As Nancy Drew gets a CW reboot, magicmolly writes that the “titian-haired” girl detective is not who you remember
Illustration: by Carolyn Figel Chapter One: A Baffling Question Who is Nancy Drew? At the New York Public Library, she is filed under “Women Detectives” and “Action and Adventure Fiction” and “Code and Cipher Stories.” If you are the target demo of a Drew book — tween, female, and solitary enough to spend time reading — she is the antidote to a life full of mysteries with unsatisfying conclusions. If you are a woman who has aged out of that demo, she is nostalgia.
The first volume came out in 1930, written by Mildred Wirt Benson from an idea devised by an author named Edward Stratemeyer. Stratemeyer ran a syndicate that originated nearly 1,400 books, including the Bobbsey Twins and the Hardy Boys. He came up with plot ideas, wrote three-page outlines, and distributed them to staff writers who fleshed out the books at warp speed for a flat fee of $50 to $250 per title.
The newest onscreen version of Nancy, who appears in a CW TV adaptation this fall, is noticeably sex-positive: Within four minutes of the pilot’s start, she’s fucking Ned Nickerson’s brains out. Whoa! The most appealing character on the adaptation is George, whom the CW show turns into a cynical bitch with Amy Winehouse eyeliner and tattoos. She manages the restaurant where both girls work, has all of the show’s funniest lines, is ethnically ambiguous, and has a boy’s name.
The opposing type of character is the adult-in-a-kid’s-body — both an aspirational and a fantastical model of being. Many young people, it turns out, don’t conceive of themselves as a lesser class of dumber, smaller humans, and this constituency enjoys books that mirror their delusion — and so we have the philosophical heroine , the stoic heroine , the intellectual , the careerist , the neurotic , and, of course, Nancy, who resembles no youth ever to traipse the Earth.
The Nancy Drew books make a case that you can be a complete nonentity — okay, a privileged nonentity — and still do tons of courageous, adventurous, altruistic stuff. Her glamour isn’t to be found in her adjectives — tactful, cordial, serious — but in her verbs. She’s constantly jumping, springing, racing, clambering, scrambling, darting after shadowy crooks, and zooming away in the blue convertible.
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