The "Nancy Drew" mysteries

In my next life, I think I want to come back as Nancy Drew.

You remember her from your grade-school days, surely. Unless you're young enough to have had this definitive rite of literary passage supplanted by "The Babysitters Club" book series.

The Nancy Drew I remember was the fictional blonde teenage detective from River Heights, the pampered only daughter of widowed, well-known attorney Carson Drew. Daddy gave her a shiny new dark blue convertible for her eighteenth birthday. Money was never an issue for Nancy.

Nancy hadn't been more than a tiny footnote in conversation for about forty years for me. Every once in a while when I'm reviewing cases as a prosecutor, some little odd detail in a police report or some sequence of events in a criminal history makes me want to find out more before I march in to court on a bail hearing. On those days I've been known to call up a police department or a district attorney's office ten states and two time zones away, and after the initial pleasantries, introduce my mission with the words "I'm playing Nancy Drew this morning..." It breaks the ice, we laugh, and then we get down to the business of real crime, not the fake stuff. Just like everybody knows that Frank Sinatra was a singer, everybody knows that Nancy Drew was a beloved character in a book who always solved a mystery.

But then I cleaned out the garage.

Last summer was a whirlwind of ambition for projects in and around the house. The list included putting in a brick patio, expanding the flower gardens, getting the garage and house re-roofed, and cleaning and reorganizing the garage. Hard to figure which was the jewel in the crown of this assortment--the sight of the brick patio which warms my heart every time I step out the front door, or the fact that I see the walls of my garage for the first time in two decades. And they now have shelves!!

At any rate, cleaning the garage was an epic physical and emotional journey in many ways, an archelogical foray through the strata of my life, layers of history revealed by magazines, beach toys, cassette tapes, and scrap lumber, and ritually cleansed by several bonfires and a trip to a waste disposal facility. Where else does one take the ancient PC that my youngest bought for me for two dollars at a church rummage sale when he was around eight? It never worked ... but he was so happy about his "find' that I still waited until he left for college before I let it go.

And in the farthest corner, in the last of the "mystery" bags, I found a trove of books and gadgets I'd brought back from a different expedition to my past years before. Among them, and relatively untouched by the mice who had evidently had the run of the bag for quite a long time, were a couple of Nancy Drew mysteries, circa the mid-1950s. I remembered that while I'd loved to read the books as a youngster, our family budget didn't support collecting anything, so the bulk of the books I'd read had come from my neighborhood library in Chicago. At the time of the discovery, I was still up to my elbows in dust, dirt and wall brackets, so I vowed to sit down one sunny day and peruse them in more leisurely fashion.

That day came yesterday. While this morning brings a fresh sheet of snow and sleet to the landscape right before spring comes in like a lion, we'd been lulled by several days of warmth and sunshine and melting snowscapes. I'd brushed off the leaf litter and dirt shoved on to the patio by the snow plow, and pulled out my lawn chairs and a little side table. Then, with my pants legs rolled up to catch a few more inches of sunshine, I settled in to read the last of The Scarlet Slipper Mystery.

The book was a light confection of chance meetings, mysterious strangers, European accents, stolen gems, and a beleaguered little country of "Centrovia" apparently beset by civil war. I didn't really care who had smuggled the diamonds into the country in a series of ballerina paintings, but I was utterly struck by just how perfect a life Ms. Drew enjoyed.

Start with the lovely features and the perfect figure, followed by the three-story house on a shady street she shared with her dad, the new convertible, the rapturous, unceasing and fawning admiration of the community, and the perfect boyfriend Ned Nickerson, who came complete with a little green sportster, a cohort of good-natured fraternity brothers and a summer cottage in the family. Ned was a good guy to have along on Nancy's adventures, given his eternal willingness to tackle someone if needed, and to take Nancy out to dinner if her spirits needed lifting. Throw in a brave wee doggie named Togo, and the cheerful housekeeper Hannah Gruen who lived to fuss over Nancy and keep the teenaged sleuth and her friends supplied with a steady stream of delicious sandwiches and other homemade snacks. Yes, poor Nancy had lost her mother when she was very young ... but Hannah had clearly taken over the maternal fussing role, with none of the potential for family disagreements that lurk in actual marriages. She was paid to be that nice.

As I read, I picked up on a pattern of Nancy being able to turn every small temporary setback into gold, and consulted "The Secret of the Old Clock" for verification. Yup, there it was just as I remembered, the confrontation with the evil Topham sisters in the misses' wearing apparel section of Taylor's Department Store. The mini-adventure began with an unpleasant confrontation and tug of war over a "lovely pale blue dance creation" of lace and chiffon, and ended with Nancy getting the dress at fifty percent off and with a seamstress' improvement in the style of the chiffon skirt torn in the fracas.

It was a little like watching Barbie and Ken solve crimes, but Barbie never had it this good!! I could get used to a life like that. For a while, at least. I think after about a month of this treatment, I'd feel like I was in the land of the Stepford Wives. Still, a comfortable place to be, with an endless fashionable wardrobe, an eternal wellspring of good luck, and all meals prepared.
After I finished reading about satin toe shoes and gem smuggling, I turned to Wikipedia to get a little more perspective on the character who had been my youthful role model until she was replaced by imperiled heroines of regency romances. The first revelation that knocked my socks off was that there was no actual author by the name of "Carolyn Keene" laboring over her craft on a manuel typewriter while sipping tea and thinking up new adventures. Ms. Keene was just a pseudonym, the books ghostwritten under contract by many individuals to the plot specifications they were given. The person who actually thought up the "girl detective" series in the 1930s was Edward Stratemeyer, who had first created the "Hardy Boys" detective series for young boys not long before. As Hannah Gruen might say, "Well, I never!"

And the second big shocker was that Nancy had evolved as a character over the years. Go figure, don't we all? But in her case, I don't think it was for the better.

I'm eventually going to have to track this down for myself (shades of Nancy Drew girl detective coming to the fore), but "research has shown" that the Nancy who first appeared in the 1930s was sixteen, feisty, independent-minded, outspoken, even flippant at times. By the 1950s, however, she'd been recast as being sweeter, kinder, less bold, and less abrasive. "Cardboard" was the description of one critic. Descriptions of the Nancy that appeared in the 1960s and 70s include being more docile, more demure, relentlessly upbeat, a girl who has learned to hold her tongue. Even later incarnations add more romance (gasp ... she breaks up with Ned in 1995 when she goes to college!!), and cover illustrations include boyfriends or villains in the background rather than relying on just Nancy to carry the cover.

Hmmm... I've generally found that as time has gone by, I've gotten less docile, more outspoken, braver, more adventurous, and less compliant than the earlier versions of me. I was somewhat saddened to note Nancy's documented personality changes over the years, in some ways a backwards arc of revisionism.

Still, in any of her incarnations, I have to admit that Nancy had it pretty darn good. But if I'm coming back as Nancy Drew in my next life, I think I'll pick the version from the 1930s. I'll take "feisty" over "fatuous" any day of the week.