Nancy Drew and the Mystery of Her Enduring Relevance

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/arts/television/nancy-drew-cw.html

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Nancy Drew, the girl detective who could pick a lock, play the bagpipes, tap Morse Code in high heels and drive her blue roadster like a Daytona champ, turns 90 next year.

Introduced as “a pretty girl of 16” on the first page of “The Secret of the Old Clock” in 1930, Nancy has inspired generations of readers (Sonia Sotomayor, Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton among them) with her style and pluck. No matter how many bowling balls and candelabras bludgeon her, she keeps sleuthing. Fictional characters like V.I. Warshawski, Veronica Mars and Betty Cooper of “Riverdale” owe her a tip of the cloche hat.

“She’s a force for good, unafraid to speak up, unafraid to challenge authority,” said Melanie Rehak, the author of “Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her.”

Over the years, Nancy has aged up and down; her hair has morphed from blond to red to strawberry; she has acquired best friends, Bess Marvin and George Fayne, and a loyal boyfriend, Ned Nickerson. Briefly, her roadster was maroon. Never out of print, she has appeared in more than 250 books and counting, in movies, on television shows, in CD-ROM games. She has been reinvented, in ways that fans have not always embraced, for seemingly every era.

Each new adaptation has to reckon, Rehak explained, with the Nancy readers think they know. “It’s very hard to disconnect her from the decades and decades of cultural presence that she has had,” she said.

On Oct. 9, she returns again, in “Nancy Drew,” an hourlong drama on CW with a contemporary spin and a supernatural kick. Brittle, adrift, this Nancy is grieving her mother, sparring with her father and having casual sex with Ned Nickerson. He goes by Nick now, and he has a record. Call it “The Mystery of the Hot Mess.”

“At the core is the idea of a young woman who believes in righting wrongs and finding the truth,” said Stephanie Savage, a creator of the series.

How and why has Nancy evolved from her tweed-suited origins to her new role as a thoroughly modern snoop? Grab your magnifying glass.

Edward Stratemeyer, the head of a children’s literature syndicate, first imagined Nancy Drew in 1929. Having already created “The Hardy Boys,” Stratemeyer wanted a detective who could capture the hearts and pocket money of girls. He described this new heroine, in a memo to his publishers, as “an up-to-date American girl at her best, bright, clever, resourceful and full of energy.” Her name, he suggested, might be Stella Strong. Or Diana Dare. Or Nan Drew.

He recruited a young newspaperwoman, Mildred Wirt, later Mildred Wirt Benson, and furnished her with detailed outlines for the first three books, “The Secret of the Old Clock,” “The Hidden Staircase” and “The Bungalow Mystery.” Published in 1930, these books appeared, like all subsequent Nancy Drews, under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene.

Benson, who wrote Nancy Drew books off and on for two decades, fleshed out Stratemeyer’s breakneck plot while imbuing Nancy with spunk, valor and an unflagging sense of her own moral rightness — although that rightness occasionally lent itself to burglary. In the 1950s, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, Stratemeyer’s younger daughter and heir to the Stratemeyer Syndicate, took over the series, instilling Nancy with some of her own Wellesley-educated refinement and drive.

The Nancy Drew books, which have sold more than 80 million copies, offer a model of femininity that is self-reliant, snappily dressed, capable of catching the baddie in time to make the college dance. An apotheosis of American girlhood, Nancy isn’t quite an everywoman — we can’t all crack a safe or pilot a speedboat — but she is an archetype, just generic enough for readers to imagine themselves in her sensible heels.

“She’s sort of an analog hero,” Melinda Hsu Taylor, the showrunner for the CW’s “Nancy Drew,” said. “She’s not able to fly or turn herself invisible, but she gets it done in the way that somebody who’s reading the books maybe could get it done, too.”

The 1932 book “Nancy’s Mysterious Letter” made that explicit. “I have solved some mysteries, I’ll admit, and I enjoy it,” Nancy says. “But I’m sure there are many other girls who could do the same.”

Popular culture likes to reimagine its superheroes every decade or so. Nancy is no exception. In the 1930s, the Stratemeyer Syndicate sold the film rights to Warner Bros. Nancy first appeared onscreen, played by a curly-haired Bonita Granville, in “Nancy Drew … Detective,” a 1938 film advertised with tag lines like “Her homework may not be so hot … but her police-work is 100 percent!” and “Meet the toughest sleuth who ever captured … your heart.” Three sequels quickly followed, none of them major successes.

