Dad’s been clearing miscellaneous historic artifacts out of his garage, and in the process he’s been uncovering deeply buried boxes of my youthful treasures, which (of course) include books. Recently we carried home a box full of my old Nancy Drew books. (Yes, Dad wrote the label on the box.)
I think it’s time for a few reminiscences of my first object for binge-reading: Nancy Drew mysteries. I think it’s the only mystery series I’ve ever been glued to (unless you count Harry Potter). I’m just not “into mysteries.”
Interestingly, I’ve found that a lot of professional editors are avid mystery readers. Isn’t that curious? Maybe it’s because mystery novels reward close, careful readers who have good memories. (“Wait, back in chapter three, didn’t it say that the woman who walked with a cane had red hair?”) Or perhaps the quick pace of mysteries keeps an editor so engrossed that she doesn’t have time to notice infelicities of grammar, awkward diction, or typos. Editors really don’t want to keep editing when they’re off the clock. They really don’t.
My memories of reading Nancy Drew books are pretty sketchy. I don’t remember which of them I read first, though there’s a good chance it was The Clue of the Tapping Heels. The cat on the front cover probably made it seem extra promising, since I loved cats.
I’m pretty sure my mom introduced the series to me, since she had read the books as a girl, too (in their first editions, before they were all significantly revised in the fifties, sixties, and seventies). She provided me with her 1931 edition of The Secret of Red Gate Farm.
Mom says she and her sister, Anna Mae, and her sister’s friend Lucille Loesch traded the Nancy Drew books. I guess that’s why Lucille’s name is written in this copy. I’m not sure who penciled in the extra decorations for the endpapers illustrations.
I remember that once I got into them, I shopped for Nancy Drew books at the Missouri Book Store, which was located on the former Lowry Street (now Lowry Mall) on the MU campus (it’s where the so-called Student Success Center is located now).
The Missouri Book store was the scene of many, many youthful book purchases for my brother and me. We went all over that place. The second floor must have been where the trade books were displayed, because I remember making a beeline up those stairs, especially later, when I was devouring science fiction paperpacks.
Mom and Dad indulged us when it came to buying books, and I’m forever grateful.
No matter which bookstore my family visited (and we pretty much entered every bookstore we saw, and they’d always have to pretty much drag me out it, each time), I remember poring over the tantalizing array of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books on the sales shelves.
I’d inspect the series list of titles printed on the back of each of those hardcover books, trying to figure out which I’d read and which I still “had to read.”
It was slightly hard for me to keep them straight, since I’m pretty sure that, in addition to the books I was accumulating on my shelf at home, I had also read several Nancy Drews from the library. (Mom and Dad took us to the public library regularly, too.)
At this point, it’s hard for me to remember much about reading them, except that I devoured them and that I definitely saw something of myself in the characters—whether I “read” Nancy as someone I wanted to be, or whether I “read” her as someone I wanted to be around, to have as a good friend, I can’t quite say. Was I looking out, or in? It was probably a mixture of both emulation and, well, longing. I think I kind of wanted a sister.
For sure, it was refreshing to read story after story—to enter a world—where females had agency, opinions, goals, gumption, risk, and reward, and where males were there for decoration, or because they were agents serving the plot, notably as the bad guys, but also as policemen; fathers with cash, useful friends, and connections; or plot-device boyfriends—Ned Nickerson—who show up in the nick of time in a deus ex machina fashion.
I enjoy reading old books, and I’m sometimes astounded when I stop to realize how ingrained the masculine perspective used to be. It wasn’t until the 1980s, I think, when writers (and their editors) really started systematically letting go of the “woman doctor” designation, or terms like “mankind” or “manmade” or “the progress of man.” Yet even today, the protagonists of our entertainments (literary or in other media) are still mostly masculine. Or, when they’re females, their fundamental motivations are still usually romantic love, looks, or children. True, there are more female protagonists in adventures, but it seems they always have to have a love scene, always have to show they ultimately just want to be with their guy, where they can let themselves feel vulnerable, which is what every woman ultimately wants. (Give me a break.)
Plenty of women have written about the influence of Nancy Drew on their lives, and I don’t need to repeat any of that. But as Sue and I have been looking at these books, reading them out loud to each other in the evenings, laughing at times, rolling our eyes at others, I’ve been thinking hard about how they helped form my perceptions of the world. Here are some things I’ve noticed.
