I’ve got a bit of a weird book club this week...
An absolutely incredible sequel to a stunningly fun book was released last week. It’s called Nancy Business and is the sequel to 2019’s The Nancys from RWR McDonald. I’ve only just started Nancy Business and rather than revisiting my book club on The Nancys, I thought we’d go back further still to a piece I wrote on the history of what would become one of RWR McDonald’s inspirations Nancy Drew.
Our tale starts one hundred years ago...
So Nancy Drew is best known as an unassuming, always ready, teen detective from River Heights. Her father Carson Drew is a crime fighting lawyer and her asexual boyfriend is Ned Nickerson. She’s the star of hundreds of novels and several screen adaptations, but she’s also been around for close to a hundred years and has gone through numerous iterations.
So right now it may sound like Nancy Drew is one of the undead and we need to call in one of the various iterations of Buffy to slay her. In fact Nancy is the product of an extremely successful, if highly exploitative publishing syndicate that was able to turn the methods of mass production to teen literature.
Nancy Drew, along with her male teen detective counterparts The Hardy Boys, were the brainchild of the publishing empire of Edward Stratemeyer (b.1862). Stratemeyer grew his empire over the early decades of the twentieth century using a shrewd understanding of what children want and how to market it to their tiny allowances. Yay Capitalism!
Stratemeyer was capitalising on a confluence of social and cultural changes including an increase in childhood literacy, the popularising of assembly line techniques and a growing appetite for entertainment. This created the audience that would devour series aimed at younger readers for 10-50 cents a pop.
Stratemeyer knew what the public wanted and he created characters that would resonate with their ideal lives. He created every-person type characters (at least if you were white and middle class) and employed marketing and cross promoting techniques that would do Amazon proud!
Seeking titles for a slightly older audience Stratemeyer launched The Hardy Boys in 1926 and the first Nancy Drew books followed in 1930 written under the pen name Carolyn Keene. These books were incredibly popular and overturned the maxim of the time that girls would happily read boys books.
The original writer of Nancy Drew was Mildred Wirt, but there were many more to come over the years. The books were penned by a team of writers working under a pseudonym (so it looked all wholesome and consistent). Much like the comic book industry to come, the Stratemeyer syndicate knew how to screw over its bullpen of writers; with many struggling to survive.
Nancy Drew has had many updates over the years but the basic concept was formulaic. Nancy Drew lived in River Heights. Her boyfriend was Ned Nickerson. They had a sunny white-bread relationship and were not particularly troubled by diversity. Each book saw a mystery emerge that was solved by hard work, a bump on the head that never seemed to cause concussion and a whole lot of pluck, luck and coincidence.
So across the years and her many faces Nancy became a publishing powerhouse that despite her extremely American origins even penetrated publishing in the antipodes.
Nancy Drew’s popularity makes her a troubling feminist icon; her freedom and independence offered one vision of equality and in the 1930’s and through the war years you can see how she might have inspired the minds of some young girls to dream. However her white suburban privilege firmly situates her freedom as the domain of her dominant culture status and does nothing for a world coming to understand that intersectionality was never a choice but an inevitability.
