The publicity for the (Warner Brothers) films tried to pitch Nancy as a slightly edgier character than she was in print. “One side, flatfeet…let a real sleuth show you how it’s done!” shouted the posters. “She may be just sixteen, but she’s got something you guys never had…female intuition!” “Meet the toughest sleuth who ever captured…your heart! It’s none other than that master man hunter, that champ criminologist…Nancy Drew Detective,” ran another. “Nancy’s through playing with dolls! She’d rather play with danger!” (and so on, pp. 194)
Back in 1938 Warner Brothers employees scripted a few movies based on the soaring popularity of Carolyn Keene’s fictitious girl detective, Nancy Drew, who began her reign in 1930. I’ll have to try to find Nancy Drew: Detective starring Bonita Granville and loosely inspired by the book, The Password To Larkspur Lane. Two other movies came out that were total Warner Brothers’ originals (Nancy Drew: Reporter and Nancy Drew: Sharpshooter), plus Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase from the book of that name. The public wasn’t too thrilled with the new Nancy, however. There was something inimitable about her that only her creator could deliver.
But who was her creator? Carolyn Keene? Nope. That’s only her pen name.
In Melanie Rehak’s 2005 book, Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, Nancy’s legions of fans discover the answers to the ultimate mystery of all: how did Nancy Drew become the feisty, independent teenage sleuth that somehow didn’t crack a fingernail or heel, but could crack the case every time with just a little help from her friends?
I must warn any of you fans who do not know the ugly truth. Rehak’s revelations may disturb you and at the least will disappoint you if you imagine Nancy was created and developed out of the sheer joy of creating. She was not.
Nancy Drew, along with many other juvenile book characters like The Dana Girls, The Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, Ruth Fielding and The Hardy Boys, was created by Edward Stratemeyer, head of the very successful Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1929 (actually his first choice of name was Stella Strong), and several plot sketches were revised and approved by Grosset and Dunlap before Edward sent detailed plot scripts to a writer he wanted to try out, a Midwestern woman named Mildred Wirt. Hailing from Iowa she attended the University of Iowa to learn journalism, wrote on The Daily Hawkeye and published in various magazines like St. Nicholas.
Soon after he dies and his grown daughters, Edna and Harriet, are thrown into the position of deciding what to do with their inheritance. Their mother was an invalid and Edna needed to care for her. Harriet was married with small children. It was the Depression and nobody had the capital to buy the Syndicate, yet they didn’t want their father’s pride and joy to die (or their pampered lifestyles), so the women became very nervous CEOs in a man’s world. Not everybody approved, to put it mildly.
Nancy Drew’s real story has only begun. Rehak helps us to get to know Mildred, Harriet and Edna very well by focusing on their lives apart from each other and also by correspondence. Fourteen chapters in this 314-page book plunge us into the story of different-minded women struggling to understand, control and tolerate each other for the sake of putting Nancy Drew books out as quickly as possible. Many changes occurred in their lives that sometimes were reflected in the mystery novels, such as World War II. and Harriet’s son being killed in it, but mostly the world of Nancy Drew was a world of clean-cut fantasy for girls wanting to be like their bold, quick-thinking and beautiful heroine who never once kissed her long-suffering boyfriend Ned.
Nancy wasn’t written by Wirt after The Mystery of the Tolling Bell in 1945, which had to be heavily revised because an exhausted Wirt Benson with a dying husband had made Nancy too defeatist and sissy. Harriet took over the job just like she had the business when Edna married and up and moved away, though Edna would be on the sidelines making Harriet miserable until Edna died.
Then Mildred revealed to her alma mater that she wrote the early Nancys, although she had signed away all rights to them, and that started a discouraging chain of events watched and reported by the hungry media.
I won’t reveal what those many events are because if you’re an older Nancy Drew fan you’ve probably heard of them and if you’re younger like me, you may not wish to know or may instead enjoy discovering them yourself. They do mirror what was going on in American society and how women of different ages and times responded to the sleuth. Nancy Drew has gone through a number of transformations since 1930, most recently becoming a kid talking directly to her very young readers in a well-received series called Nancy Drew Notebooks, put out by Simon and Schuster who bought the Syndicate when Harriet died.
Melanie Rehak in her first book has done herself proud. Girl Sleuth covers a whole lot of ground in a well-constructed, interesting way that helped me to understand how Nancy was created and developed. I had heard of Mildred Wirt Benson, but nothing else and so this was more interesting to me than for someone who knew what was going to happen.
But while it was interesting, it wasn’t hard for me to set it down. I learned how much money had to do with Nancy getting written for both of her writers and it was unsettling.
I have fond memories of reading the yellow-spined books, not the original, blue-jacketed ones, when I was prepubescent and still have ten that I bought on my bookshelf with the Hardy Boys that I gradually preferred. I even was inspired to write my first book at the age of nine with me as Nancy. Not bad, huh? Then I enjoyed it when Pamela Sue Martin played Nancy and Shaun Cassidy with Parker Stevenson as the Hardy Boys on TV, though the latter more. Girl Sleuth talks about why that went sour after a couple of seasons. People just prefer Mildred’s original Nancy (and I specify original because Harriet published revised versions).
I recommend the book to people who can handle the behind-the-scenes truth about Nancy and think it would be fascinating to get to know the women who created her. Some of you will admire the ambitious, hard-working women, but you may also have mixed feelings like me, especially about Harriet. Rehak is fairly objective in a reporter's style so no one is really villainized, but it kept me at a distance as well. It reminds you this is real life and not a story.
You might really enjoy Girl Sleuth. I wish I could say I did, but honestly, I would’ve rather kept these lurid secrets covered up. I prefer the fantasy world of Nancy Drew.
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