The girl detective is officially a nonagenarian. Well, her book series is anyway. Tomorrow, April 28, marks the 90-year anniversary of the publication of the first Nancy Drew book, The Secret of the Old Clock (1930) by Carolyn Keene. As a young child, I devoured my way through the library’s entire shelf of Nancy Drew mysteries, and I’m sure that the gloomy settings, air of suspense, and plucky heroine had long-lasting effects on my literary taste. So, I want to take today to celebrate the legacy of Nancy Drew.
I’ve written before about the detective novel’s origins in the Gothic, and Nancy Drew is no different. We can see precursors to the adolescent amateur detective as far back as the penny dreadfuls of the early Victorian era. In fact, one popular series was titled The Boy Detective, or The Crimes of London (1865). This set of serialized tales followed a boy named Ernest Keen who ran away from home and became the assistant to a city police inspector. Ernest Keen was an obvious predecessor to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Baker Street boys—the young urchins who occasionally help out Sherlock Holmes. Nancy Drew’s sibling series, The Hardy Boys, also follows this pattern of young men acting as assistants to a professional detective. But the Nancy Drew series changed the game by giving this same premise a female protagonist. Nancy even went so far as to adopt the gender-flipped version of Ernest Keen’s nickname, becoming known as “the girl detective.”
But while the amateur detective genre was mainly the purview for male protagonists before Nancy Drew came along, we can still see the building blocks for a girl detective in the earliest of Gothic heroines. For example, take Matilda in Eliza Parson’s The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793). While staying in an allegedly haunted castle, Matilda hears groans and clinking chains in the night and is told a local legend about the ghosts that reside there. Instead of being afraid, Matilda immediately assumes there must a rational explanation and sets out to investigate. The mystery is not prolonged, as Matilda quickly comes across the imprisoned wife of Count Wolfenbach, long thought to be dead. In Matilda, we can see the early groundwork for a clever heroine who questions the stories presented to her and sets out to discover the truth on her own. Ann Radcliffe’s protagonists are similarly curious, though a bit more credulous of the supernatural. In Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), young Adeline stays up late at night exploring the secret passages of the ancient abbey she has taken refuge in, leading to the discovery of clues related to her father’s murder. Unlike these early Gothic heroines, however, Nancy Drew is afforded an independence and freedom of movement that had seldom been seen in young women in literature before. Nancy Drew is not an orphaned naïf unlocking the dark secrets of the castle in which she is trapped, but rather a wealthy and autonomous young woman who travels freely in her own car, has the support of two female friends and the respect of male authority figures, and takes on cases that do not necessarily center on her own personal safety. It is this bold independence that accounts for much of Nancy Drew’s appeal.
The continued influence of the Gothic can be seen in more than just Nancy’s character. In the course of her investigations, Nancy often travels to classic Gothic settings, such as ancient ancestral homes, isolated country mansions, and even the occasional castle. Many of the plots likewise revolve around traditional themes like a contested family inheritance or debunking the seemingly supernatural. Unfortunately, it’s been so long since I read any Nancy Drew books that I don’t remember them well enough to go into a deeper analysis. But perhaps that means it’s time to dive back in!
With foundations in a centuries-old literary tradition blended with an ever-updating depiction of the ideal modern woman, it’s no wonder that the character of Nancy Drew has sustained the attention of readers for hundreds and hundreds of books! In addition to the original Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series, which officially concluded in 2003, she has spawned several spin-off series including the more mature Nancy Drew Files; the modernized Girl Detective series; and most recently, the kid-friendly Nancy Drew Diaries. With nearly a century of ongoing stories, Nancy Drew is one of the longest lasting cultural icons in the mystery genre, and she seems to be here to stay.
What is your favorite Nancy Drew book? Have you read any of the more recent series? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!