Girl Sleuth (37 page)

As pop psychology took off, the language of self-awareness and self-fulfillment that came to be a hallmark of the 1970s permeated the ever-proliferating examinations of Nancy, many of
which were injected with pseudo-Freudian theories to boot. Even the Syndicate got on the bandwagon. “Psychologists say that Nancy Drew provides a perfect release for pre-teen girls,” Andy Svenson told one reporter cheerfully. A sociologist at UC San Francisco thought that her success was due to the fact that “she's an atypical girl, an adventurous girl who could somehow compete with a boy and not upset the sexual role definitions.” He also thought, however, that no small amount of nostalgia was fueling her revival. “We sense things are changing very quickly,” he told
McCall's
magazine, “and traditional values are being challenged. When this happens, one looks inward to anchoring points for some kind of stability.” Nancy as anchor: It must have made sense to the group of Nancy Drew–loving adults who answered an ad in a California newspaper and met for a “Nancy Drew Circle” to discuss their favorite sleuth. In addition to husbands who were dragged to the event by their “N.D. Freak” wives, there was a woman who worked for the local telephone company who confessed to the
San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle:
“You can really get into her character. I traveled through Canada on a vacation, signing myself Nancy Drew.” There was also a more sobering story about the power of the girl detective. “‘In Hungary, I was in the resistance to the war,' Gisele Chobaji told the group. ‘We couldn't endure all we had to if we couldn't read something beyond realism. Our two favorites were Nancy Drew and the Agatha Christie books, we read one a day in the bomb shelters.'” In another article, yet one more former obsessive gushed: “Is it possible that there breathes somewhere a female between the ages of nine and 49 who doesn't know Nancy Drew?” Nancy was like the cool girl next door, and she was just modern enough to get away with it. “I wasn't thinking about women's liberation when I wrote the books,” Harriet told this
same reporter. “I've never thought of myself as a women's libber but I do believe that women have brains. Nothing makes me angrier than to have my intelligence insulted.”

Given this statement and the nature of the press coverage of Nancy, the Syndicate's big idea for 1973 seemed woefully out of step with the times.
The Nancy Drew Cookbook: Clues to Good Cooking
was full of quaint recipes with a secret included in each one (“
A DETECTIVE NEEDS ENERGY
: Add more protein to your cake by mixing ½ cup of finely chopped pecans to the maple sugar mixture”) seemed like a thing of the past before it even hit bookshelves. With page after page of kitschy dishes named after Nancy's various mysteries, like Crumbling Wall Coffee Cake, Tolling Bell Tuna Rolls, Mysterious Letter Chili, and a host of others, it almost seemed designed to infuriate feminists who had taken up the sleuth with a vengeance. Young fans bought the book, but press reactions ran the gamut from politely amused to outright enraged. Fortunately for Grosset and the Syndicate, as one reviewer noted, “There are some books that need no reviews to insure their success. This is one of them. If only one per cent of Miss Keene's readers buy this book, she'll sell millions of copies.”

Other pieces were less kind, harping on the throwback nature of a cookbook for girls in a time of social change for woman. “People are always asking me if Nancy is a ‘women's libber' [Mrs. Adams] confided, sounding a little weary of the notion,” the
New York Daily News
reported. “‘I suppose,' and here she brightened, ‘that Nancy was ahead of her time.' In the same breath, though, Mrs. Adams refuses to concede that Nancy might lose any analytical powers by putting on an apron.” No doubt when she received her copy of the article, Harriet also refused to admit the implications of the fact that it ran on the same page of the
Daily
News
as a story about women at MIT demanding that the prestigious university admit even more women.

And then there was
Ms.,
which ran a first-person essay about Nancy Drew and her culinary adventures that not only established her—in her original form—even more firmly in the feminist pantheon, but took Grosset & Dunlap to task for its “recent innovations.” The writer did not like the revisions, and she liked the cookbook even less. “Even though Nancy Drew was sixteen and I was only nine, I knew she and I were kindred spirits,” the writer rhapsodized as she looked back on her childhood sleuthing exploits investigating a suspicious geography teacher. “I remember Nancy the intelligent, go-getting detective.” Distressed about
Clues to Good Cooking,
which she believed threatened Nancy's “feminist value,” the author went straight to the source, whom she referred to, of course, as “Ms.” Adams. There, she learned that “Harriet Adams says she would much rather write a Nancy Drew detective guide.”