- Nancy’s a do-gooder. She chooses to help people instead of pursuing her own comforts. She doesn’t hesitate to help others, buying a lunch for someone who’s just been robbed, or hiring a taxi for someone who’s suffered an accident. She can do this, because she’s—
- Blessed with money, class standing, and freedom. She has her own car (at age 16/18, during the Depression or World War II, or the sixties or seventies, depending on the edition), and she can go wherever she wants. She doesn’t (have to) have a job, so she can do things whenever she wants. Her dad’s a lawyer and has his own, flexible schedule, making few demands on her time. Because her dad’s a lawyer, she gets lots of perks; the cops always give her the benefit of a doubt, and they often bend over backward to help her. With a mother-like, live-in housekeeper, Nancy isn’t stuck doing all the drudgery any other only-daughter of a single father would be stuck doing. And if she had a mom instead of a mom-like housekeeper, Nancy would be stuck in the kitchen, or the laundry room, or whatever (“go help your mom”).
- Nancy and her chums frequently teach us what not to do. Heavy foreshadowing and obvious details planted before a mishap teach the youthful reader to pay attention to warning signs and red flags. You can see it coming from a mile away. The day before Nancy’s motorboat motor gives out in the middle of a lake, an excursion in the same boat had another girl mentioning, “gee, this motor quits working suddenly sometimes, I’m so glad it’s working today!” Countless are the times that Nancy or someone else goes off investigatin’ all alone, at night, or into a dark cavern, and either falls into a hole and gets stuck, or gets grabbed with a rough hand clapped across her mouth and is then bound and gagged: you should have told someone where you were going! Or, you shouldn’t have gone alone. And people who are mean and aggressive in small ways tend to be mean and aggressive in others.
- Fortunately, since these are books for youths, the pickles Nancy and her chums get into are never as dark as they’d be in real life. When bad guys catch the good guys, they usually tie them up, gag them, and leave them somewhere. Chloroform is used a lot. People are bopped on the head and knocked out pretty frequently, but they always come around with the aid of water and having their hands and wrists rubbed. It’s a far cry from the violence and terrorization you’d expect in a grown-up crime scenario.
- Nancy also teaches out what we should do. In addition to being faultlessly thoughtful, kind, helpful, demure (she doesn’t take payment for her services, and she downplays kudos after she’s saved the day), she is also very often prepared, resourceful, knowledgeable, quick-witted, diplomatic, observant, and circumspect. When her car gets stuck in a muddy ditch, she grabs sticks and brush and stuff to wedge under her wheels for traction. When it’s time for her to travel to France, she’s in good shape because she already knows French. And she knows when to keep her thoughts to herself. She knows how to draw out people, get them talking, get them to blurt out a confession. She also seems to value her intuition without giving it too much weight.
- Her friends, George and Bess, represent opposing and complementary impulses. This type of character trio occurs all over in stories, ranging from the Kirk-Spock-McCoy trio in Star Trek to Harry-Hermione-Ron in Harry Potter to Blossom-Buttercup-Bubbles in the Powerpuff Girls. George, the tomboy, is brash, assertive, impulsive, physical, and rather fearless; essentially too masculine. Bess is self-indulgent, lazy, timid, prone to paralyzing fear, soft, essentially too feminine. Nancy, though, is “just right,” so she’s the natural leader; she filters the impulses represented by her chums through her intellect, intuition, hindsight, and foresight. She’s got uncommonly good common sense.
- The men are “types.” Nancy’s dad is perfection: kind, humorous, gentle, strong, smart, wise, and wealthy. George Clooney, or a generation earlier, Cary Grant, plays him in the movie adaptation. (John Forsythe played him in the grown-up TV version called Charlie's Angels.) And Nancy’s tall, dark, and handsome college football quarterback boyfriend tends to show up just in the Ned-Nickerson of time—when it’s time to move a big, heavy beam out of a tunnel when people are trapped by a cave-in—or at occasions when Nancy needs a male date at a dance. Otherwise, he, like Carson Drew, is kind of flat. The other men in the tales are flatter still; bad guys with low-slung jaws and gruff voices; or shifty-eyed, thin-lipped guys with sharp, cutting voices; or they are kind, elderly, white-haired gentlemen in need of respect and care; or they are helpful, handsome guest stars who help solve mysteries while possibly offering red herrings to the reader by constantly being absent when mysterious bad stuff occurs. Mostly, you can tell bad guys by the way they are described; handsome, candid, gentle men turn out to be good, while people who are ugly and express cruelty, impatience, or an argumentative nature turn out to be bad. (Usually.) See the comment about red flags above.
- A lot of women are types, too, but it seems to me that Nancy Drew’s female characters are slightly more nuanced than the men. Is it just me? Or maybe it’s that Nancy Drew lives in a kind of gender-segregated world, where womenfolk tend to stick together, commiserate with one another, share confidences, help each other, while men and boys are off doing their male-things. It wasn’t that long ago that women did indeed stick to their own realm, and men with theirs, and children tended to be told to hang out with their own gender.
