Book offers clues about the creators of Nancy Drew

September 11, 2005|By Maud Lavin

Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her

By Melanie Rehak

Harcourt, 384 pages, $25

Nancy Drew had pizazz, elegance, smarts and stunning competency. Was there ever another know-it-all character of any gender who man-aged to be so charming and inspiring, rather than just plain obnoxious? Even Sherlock Holmes could be trying from Watson's point of view, but sidekicks George and Bess had a wonderful time with Nancy.

Nancy was born fully clothed and able to drive a roadster in 1930, and her adventures--all 56 of the original Nancy Drew books written by the pseudonymous Carolyn Keene--are still read avidly. In "Girl Sleuth," Melanie Rehak skillfully tells the story of Nancy Drew's two main writers, Mildred Wirt Benson and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, and how Nancy evolved over time through their talents. Rehak also recounts how the ups and downs of the children's publishing business affected the series.

Rehak is particularly deft at placing Nancy Drew in the context of American women's history, linking the sleuth's traits to what was considered acceptable for dashing women at different dates. For instance, in the Depression-era books written by Benson, a woman who supported herself and sometimes her family throughout her life, Nancy was bolder and often explicitly concerned with helping the poor. Benson wrote the majority of the first 30 Nancy Drews. After 1953, in books written by Adams--a Wellesley College graduate and someone who, with her sister Edna, inherited her father's prosperous children's books syndicate business--Nancy was more polite and a shade more fragile.

Thankfully, though, Nancy didn't change too much. She always drove with assurance--first that roadster and later a convertible; she never apologized for being smart or right; she dressed well for every occasion; she remained the apple of her father's eye; she was ever loyal to George and Bess; she never got gushy over her "special date" Ned Nickerson; she always got out of jams; she conquered her fright each time and was brave; she always solved the mystery. (There's a recent sequel series called "Nancy Drew Girl Detective" that stars a sillier Nancy, but I won't go into detail about that--it's Just Not Nancy.)

While Nancy's character is stalwart, her history is slippery; a number of writers wrote books for the series (although Benson and Adams wrote the majority by far), and most were given outlines by Stratemeyer Syndicate editors, at first by Edward Stratemeyer, the syndicate's founder and one of the best-known children's book writers of his time. Nancy was his brainchild, and the first plots were his. Benson, though, brought her to life. And Adams, first through editorial outlines, then by her own authorship, kept her lively.

Rehak rightly perceives that readers want to know what it was in the lives and dreams of Benson and Adams that prompted them to embolden Nancy. In this well-researched and fluidly paced book, Rehak delivers a complex interweaving of the writers' biographies with the context of their times, with special attention to their continued sensitivity to what girls wanted--and would buy.

American women got the vote in 1920, thanks to cultural changes after World War I and the prolonged efforts of suffragists. And it was the tastes of their generation's daughters--little girls wearing low-waisted dresses, and uncorseted young ladies sporting bobbed hair--that prompted Edward Stratemeyer's awareness that his female readers were ready for girls equivalent to the young heroes in his syndicate's Hardy Boys and Tom Swift series. They got Nancy.

Benson and then Adams gave Nancy dimension and boosted her to popularity in the years starting a decade after suffrage and running through the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. Their biographies are reminders of the quieter trailblazing that persisted throughout the middle decades of the last century.

Benson entered the University of Iowa in 1922. In 1927 she got her master's degree in journalism at Iowa (the first woman to do so) and went on to a publishing career during which she wrote more than 120 children's books. She became, during World War II, a city hall reporter for the Toldeo Times and eventually a columnist for the Toledo Blade. Benson continued writing her column until she died at 96 in 2002. She was twice married and twice widowed and had a daughter. At 59 she became a pilot, an avocation she pursued enthusiastically.

Adams began Wellesley in 1910. After graduating, she returned home to New Jersey and soon married. She had four children and became active in local social clubs. When her father died in 1930 (shortly after the first set of Nancy Drews was published), the Depression made it hard to sell the Stratemeyer Syndicate. So Adams and her sister, but primarily Adams, took over the business and ran it for more than 50 years.
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