Girl Sleuth (42 page)

The following year, Simon & Schuster gave the girl detective yet another push forward, but in an entirely different direction. The first title in the Nancy Drew on Campus series, in which Nancy leaves the cocoon of River Heights for Wilder University, told practically the whole story in four short words:
New Lives, New Loves.
The first press release left no doubt as to where the books were headed. “It's 65 years later . . . Will Nancy Drew finally break up with Ned Nickerson? Stay tuned . . .” On the back of
New Lives, New Loves,
was a special hotline number that readers
could call “to vote on Nancy and Ned's love life.” The books were less concerned with mystery than they were with college life. As one critic has written, “The classic Nancy Drew sleuth became Nancy Drew co-ed . . . Nancy's baffling mysteries of yesteryear became the baffling mystery of living life on her own away from the comfort of home and far away from the comfort of Ned.” The series took up everything from date rape to college loans and, in doing so, portrayed Nancy as an average girl who was more in search of a good time than an engrossing mystery.

No matter what Simon & Schuster did, though, everyone still seemed to prefer the version of the sleuth they had known as children, as a Washington, D.C., rock band called Tuscadero made clear in a 1995 song called “Nancy Drew.” Its lyrics recounted “the horror of discovering that your mom threw out your collection of the teenage sleuth's books.” “You write about what you know the best,” said the band's female guitarist and vocalist, “and I happen to know a lot about Nancy Drew books and jerky guys that I've dated.”

“Like hamburgers and Disney cartoons,” the
Boston Globe
pronounced, “Nancy Drew has entered global culture.” By the mid-nineties, it was more apparent than ever that Nancy Drew represented a certain eternal something to everyone who knew about her, and she remained reassuringly the same in the eyes of her fans. Referring to what it called “her quintessential ‘
Drewness,
'” the in-house guide to a Nancy television show filmed in Paris and broadcast in the United States in 1995 tried to pin down just what that something about Nancy was. “This quality is expressed in her wardrobe. She chooses clear, saturated colors that reflect her moral certainty. When Nancy wears green, it's not olive green or sea foam or celadon. It's
green.
” Even the furnishings in her TV apartment, the guide explained, would radiate “a
feeling of security; they have a timeless quality that is impossible to date . . . a sofa is a sofa . . . It has a pure design that reflects a sofa's essence, its truth. Visually, Nancy's world will make sense.” The outside world, on the other hand, “is a world of unsolved mysteries, a place filled with cold glaring light and turbulent disorder.” In short, the description finished off, “it can be described as a world without Drewness.”

None of the later versions of Nancy, either in print or on television, captured the popular imagination the way the original sleuth had. The Nancy Drew on Campus series lasted only three years, and the “lifestyle” that Simon & Schuster had hoped to promote under the River Heights, USA, label back in 1986 never took off. The
Nancy Drew Files
lasted for ten years, a respectable run but one that nonetheless didn't even come close to the first Nancy's more-than-fifty-year reign. Simon & Schuster's only enduring line was the Nancy Drew Notebooks for little girls, which were written, by necessity, without the loud, flashy plots and clothing and crushes that so marred their other attempts to revamp the sleuth. It was, and still is, the Stratemeyer Syndicate's Nancy who lives in the public imagination, in both her original and revised versions—the Nancy of moral certainty and neat, elegant actions. The one written by women who understood, in ways nobody else could, who she really was.

O
N THE AFTERNOON
of May 29, 2002, after handing in her column at the
Blade,
Mildred left the office by taxi for her home. Several hours later she was taken to Toledo Hospital, where she died that evening at the age of ninety-six. All across the country, obituaries heralded her—as they had heralded Harriet years ear-lier—as Carolyn Keene, the author of the Nancy Drew books. “Nancy Drew, girl sleuth extraordinaire: We loved her, we wanted to be her, we couldn't put her books down,” the
Washington Post's
tribute began. “The original Carolyn Keene—the first, and best, of the ghostwriters, the one who gave Nancy her personality and her keenness, her independence and her spunk—is exactly what we'd hope to find. Her name was Mildred Wirt Benson, and she died Tuesday night in Toledo.”

By the time she passed away, Mildred had confessed to Geoff Lapin, “Nancy Drew demands have about put me under.” She had been inundated with fan mail for the better part of a decade, and, having lost her eyesight, had resorted to signing a printed form thanking readers. (She had also taken to using a very large magnifying glass to read the text on her computer screen at work, a Nancy-like turn of events if ever there was one.) “It reached the point where, whenever we saw some hapless cameraman setting up light in the newsroom,” one of her colleagues recalled after she died, “we wondered only which network was here to interview her this time.”

In the end, her past with the Stratemeyer Syndicate became a burden, but Mildred never forgot why she had started writing children's books in the first place. Her final column, posthumously published, was about her love of reading and her admiration of public libraries, the very institutions that had both provided her with the detail and atmosphere that made many of her books so magical and provided so many young readers the chance to read to them.

