Nancy Drew and Friends: Girl Detectives

Nancy Drew and Her Sister Sleuths is an excellent collection of essays that emerged out of a conference on "Nancy Drew and Girl Sleuths" held at the co-editors' home institution of Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in February 2007. The bulk of the focus is on Nancy Drew, a literary character and pop culture phenomenon that has received a fair amount of scholarly attention throughout the last decade (see, for example, Nash; Rehak), as have her brother sleuths, the Hardy Boys (see Connelly; Greenwald). But the overall aims of the volume are to investigate the popularity and the commodity value of what Michael G. Cornelius terms in his introduction the "Moll Dick," a term that he locates in an early Trixie Belden book referring to the blending of typically male and typically female gender values that the girl sleuth embodies: courageous, logical, resourceful, and justice-seeking on one hand, and feminine, nurturing, glamorous, and self-effacing on the other. By amalgamating what Cornelius refers to as "the qualities perceived to be finest in both boys and girls" (3), the girl sleuth has not only proven to be a durable figure in US literature for young people across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, but this literary "girl boy" is also continually reimagined across time as a product of the now.

While the overall collection does not purport to solve the mystery of the Moll Dick as swiftly and definitively as many of the series books that it discusses, the individual chapters lay the groundwork for a vast array of ongoing conversations about the lures, pleasures, and challenges of girls' sleuth stories. James D. Keeline kicks things off with a discussion of a number of myths that have been perpetuated about Edward Stratemeyer and the cultural production of one of his most popular series, Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, first published by Grosset & Dunlap in 1930. Thanks to his careful sifting through the Stratemeyer Syndicate archives at the New York Public Library, Keeline clears up a number of misconceptions, beginning with the common claim that the Nancy Drew series was devised out of an attempt to match the sales of the Hardy Boys series, begun in 1927, even though its sales were half of those of another Stratemeyer series, the Ted Scott Flying Series. As well, according to Keeline, the syndicate's decision to revise and sanitize the first thirty-four Nancy Drew titles was not done solely out of a motivation to remove racist stereotyping (which proved unexpectedly controversial, given the removal of most characters of color altogether). Rather, manufacturing costs related to the production and storage of printing plates made the rewriting and shortening of earlier texts a worthwhile endeavor, since it would cost as much to reset old books according to up-to-date methods.

Subsequent chapters on the Nancy Drew books focus on a range of topics: Linda K. Karrell on Foucauldian notions of collaborative authorship; co-editor Melanie E. Gregg on French translations and cultural adaptation; Leona W. Fisher on xenophobia and white privilege, and Michael G. Cornelius on the ways in which science and technology repeatedly foil the otherwise unflappable girl sleuth, revealing a set of gendered interactions and hierarchies concerning skill, formal training, and the binary opposition between rationalism and superstition. Fortunately, the authors do not limit their discussion to the canon of fifty-six titles published in hardcover by Grosset & Dunlap between 1930 and 1979, but incorporate some of the hundreds of additional titles published by Simon & Schuster since 1979. Fisher, in particular, notes that the patterns of white privilege persist in the latest series, Nancy Drew: Girl Detective, launched in 2004.

The second half of the book takes as its focus some of Nancy Drew's sister sleuths, none of whom (with the partial exception of Trixie Belden) has been able to replicate the popularity and enduring appeal of Nancy Drew. Readers who are familiar mainly with the Nancy Drew franchise...