Month: July 2008

Show: NPR: In Character

Episode Date: June 23, 2008, "Nancy Drew" 

Length: 8 Minutes

Producer: NPR’s special series on famous American fictional characters. Some of my favorite entries so far have included Charlie Brown, Long Duk Dong, Hester Prynne and The Dude. This episode is about Nancy Drew.

What I Knew:

• Nancy Drew, like many fictional heroes of children’s literature, does not have a mother. Just her and her dad, the dashing attorney Carson Drew.

• All Nancy Drew novels are attributed to an author named Carolyn Keene. Carolyn Keene is a pseudonym as the series has been written by numerous authors since the first Nancy Drew book was published in 1930. 23 of the first 25 novels were written by one Mildred Benson, a staff writer for the Toledo Blade for 58 years. When she died in 2002 at aged 96, she was still writing a weekly column for the Blade.

• Frank Lebowitz is a lifelong fan. As is Laura Lippman, a mystery writer I admire.

• The first Nancy Drew book was called The Secret of the Old Clock, a common Trivial Pursuit question.

What I Didn’t Know:

• Nancy Drew is a big goody-goody, a All (Middle)-American girl seized by a need to snoop. Unlike her younger counterpart Harriet the Spy (also an In Character subject) who grew up in privilege in Manhattan and feels entitled to her sleuthing. Both are held up as icons of feminism in children but even the girls NPR interviewed for the Nancy Drew piece found her perfectionism annoying.

• Those same girls pay a lot of attention to how Nancy dresses. This could be a gender thing because I don’t ever remember taking sartorial cues from Encyclopedia Brown or The Hardy Boys.

• Nancy Drew’s car (a roadster) is nearly as iconic as her. In more recent titles, the car has been changed to a hybrid.