“I
T'S HARD TO ACCEPT
that Nancy Drew is dead,” mourned one obituary writer. But she had it wrong. Though Mildred and Harriet are both gone, Nancy is anything but. She turned seventy-five
in April of 2005, and in preparation Simon & Schuster launched her into the world yet again. Written in the first person—Nancy talks more directly to us than ever—the new Nancy Drew Girl Detective series nonetheless harkens back to the old Nancy, the Nancy of Harriet and Mildred. “Long before
Charlie's Angels, Murder She Wrote
's Jessica Fletcher, and
CSI
's Catherine Willows, super-sleuth Nancy Drew was fighting crime and keeping the streets of River Heights safe,” the press materials that went out with the first book began. Though she now drives a hybrid car and solves crimes while doing things like competing in a bike race for charity, the sleuth has regained some of the spark she lost in the 1980s and '90s. “My friends tell me I'm always looking for trouble, but that's not really true,” she announces in
Without a Trace,
the first title in the new series. “It just seems to have a way of finding me.” She may be using a global positioning system, but she's still our Nancy. In her first new outing, she's late for a movie date with Ned while out on a case, and later she confides in us: “Ned's not into mysteries in the same way I am, but he's more than smart enough to follow along when I'm in full hypothesizing mode.” After the wild college years and the boy-crazy moments, Nancy's got her feet back on the ground again.

The cover design of the new books pays a respectful nod to the past, too—a cutout of Nancy's inquisitive eyes that runs across the top of each book comes from the cover of the 1950s edition of
The Secret of the Old Clock,
the revision of the title that started everything back in 1930. On Nancy's seventy-fifth anniversary, both the original version of
Old Clock
(in its Applewood Books edition) and the revised version are still selling well. In 2002 about 150,000 copies of Harriet's 1959
Secret of the Old Clock
were sold, which put it—outdated fashions, lingo, and all—among the top fifty children's books.

Vintage Nancy Drew books are not the only things that linger on from the past. Women today continue to face the same problems that Harriet and Mildred dealt with as they made their way through the twentieth century. The balance of home and work feels more off-kilter than ever, adequate child care is still unavailable, office culture has barely given an inch to women who want to have families without falling behind professionally, and it seems like rarely a year goes by without someone publishing a tome lamenting the lack of progress. Women still earn less than men, and they still feel—for the most part, anyway—that it's their job, not their husbands', to give up their careers in order to hold a family together.

Fortunately, Nancy Drew is still here, too, a guide for the ages. She and the rich, tumultuous lives of the women who created her remind us of the rewards of perseverance and the value of confidence. Thanks to Mildred and Harriet and the generations of women and girls who glimpsed in Nancy Drew a vision of what they might be someday, it doesn't look like the sleuth is going away anytime soon, which is a good thing. There are fighting days still ahead of us, and we're going to need her.

I
AM DEEPLY GRATEFUL
to The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and to Mel and Lois Tukman, without whose support my fellowship there would not have been possible. Many thanks to Pamela Leo, Amy Azzarito and Rebecca Federman, and to Peter Gay and Jean Strouse. Also at the library, thanks to Bill Stingone, Wayne Furman, and the entire staff of the Rare Books Reading Room. Janet Weaver and Karen Mason at the University of Iowa Women's Archives have been endlessly generous, as have David McCartney and the staff of the University of Iowa University Archives. In Marengo, Iowa, Eva Schmidt and the staff at the Iowa County Genealogy Society tracked down information that I could not have gotten anywhere else. At Wellesley, Jean Berry was immensely helpful, as were Nancy Hawkins and Mary Mackzum at the
Toledo Blade.
Thanks also to John Robinson Block, who graciously granted me permission to access the
Toledo Blade
Library. I am grateful to Sally Vallongo for permission to use her long interview with Mildred Benson, and to Richard Gallagher for sharing both his impressions of Harriet Adams and his interview with her from the 1970s. Carolyn Stewart Dyer was my host in Iowa City and a wonderful source of stories about Mildred Benson.

I was taken in without a second thought and with great kindness by a group of people who knew, and no doubt still know, far more than I do about various aspects of the Stratemeyer Syndicate and Nancy Drew, and who generously shared material with me: James Keeline, Deidre Johnson, Ilana Nash, and Geoff Lapin all added immensely to my research and my understanding of my subject. Jennifer Fisher, president of the Nancy Drew Sleuths, has been helpful in more ways than I can count.

Thanks to Ben Winters, transcriber and playwright extraordinaire, and to Libby Gills, who saved me from logging more hours in front of the microfilm reader.

Thanks also to Sarah Chalfant and Jin Auh, and to Jennifer Gilmore, Michelle Blankenship, David Hough, Sara Branch, and Lydia D'moch at Harcourt, the kind of publishing house at which every author should be so fortunate to land.

Brad McKee has read just about every word I've produced over the last decade, and his boundless support along with his candid, perceptive comments have made me a better writer. The thoughtful criticism of MacKenzie Bezos, who read this manuscript more than once with both enthusiasm and a very keen eye, has been indispensable. The (relatively) successful management of my literary neuroses can be attributed almost exclusively to my fellow neurotic, Patrick Keefe, whose formidable work ethic spurred me on, and whose friendship is an endless source of pleasure and good conversation.

The incomparable Andrea Schulz saw what this book might be the very first time she read the proposal and then she made it her business to get me to see it, too. Her talent and dedication are the stuff of which only the very best editors are made.