The gender thing is really interesting; Nancy Drew was clearly written for female readers, as a kind of complement to the Hardy Boys series, which was apparently intended to appeal to boys. As a kid, I did read a few Hardy Boys books, but I basically “stayed in my lane” and stuck to my Nancy Drews. Why is that? Like any other female reader, I’m used to imagining myself as the masculine protagonist, merely because there’d be a dearth of worthwhile things to read if I could not. But the idea that females could be the star, could have agency, could rely on themselves, was indeed empowering. As a female, you know you have a brain and opinions, you can make choices and do things; but it was and still is unusual to see females depicted as independent of men. And as a girl, I knew I could have plenty of my own adventures and fun without my brother’s “help.” N.D. reflected that in a way I could envision for a future.
Another thing that has occurred to me as I reread these stories long, long after I initially read them is, How did I picture all this stuff before I had much in my head to build mental images on? I suppose it’s the magic of literature—the ability for written prose to allow you to mentally picture things you’ve never seen before. But it is an especially fascinating question for juvenile literature. How do I picture an Arizona ranch when I don’t really know what Arizona is? What do cactuses and scrub trees really look like on a landscape? What’s a bridle? What’s a brake pedal? How do I picture a train station when I’ve never been to one? In one story, Nancy’s department store “charge plate” figures into the mystery. What’s a charge plate? Even today, I had to look it up. When I was young, what could I have pictured? A dinner plate? I might’ve just mentally shrugged, kind of “blipped” over it as an unknowable thing, and zoomed ahead with the story having only the vaguest comprehension.
And I was pretty young when I read Nancy Drew. Mom is fond of telling people about how I was in second grade and reading these “chapter” books. Mom says that she went to one of her parent-teacher conferences, and the teacher expressed dissatisfaction with my attention or the enthusiasm I was showing during reading period.
Mom asked her, “well, what are you reading in class?” And the teacher told her, “oh, we’re reading the Little Brown Bears series” (or whatever). To which Mom responded, “Oh, well, no wonder—Julie’s reading Nancy Drew books at home!” “Oh, goodness, that explains why she’s not interested in the Little Brown Bears! I’ll find some more appropriate materials for her!” (Well, something must’ve worked.)
I have absolutely no memory of the Little Brown Bears. But I’m pretty sure that the Clue of the Tapping Heels was my first Nancy Drew book. Ha-ha-ha today, it’d be about the last one I’d select.
So from about 1973 to 1975 (second and third grade), I devoured Nancy Drew books. I proudly accumulated the volumes and kept them in numerical order on my shelf.
Somehow I got my mitts on metallic gold ink and carefully scratched my name onto the covers with it. I’m pretty sure it was a fountain pen.
Writing my name in gold ink was much classier than scrawling my name on the front endpapers with a magic marker.
My signature was putrid compared to that of Lucille Loesch’s in the thirties or early forties . . .
Maybe Lucille was reading them at a slightly older age than when I read them. The versions I read had been revised, shortened, and apparently kind of dumbed-down for a younger audience.
I even got the Nancy Drew Cookbook: Clues to Good Cooking, for whatever that was worth.
The cookbook didn’t appeal to me much. I learned one recipe out of it, but the book otherwise didn’t have much impact on me.
Like several other seventies cookbooks, some of the ideas seem regrettable in retrospect.
In the mid-seventies, they were churning out a bunch of new Nancy Drew mysteries, and suddenly they seemed to be appearing faster than I cared to read them. Number 52, The Secret of the Forgotten City was brand new, and I felt pretty cutting-edge to be reading a fresh mystery no one had ever read before.
But the newer stories seemed to lack something that the ones composed in the thirties and forties had provided. Maybe I always knew there was something old-fashioned about the early Nancy Drews, and I liked that sense of them riding around in a roadster, instead of a convertible.
And honestly, some of the writing (and editing) was just bad, on all kinds of levels. I can see it clearly now, but back then, I could probably only sense it. For instance, today's editors eliminate almost every adverb they see. But these books are full of phrases like "announced gloatingly," "walked quickly," and "said warningly." Today it would just be stronger verbs: "gloated," "hurried," and "warned."
Or, most likely, my reading abilities and tastes were eclipsing this juvenile literature. Soon I was reading the James Blish print adaptations of Star Trek episodes. And I enjoyed some of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, too. Science fiction and fantasy became my passion, big-time. But by college, when I sought a degree in English literature and really got a taste of fine-art writing, the tap had kind of turned off. Mass-market fiction started to feel like a big waste of time, just like television is a big waste of time. Compared to Donne, Austen, Joyce, Hemingway, etc., etc., it all seemed so fatuous. Nonfiction rose to the top of my interests, especially natural history essays. And there it’s stayed.
But it’s been fun going through my box of old Nancy Drew novels. I guess I will try to sell them, because I’ll bet someone else would get a kick out of revisiting Nancy and her adventures, too.
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