* * * * *
                                        
                  What is it with teenage detectives, anyway?
                                        
> The fundamental instability at the heart of Nancy Drew is a direct result
> of the production method that wrought her. Like the thirties starlets
> programmed by the Hollywood star system to radiate glamour, power, and
> searing perfection, Nancy is a fundamentally collaborative project who
> embodies distinct, often contradictory visions for how a super-girl should
> look and behave. The publishing tycoon Edward Stratemeyer created her in
> 1930 to capitalize on the girl consumers he knew were reading his popular
> Hardy Boys books. He hired a cross-country network of ghostwriters to write
> the series under the collective pseudonym Carolyn Keene.
> 
> Nancy’s original ghostwriter, Mildred Wirt Benson of Ladora, Iowa, was
> herself an amateur archeologist responsible for the most adventurous
> iterations of the sleuth. In her autobiography, she discusses the detective
> as a product of her “unfulfilled desire for adventure” who “embodied
> qualities that [she] wished [she] had.” Stratemeyer and his daughter,
> Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, disapproved of this early characterization of
> Nancy: a boisterous teenager who drove a roadster and talked back to police
> officers, they argued, was “too flip.” Adams’s subsequent revisions began a
> gradual domestication of Drew that spans the series. Though Nancy still
> used bold words, she now did so with dainty adverbs—“Nancy said sweetly,”
> “Nancy said kindly”—adorning each line of dialogue like doilies.
> 
> If modifications to Nancy’s character reflected different ideals of
> femininity, tweaks to her appearance reflected ideals of beauty furthered
> by cinema and pop culture. Benson’s books called for “blonde” curls, but
> the illustrator Russell Tandy tinted Nancy’s hair a more voguish silver—
> just when the 1931 film Platinum Blonde premiered Jean Harlow’s famous,
> noxious dye-job, a cocktail of peroxide, ammonia, Clorox, and Lux flakes.
> By the end of the decade, writers reddened Nancy’s hair on a schedule
> roughly concurrent with the release of the Olivia de Havilland film
> Strawberry Blonde (1941). In later decades, the artist Rudy Nappi portrayed
> Nancy as increasingly glamorous and adult—on fifties-era covers she
> resembles Hitchcock’s blondes, immaculately dressed in Tippi Hedren–like
> suits and full-skirted, Grace Kelly gowns.
> 

Via Hacker News [1], “Who Is Nancy Drew, Really? [2]”

This is somewhat timely, as Nancy Drew was a topic of conversation recently.
I wasn't aware that Nancy Drew was written by ghost writers under a
collective pseudonym, but then again, I was more into Alfred Hitchcock and
The Three Investigators [3] myself (and it's odd to think that they're still
popular in Germany [4]).

I was quite upset when Alfred Hitchcock [5] was retconned out of the series:

> When Alfred Hitchcock died in 1980, Random House chose to replace him with
> the fictitious mystery writer Hector Sebastian and in 1981 the series
> became known as "The Three Investigators Mystery Series". Things just
> didn't seem the same without old Alfred and the changes in the plots and in
> the characters were noticeably different to regular readers of the series.
> In 1982 Random House issued a book of mystery puzzles featuring The Three
> Investigators. It appears to have bombed. In 1983 Marc Brandel joined the
> fold as a Three Investigators author. In 1984 and 1985, Random House very
> slightly revised the texts of the first 30 titles. In this new Revised
> Edition, Alfred Hitchcock was replaced by the fictitious movie director
> Reginald Clarke in the first book and by Hector Sebastian in books #2 -
> #30. This may have been the straw that broke the camel's back for the
> series.
> 

“The Three Investigators [6]”

But apparently, such things happen even in the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys books.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10444708
[2] http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/10/14/nancy-drew-in-
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Investigators
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Investigators#Germany
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Hitchcock
[6] http://www.threeinvestigatorsbooks.com/TheThreeInvestigators.html

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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