This was, in no uncertain terms, untrue. Though Harriet had balked at a sewing book and one other offshoot of the cookbook, original plans for the
Clues to Good Cooking
had included further volumes “on cookies and candies, then perhaps on other specialties.” It was only after years of effort on the part of others, and, perhaps, the subtle force of a friendly memo from a bookseller in Charlotte, North Carolina, that she decided to put Nancy Drew in the kind of book she had previously associated only with the Hardy Boys. “I think the
NANCY DREW COOKBOOK
is a cute idea and we are selling them here in Charlotte,” the writer, who was a man, no less, began. “But I also think, from women's liberation point of view, that we may be relegating the famous girl detective to the kitchen.”

 

I feel that a better selling book would be a Nancy Drew Detective Handbook type of project. I mention this because of the great increase in women in police work. In the future this country may have as many women as men in police departments. Such a Nancy Drew Handbook could be different from the Hardy Boys' Handbook because you could use world-wide situations. In fact a chapter on Interpol would be highly interesting.

Some people might argue that girls who read the Hardys would buy the
HARDY BOYS' DETECTIVE HANDBOOK,
but the overwhelming number of girls who peruse the Nancy Drew section of my bookshop indicate to me that a Nancy Drew Detective Manual could sell equally as well, and maybe better than the Hardys.

If you can excuse me for making a title suggestion how about “How To Become A Girl Detective.
”

 

Though a second version of
The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook
had gone to press at the same time as
The Nancy Drew Cookbook,
it would take until 1979 for Harriet and the Syndicate staff to realize the wisdom of this suggestion.
The Nancy Drew Sleuth Book: Clues to Good Sleuthing
was finally released that year, and on the back cover, the real appeal of Nancy Drew was acknowledged at last: “Every reader of the
NANCY DREW MYSTERY STORIES
has wished at some time that she, too, could solve a mystery. This is now possible.”

13

B
Y THE LATE
1970s, Harriet had taken to referring to Nancy Drew as her daughter in interviews, and the sleuth had become Harriet's way of communicating her values to the world at large. She was as protective of Nancy's image as she was of her own, whether it was in new titles or a revision that was still being worked over. “I feel you overstepped your position in trying to revamp Nancy's character,” she wrote to her old nemesis at Grosset, Anne Hagan, in 1972. “She is not all those dreadful things you accuse her of and in many instances you have actually wanted to make her negative.” The following year, she was incensed on her “child's” behalf yet again: “Anne, are your remarks intended to mend story holes or do you get some sadistic fun out of downgrading and offending me? It will take me a long time to live down the remark ‘Nancy sounds like a nasty female.'” She was even more distressed about the revisions to
The Clue in the Crumbling Wall:
“I must tell you quite frankly that you cause me
a great deal of unnecessary work, which brings my creation of a new story to an abrupt halt. There are hundreds of unwarranted word changes which are apparently whims on your part, like ‘peer out' to ‘look out.' What bothers me even more is your supposition that you, not I, know what Nancy, Mr. Drew, et al. would say or do, like deleting Nancy's lovely gesture of putting an arm around an elderly woman who has just done the young detective a great favor. In the future will you please stick to the functions of an editor and not try steering my fictional family into a non–Carolyn Keene direction.”

