Under the Magnifying Glass

Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her by Melanie Rehak


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Wha-at? You mean there was no Carolyn Keene? As a child I devoured the Nancy Drew books, like most girls, re-reading them and demanding more (to my mother's horror - she wanted me to go to a library and get them, but how could you read and re-read as I did with books if they weren't right there on your shelf? I have solved this problem in adulthood by working in libraries!). I remember hearing that there was a woman behind them, or maybe a man who started it and his wife (turned out to be his daughter) who ground them out under the name of Keene. After that I lost track of the whos and wheres and now have learned that there was a hard-writing, tough woman reporter in the midwest who did the fleshing out of book outlines provided. The syndicate then edited them or suggested edits.
This book is certainly more than one would want to know about the making of Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and other older series books. I guess you could then call it "thorough." It's disheartening to read about family squabbles over money when your associations with these books hearken to mythologies like the Easter Bunny. Harriet's sister Edna married and bowed out of the day-to-day running of the syndicate, but managed to pinch pennies from a distance. Having had a sister, I can just imagine ...
I was also right in preferring the oldest versions, the blue books with the orange print on the outside. Later editions of Nancy Drew were dumbed down, eviscerated for political correctness, and even later reduced to advertising for the shallowest of consumerism. The love of the oldest versions led me to historical fiction and period mysteries. I now prefer a little more distance in my reading. Also, the educational bits in the books (which I actually noticed as a child reader and appreciated, "Oh! I'm learning something, too!") were intentional insertions.
Disdain for series literature started early and still exists, but the nay-sayers still don't learn the lesson: kids enjoy reading them, want to read them, and they actually help young readers develop the fluidity of reading, which prepares kids for the meatier stuff they will also have to read. Whether they go on to enjoy more serious "litticher" later is up to them, but they will already be hooked on the printed word.
The book climaxes in a courtroom smack-down (if the meeting of the two long-separated, elderly ladies can be so described) when the original writer (Mildred Wirt Benson) and the Stratemeyer Syndicate head (Harriet Stratemeyer Adams) face off while Harriet attempts to defend her split from Grosset and Dunlap. They each believed themselves to be the originator, the writer of the Nancy Drew stories. Harriet went so far as to refer to Nancy as her daughter. Grosset and Dunlap had stupidly mined the Syndicate's catalog and resisted sharing even a little bit more of the gold with the Syndicate. Harriet left them for a better deal with Simon & Schuster (who virtually raped and pillaged the Nancy Drew franchise after Harriet's death, relentlessly launching watered-down series after watered-down series and never achieved the same 50 year success of the originals).
The "original" Nancy Drew series (as well as Hardy Boys) have been published in facsimile form by Applewood Books, and Good on 'em!
Long live the Nancy Drew in all of us, the real one, the one that captured our hearts in our youth, the time when our hearts were there for the taking.

View all my reviews >>