Women's Wednesday: Nancy Drew Super Sleuth

The day of women, both real and fictional, in literature.

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Original 1930 cover of the first Nancy Drew

I discovered Nancy in the fourth grade. I was in heaven. Up to that time I was reading the Bobbsey Twins for my mystery fix, but Nancy was better. She was eighteen, had her own car, and didn't need parents to take her anywhere. She also had a boyfriend who was around when she needed him but never got in her way.

She also didn't have a job. She didn't need one because unlimited money and she needed the time to solve mysteries.

Nancy didn't grow older. She stayed the same age, and stayed single. And while Nancy never aged, the

world around her did. Nancy Drew was conceived by publisher Edward Stratemeyer and first made her appearance in 1930. Stratemeyer was also the brain behind other notable detective series, like The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, The Bobbsey Twins, and the Dana Girls. You can recognize these books by their spines and covers. Each one had a different color. Hardy Boys was blue, Tom Swift was orange, The Bobbsey Twins were purple, The Dana Girls were white, and Nancy was yellow. This was the result of a design overhaul in the 60's which eliminated the

Early blue tweed edition without the dust jacket.

dust covers. Interestingly Judy Bolton has the same look about it with a spine of olive green but it was not part of Edwards syndicate. I have some earlier Nancy Drews that are in a dark blue tweed style cover. Think manufactured boy bands of the 90's and you have the idea of what happened here. Unlike most books where the writer comes up with the plot, characters, story, and writes it, Edward hired writers to write these books following an outline and they were published under one name.

The Nancy Drew series was written with the pen name of Carolyn Keene although Mildred Wirt Benson is the writer that started it off for Nancy and created the character. It's thanks to Mildred that the character is spunkier than what they wanted. But Mildred was right. Girls needed a spunky independent character. Although to be fair, Nancy lived at home with her dad, had a housekeeper, and didn't pay her own way, go to college, or have a job of any kind other than solving mysteries for free, so she wasn't as independent as we expect young women to be. She was independent in the way that she came and went as she pleased, traveled, and did things without asking permission and often alone. Nancy was a new kind of character for girls, and girls loved her. Nancy was the predecessor for other girl detectives like Judy Bolton, Trixie Beldon, and any famous girl star in the 50's. We might even look at Nancy as an embryo for the Harry Potter series. During the design overhaul some of the books were rewritten to update things on the inside.

For instance, instead of a blue roadster, she has a blue convertible. The covers were updated to reflect the fashions of that time. There were other minor changes that didn't change the story line. Nancy is always being updated. There are new Nancy book series. In the 70's there was the Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries tv show. Initially they would trade off weeks, but the Hardy Boys had more likeable actors and appealed to teenage girls so they kind of took over. Frankly, although I preferred reading Nancy, I liked watching Frank and Joe better. You can currently watch these full episodes on youtube. There have been Nancy Drew movies - all updated to the time they were made. And Nancy Drew computer games. Now the makers of Riverdale, which is a totally not version of The Archies, have also done something to Nancy. She's now a waitress and her mystery is haunted. You can't watch these shows with your childhood in mind. You have to put that aside and look at them as entirely new creations otherwise it will drive you crazy with the amount of changes. What I would like to see is a tv series made of Nancy Drew set in the time when she initially appeared. A 1930's Nancy with running boards on her car and hats on her head and stories that follow the books. Throw in a dash of humor and I think that would be fun.

Oh, look! A 1939 movie of Nancy Drew.

Here's an episode from the 1977 series starring Pamela Sue Martin (although in the last episodes she was replaced by Janet Julian). It kept to the spirit of the books.

And here is the trailer for the new Nancy Drew which seems to bear no resemblance to the books other than she's an amateur detective named Nancy Drew.