But if Harriet thought Nancy's treatment by Grosset & Dunlap was rough, she was in for a big surprise. By allowing her beloved detective to move into the cultural mainstream as a symbol to girls and women everywhere, Harriet had unwittingly opened her up to the so-called highest praise of all: imitation—or, rather, parody. It's not difficult to imagine how Harriet must have felt in the summer of 1974, when that bastion of foul-mouthed humor,
National Lampoon
magazine, decided to set its sights on Nancy in the June “Pubescence” issue. Along with ads for “I am not a crook” Nixon watches ($19.95 apiece) and features ranging from “VD Comics” to “Masturbation Foto Funnies” appeared “The Case of the Missing Heiress,” in which Nancy Drew and Patty Hearst meet up. Hearst, still on the run with the Symbionese Liberation Army after her kidnapping some months before and a spectacular robbery at a Sacramento bank, had recently made headlines yet again by participating in a shootout at a sporting goods store. In the
Lampoon
version, Nancy was called in to deduce the identity of Hearst's kidnapper, who turned out to be not the SLA but her own newspaper magnate father. The SLA got involved in the plot regardless, trying to kill Nancy along the way by giving her an overdose of Midol, the
over-the-counter remedy for menstrual cramps. Full of racial epithets and outrageous situations, the story wound down with a gentle mockery of the teen sleuth's propensity for emerging unscathed from any situation.

 

“There's still one thing I don't understand,” Bess Marvin called from the rumble seat as they motored east for River Heights . . . “When the SLA gave you that fatal overdose of Midol, how come you still could set the fire and escape without being knocked out?” “That's still a real puzzler,” Nancy laughed pertly. “I still haven't been able to figure that out for myself!” With a chorus of appreciative chuckles, Nancy and her chums sped merrily into the darkening landscape, little knowing that Nancy's next adventure,
The Secret of the Fatal Motoring Mishap,
would solve more than a few mysteries.

 

Depending on how you thought of it, Nancy had either scraped rock bottom or reached the very height of popular culture. But when the
New York Times Magazine
ran another parody, “The Real Nancy Drew,” in October of the following year, Harriet could not keep quiet. The piece, which ran as a mock interview with an aged Nancy, did everything from imply that the sleuth had grown up to be a lonely old maid (“Old age has its compensations and royalties,” she answers jauntily to that question) to state outright that George was a lesbian. “George didn't come clean with me, pretending she was a tomboy, when actually she was a . . . Q: She didn't come out of the closet? A: Kept it locked and threw away the key.” It was too much for Harriet to bear. She wrote a letter to the
Times,
berating them for violating their own standards as well as hers, and for “belittling and reversing the principal characters in this famous series (which I write under the name Caroline [sic] Keene) with innuendoes of sex
and pornography. Surely the millions of loyal Nancy Drew fans of all ages will find this travesty most distasteful.” In her reply, the parody's author simply piled on more. “I did not tell all,” she wrote. “Now that my back is up against the haunted house, I feel it is my duty to set the record straight . . . it was Nancy Drew who backed Calvin Coolidge all the way, who was the first woman to wear a tube dress in the jungle in order to be more feminine, who photographed Bomba the Jungle Boy for
Life
magazine (making him an overnight sensation), who personally slapped Bertrand Russell to teach him that infidelity doesn't pay.” Nancy had officially gone from private to public property.

As much as the besmirching of her prized “daughter” bothered Harriet, it was good for business. By 1976 sales of the series had been increasing steadily for four years, reversing the gradual drop-off that had been happening since the late 1950s. “Nobody's sure why,” one reporter wrote. “Except mothers who grew up with the books now seem to be buying them for their daughters.” Often these mothers were unaware that the books had been revised, but in any case the new Nancy seemed to be exciting enough for the younger set. The nostalgia factor was still running high, too, as women's libbers fell more in love with Nancy than ever. “In the Drew books, there were mysteries to be solved and she solved them,” the president of NOW told the
Philadelphia Inquirer.
“[Most juvenile heroines] never did anything. I think the idea that she may have had a lot to do with liberating women is probably the case.” A former staffer at
Ms.
opined that “Nancy Drew, whose exploits have filled the contents of 50 books, is one heroine who qualifies in many ways as a role model for young feminists,” leaving the reporter on the story to conclude that “her daring, self-confident, competent personality may be increasingly attractive to today's ‘new woman'—and today's children.”