Nancy Drew and Her Sister Sleuths: Essays on the Fiction of Girl Detectives (review)

This collection originated in papers given during a conference held at Wilson College in 2007 entitled “Nancy Drew and Girl Sleuths.” Reflecting this origin, the essays tend toward the workmanlike and informative, interesting more for their additions to our knowledge of this popular genre rather than for intriguing thought or style, though there are three notable exceptions.

The essays on the Nancy Drew series itself offer analyses of the persistent white-supremacy attitudes in the novels (Leona W. Fisher), of the changes that occur when the books are translated into French (Melanie E. Gregg), and of Nancy’s lack of competence in scientific matters (Michael G. Cornelius). This latter chapter, on science in the Nancy Drew books, addresses a subject that is interesting but not as portentous as this essay wants it to be. It’s difficult, on the evidence offered in the essay, to believe that technology had a “catastrophic impact” on Nancy’s identity or that it caused a “severe dissolution of [her] identity” (80, 87).

The slippery concept of authorship underlies the entire collection, but two essays address it directly. James D. Keeline, not a professional academic but a thorough researcher in the Stratemeyer records at the New York Public Library, offers an overview of the syndicate system as it produced the Nancy Drew series, drawing particularly on correspondence between Mildred Wirt Benson and Grosset and Dunlap Publishers. In her essay on readers’ shifting notions of authorship, Linda K. Karell concludes that the longevity of Nancy Drew reflects both “the psychological comforts of an essential identity” and the fascination of an identity that is “constantly reconstructed and negotiated” (44).

Other girl-sleuth series provide various contrasts to the Nancy Drew books. Anita G. Gorman’s and Leslie Robertson Mateer’s essay on the Cherry Ames books is particularly clear and useful. Mostly descriptive and cleanly organized around the series’ three distinct phases—war, postwar, and the mid-1950s to 1968—it concludes with the news (to this reviewer, anyway) that the first eight novels have been republished “without significant revision, in 2005–2006” (138), because they may help attract girls to nursing as a profession, as they did in their first incarnation. Steven J. Zani’s essay on the popular Trixie Belden series stresses its difference from other such series because of its focus on family.

Two of the most interesting and well-written essays in the collection are those by Fred Erisman and H. Alan Pickrell. Erisman describes a series of five books, published between 1931 and 1933, about “Linda Carlton,” a young woman who was determined to become a flyer in those early days of aviation. The books bear only a surface resemblance to the Nancy Drew model, for Linda clearly represents the New Woman, liberated and still evolving through the 1920s and 1930s. Aviation itself becomes almost a character in these books, which detail the remarkable achievements of women pilots as well as the advances in aircraft design and construction during the early twentieth century. (My husband, who is an ardent aviation history scholar, read this essay and lauded it as extremely knowledgeable.) One question lingers, however: Erisman assumes (or knows?) that the author, Edith Lavell, is a real person; he never addresses the possibility that her name is a pseudonym, that the books may have been written by a publisher’s hireling, or whether Lavell wrote anything else. (Three of the books were published by Saalfield and two by A. L. Burt.) Because authorship is one of the unifying themes in this collection, we need some clarification on this point.

H. Alan Pickrell tackles a complex subject and makes it fascinating: the 1930s Grosset and Dunlap “Melody Lane” teenage sleuth series, in which various characters acted as detectives. Originally, the unifying concept was to be Melody Lane itself, but even that began to shift as the books developed. Pickrell carefully demonstrates that it was an “interesting...