In the late 1950s, even as new books were being written, the early ones were revised, with an eye to making them even more plot-driven and less prone to ethnic and racial stereotypes. (Adams’s remedy: Make all of the characters white.) On the new canary yellow covers, Nancy kept up with contemporary fashions, although Adams proudly kept the books free of pernicious influences like hippies and drugs.

Lucille Ball’s production company attempted to create a Nancy Drew television series in the 1950s, but Nancy finally made it to the networks in 1977 when “The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries” aired on ABC. Pamela Sue Martin starred as Nancy Drew and later, after the series was canceled, she complained to Playboy about how sanitized her character had been. “There was never any tragedy or extreme emotion,” Martin said. “Never a kissing scene or any sign that she would indulge with the opposite sex.” (In the new series, Martin swans in as the town psychic.)

The ’80s, ’90s and 2000s saw several attempts to make over Nancy, in books and onscreen. A Nancy in jeans and moussed hair graced the covers of “The Nancy Drew Files,” books aimed at a teenage audience. A younger Nancy Drew appeared in “Nancy Drew Notebooks.” When the original series, “The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories,” concluded, “Nancy Drew: Girl Detective” took over, with Nancy narrating her adventures in the first person.

In 1989, a series for USA Networks, starring Margot Kidder, never finished its pilot, and in 1995, WB briefly aired, then canceled, a half-hour series with Scott Speedman as Ned. In the ’00s, ABC aired a Nancy Drew pilot, passing on a series, and Emma Roberts appeared in a Nancy Drew movie. CBS and NBC both developed projects centered on a middle-aged Nancy Drew, but declined to order series. This year, a movie starring Sophia Lillis, had a limited release and like all Nancy Drew adaptations before it, earned middling reviews.

Why has Nancy Drew proved so difficult to adapt? “It’s a bit of a puzzle,” said Rehak, the “Girl Sleuth” author. “Part of her appeal has always been that people relate to her in various ways. Actually seeing her onscreen embodied in a real person kind of ruined it for them.”

In a rare example of a successful Nancy Drew adaptation, Her Interactive has released 32 beloved computer games, with the 33rd due later this year. Kennedy McMann, the star of the new “Nancy Drew” and a self-described superfan, grew up playing those games. “I feel like I’ve been pretending to be Nancy Drew for the last 15 years,” she said.

Despite decades of feeble adaptations and reboots, American culture has never stopped loving Nancy Drew. “We still crave heroic, fearless women, or women who face their fear and move past it,” said Savage, the series co-creator. “And she’s that girl.”

When the rights became available, Savage and her producing partner, Josh Schwartz, pocketed them. Her idea, which she pitched to the writer Noga Landau, an executive producer on the show, was to embrace Nancy’s darkness, a subtext that other adaptations had ignored.

Savage, who has a Ph.D. in English, noted how in the novels, Nancy’s obsessive hunger for the truth sometimes verged on voyeurism and led her into places that nice girls shouldn’t go.

“For me,” she said, “there was an idea of Nancy Drew, transgressor: She will sneak into your house, she’ll read your secret letters, she’ll go through your nightstand, she’ll follow you.”

This new “Nancy Drew” raises the heroine’s age to 18 and offers some psychological depth. Her mother has recently died, her relationship with her father is troubled, and she is stuck in Horseshoe Bay, Me. — not the Midwestern River Heights of the books — while she waits to reapply to college. A sleuth since girlhood, she has sworn off investigating. “I don’t go searching in the dark anymore,” she says in voice-over. That resolve lasts about 10 minutes. Oh, and in this world, ghosts are real.

Hsu Taylor knows that this version (the ghosts, the sex, the teen angst, the effortlessly diverse cast) may surprise some Nancy devotees. “But the way that we chose to do it is a way that is inclusive and updated and modern and relevant and accessible to audiences,” she said.

If you look past the updates, you can still see the outline of the classic heroine. “What’s left behind is a girl who cannot accept that the truth not be told, like she cannot sleep at night, unless the mystery is solved,” said Landau, speaking by telephone. (She apologized for the bad reception: “I’m walking down a weird hidden staircase,” she said, which seemed very on brand.)

The writers and directors have scattered Easter eggs drawn from the novels within each episode. (Savvy fans will clock a shout-out to “The Secret of the Old Attic” in the pilot.) They also invited Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has cited the books as a profound influence, to make a cameo.

This new Nancy might be messy, but she is, like the Nancys before her, brave, resourceful and a demon in her roadster. Can she solve the mystery of network renewal? For now, she’s on the case.