success, and did not continue beyond those three volumes. (Despite Blank's track record with Beverly Gray, her publisher offered her a pay cut to only $150 each for the Adventure Girls books!) From 1937 through 1955, Blank turned out one new Beverly Gray book each year, for a total of twenty-six volumes.

Clair Blank's Beverly Gray was one of the first "career girl" sleuths, a forerunner of such notables as nurse Cherry Ames, flight attendants Vicki Barr and Shirley Flight, reporter Sally Baxter, and advertising copywriter Connie Blair. After college, Beverly becomes a reporter and novelist in New York City, sharing a Greenwich Village apartment with three other career-minded young women. She regularly encounters mystery, romance, and adventure in a series of fast-paced, melodramatic stories, with such titles as Beverly Gray on a Treasure Hunt, Beverly Gray's Island Mystery, and Beverly Gray's Scoop. Though she does have a fiancé, one Larry Owens, Beverly has no plans ever to abandon her writing.

While she was writing Beverly Gray stories, Blank also worked as a typist for a Philadelphia pipeline company. When World War II began, she became a volunteer driver for army officers on leave. She married George E. Moyer in 1943 and quit her secretarial job in 1946; her first son was born in 1947, and a second son was born in 1953.

Clair Blank died in Philadelphia on August 15, 1965, just ten days after celebrating her fiftieth birthday.