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In GIRL SLEUTH, Melanie Rehak writes a history of Nancy Drew as grippingly entertaining as the books about the girl herself. Subtitled Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, the book thoroughly documents not only the invention and writing of the series, but also the entire lives of Mildred Wirt Benson and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. (Nancy doesn't show up until page 109.) This detailed background is full of interesting anecdotes. Mildred's father's engagement gift to her mother, for example, is not a diamond, but a complete set of leather-bound Shakespeare. ("She never let him forget it") And during the Depression, the Wirts hid their money inside the tubes of a xylophone. GIRL SLEUTH is full of these fascinating little details, copiously annotated in the back. Although lightly written, this is very much a well-researched work of scholarship. It is a worthy one as well. Nancy, Rehak argues, has survived this long because this symbol of can-do womanhood has always had her fate held in feminine hands. "Just 12 days after the launching of Nancy Drew," Rehak reminds us, her creator, Edward Stratemeyer died. He had two daughters who had been blocked out of any attempt to learn any sort of work, including his own. (Stratemeyer seems to have been all for the equality of the sexes -- as long as it was outside his own family.) In a world where finances were collapsing and women weren't taken seriously as businesspeople, Harriet and her sister Edna had just inherited the largest publishing juggernaut in America -- a property which included an up-and-coming author named Mildred Wirt. Mildred had already written the first three books, and Harriet, who took over the business, figured that she knew Nancy better than anyone, at least at first. How Harriet and Mildred handle Nancy and each other is the bulk of the book. Mildred and Harriet (mostly Harriet) ushered their charge from an era of white gloves, 50-cent novels, racism, and "marrying up" to blue jeans, paperbacks, political correctness, and feminism. Along the way all three of them survived a Depression, a world war and two smaller ones, and a constantly shifting social standard for women. Rehak not only covers the familiar territory of Harriet's rewrites of Mildred's material, but also Harriet's approaches to alternative adaptations of Nancy from the 30s B-movies, the parodies, the television show, and its scandalous aftermath. ("There was one place that every ambitious young actress who was willing to do certain things for her career ended up in the 1970s, and that was where Martin went next.") There is even a chapter on the fates of Simon and Schuster's various Nancy spin-offs and the Applewood Press reissues of the originals. If I have one complaint, it's a petty one; Rehak notes that the producers of the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys were also women without mentioning that for the time, that was as unusual as a female tycoon in the 1930s. Otherwise GIRL SLEUTH is entertaining, informative, and highly readable. If you ever hung out with Nancy, you owe it to yourself to add GIRL SLEUTH to your collection of blue covers or yellow spines.
Reviewed by Linnea Dodson, September 2005
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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