Revisiting Models of th Nancy Drew Revisited: Female Priv Created in the s by the Stratemeyer Syndicate of writers, the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories are still very popular today both with teenage girls and American female detective writers. What are the reasons for the enduring appeal of the girl detective? Is Nancy Drew really, as some women writers assert, the literary mother of the new breed of adult fictional women sleuths in the United States? What are the differences and the similarities between Nancy Drew and those fictional sleuths?
Why do so many contemporary American female detective writers still somehow, consciously or not, take Nancy Drew as a model for their own fictional private eyes? Those are some of the mysteries this article is going to try and solve. Nancy Pickard acknowledges that her desire to write murder mysteries as an adult dates back to her reading Nancy Drew as a girl.
She also says that her own detective, Jenny Cain,. VI Warshawski. Girl Detective. Idiot extraordinaire. Nancy Pickard concurs:. Nancy Drew was almost everything I wanted to be when I grew up: intelligent, self-confident, energetic, successful, and independent. I confess that I also wished I was well-to-do and beautiful, just like Nancy [ I think it is not overstating the case to maintain that the original Nancy Drew is a mythic character in the psyches of the American women who followed her adventures as they were growing up.
She may have been Superman, Batman, and Green Hornet, all wrapped up in a pretty girl in a blue convertible And over the past sixty years, the Nancy Drew stories have been translated into many languages thirteen to be more precise, including Malaysian and her popularity has become international. The stories were adapted to a certain extent for local markets: thus for example in the French version Nancy Drew mysteriously became Alice Roy, her father Carson Drew turned into James Roy, and River Heights, her native town, into River City.
However, as far as I can tell, it is only in the United Sates that her stories have triggered so many vocations among her young readers for writing detective novels once they were grown up: there must be something essentially American about her and her enduring appeal. These are some of the mysteries I am going to try and solve here. To start with, she is a character important enough in American literary consciousness to deserve an entry in the Grolier Encyclopedia as:.
