Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her
In the introduction to her recent book Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her Melanie Rehak writes, “Grab your magnifying glass, because this is a mystery story.” She too is right, but not in the way she means. The mystery is why this book was published.
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She’s even inspired parodies–the surest sign of ubiquity. There’s Mabel Maney’s 1993 The Case of the Not-So-Nice Nurse, in which Nancy Clue makes love at first sight with Cherry Aimless in a San Francisco motel. (Maney also wrote A Ghost in the Closet, a Hardly Boys mystery.) In Chelsea Cain’s novel Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, published this spring, Nancy ages, drinks and drives, and falls for a Hardy. In the often-staged 1978 play The Clue in the Old Birdbath (which ran for six months at Stage Left in 1993) the characters drop double entendres by the pound. “Jeepers! Let’s go for some tramps in the wood,” Tansy True suggests.
Anyway, what Rehak means by her reference to mystery is that no one’s delved into the true, secret history of the women behind the 56 original Nancy Drew adventures, Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. You may recollect a long obituary a few years ago for an intrepid nonagenarian columnist for an Ohio paper who was the author of the Drew books. That was Mildred, the first person to write under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. Rehak thinks we need to know more. We need to know about the chautauqua assembly in Mildred’s native Ladora, Iowa. We need to know her father’s favorite quote, read the headlines of the articles she wrote for the Daily Iowan as a student, read her application letter and miscellaneous other letters she exchanged with her employers. We need to know that–my goodness!–she was pregnant while pounding out some of Nancy’s adventures and never mentioned it. We need to know as much as possible, because, because–because the mountain of paper is there! As a friend once told me, anyone’s life is interesting if you know how to cut. Rehak doesn’t.
But larger cultural lessons aren’t the concern of Rehak, who’s peering through her magnifying glass at minutiae. She seems to have taken on her subject with a light heart, writing in the introduction about the pleasure she took in the mysteries as a child, reading them by the gleam of the hallway light outside her bedroom. She started with “alluring yellow [book] spines,” then apparently tumbled into the archives and was overwhelmed. That damned magnifying glass!
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