Authors and Books
for Children

Connie Blair: The Quest for a Colorful Career

Connie Blair is different. Not a nurse or a flight attendant--no stereotypically feminine career for her!--or a college girl or an FBI wife or a gadabout in a blue roadster, Connie's following another path. This cool blond is a proud junior businesswoman at Reid and Renshaw, determined to score in the advertising game. She's clever and ambitious, and she's going to climb that ladder of success--and in her spare time, just for good measure, she'll breezily solve a passel of pesky mysteries, too.

Connie Blair is different. She's a loner--no gaggle of girlfriends, no sidekicks, no steady boyfriends, just a forgettable family puttering away at their dinky hardware store back in small-town Meadowbrook while she has the bright lights of Philadelphia shining in her big brown eyes.


Though Connie shares an apartment with her mother's younger sister--also a career woman--Aunt Bet is but a blip on the radar screen, neither authoritative mother figure nor bosom buddy. Connie has a look-alike twin, Kit, who pops in and out of Connie's mysteries, but Kit, timid and content with small-town dreams and a small-town life, pales in comparison to glamorous Connie and seems to function as little more than an occasional foil. The only other continuing female presence of any consequence in Connie's life is Georgia Cameron, an older coworker at the ad agency, who is Connie's mentor and role model--and who, perhaps significantly, eventually tosses her career for marriage, and is never heard from again. (Connie's reaction is to wonder if Georgia's departure might mean a promotion for Connie; it does.)

Connie's creator, Betty Cavanna, was already a respected and popular author of novels for adolescent girls (Going on Sixteen, a classic about a girl and her love for a dog, was published in 1946) when she began writing the Connie Blair series in 1948, under the pen name Betsy Allen. (For more information about Betty Cavanna, see Betty Cavanna: For Girls Going on Sixteen.) The series lasted ten years and twelve books; as the book jackets proclaimed, "You can identify A Connie Blair Mystery at a glance because a color is always featured in the title."

The series begins with seventeen-year-old Connie, having sparkled at a local fashion show, being invited to Philadelphia for the summer to model teen fashions at the department store where Aunt Bet is a stylist. Connie promptly manages to find a mystery and to be bashed on the head (both of which happen to her with alarming regularity), but perseveres and clears her aunt of suspicion of theft in The Clue in Blue.

In the next book, The Riddle in Red, Connie really hops onto the career ladder, starting out as a receptionist at the Reid and Renshaw Philadelphia-based ad agency; in subsequent volumes, Connie goes to art school at night to study illustration (Puzzle in Purple) and gradually assumes greater responsibilities at the agency.

For example, early on she accompanies Georgia to New Mexico (The Secret of Black Cat Gulch) and Bermuda (The Green Island Mystery) in a very junior capacity. Later, in The Yellow Warning, she's moved up and efficiently juggles the details of a photo shoot on location; in The Gray Menace, she's on her own in Atlantic City to handle publicity for a cooking contest; and in The Mystery of the Ruby Queens, she's working independently on an important art project.

Connie also travels to Florida (The Brown Satchel Mystery) and the Caribbean (Peril in Pink) on business; mysteries follow her everywhere, even when she and Kit vacation in Newport, Rhode Island (The Ghost Wore White), and Mexico (The Silver Secret).

Dedication to her job and a willingness to accept rules are perhaps Connie's defining characteristics; she is not nearly as colorful as the titles of her adventures. For example, Connie gets her ad agency job after the previous receptionist is fired for failing to use a client's brand of cosmetics; though Connie is sorry, she feels the firing was justified: "Her sympathy for Ellen [the receptionist] did not obscure the fact that there was justice in the agency's action" (The Riddle in Red, p. 25). When a valuable fur coat is lost during a photo shoot at the zoo when a gorilla escapes its cage, causing a panic, Connie conscientiously assumes responsibility. She repeatedly shows a willingness to put her job ahead of her personal life (in both The Secret of Black Cat Gulch and The Silver Secret she unhesitatingly allows last-minute business assignments to interrupt vacation plans).

Like many other series heroines, Connie claims to be torn between wanting to remain cozily in the family nest and wanting to experience romance and high adventure. But Connie Blair is different. With her, the expressions of longing for home seem rather hollow and perfunctory: nothing's going to keep this young sophisticate from wholeheartedly embracing the glamorous life.