for chasing down the bad guys and making quick escapes

1955 Porsche 356 Speedster.

I would go into sleuthing if I got one of these. Nancy drove in style.

imaginary outfit: me, as nancy drew

As a kid, I was a selective reader. Series books like Babysitter's Club, Sweet Valley High and Choose Your Own Adventure were all the rage from third to sixth grade, and I regarded them as pure dreck. Too formulaic, too predictable.

The formulas I loved belonged to an earlier era - a world populated by The Happy Hollisters, sets of Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys, Katie John, Trixie Belden, Deanna Durbin, Cherry Ames, and of course, Nancy Drew. I'd check them out by the dozen from the library and devour them. They were appealingly wholesome and pleasingly archaic. I loved the descriptions of food - ham salad sandwiches, deviled eggs and fruit cocktail, often served from a tray or a picnic hamper; the clothes - sweater sets and plaid sunsuits and crinoline party dresses; the rides in convertibles and sleek wooden boats, the stables of horses, the camping and road trips, and the benignly neglectful guardians who only ever worried just enough.

Nancy was the queen of this happy band. The equal of any adult even at 18, fearless, well-liked, and impeccably turned-out at all times. Flashlight in hand, she'd explore rotting docks, cobwebby staircases, abandoned mansions, and still make it home in time for a tray of sandwiches with her father in his study. 

Martha sourced the classic signature Nancy Drew look piece for piece in a great post at Nibs, but this is my own take.

title after title

The summer I was seven, a sudden adventure shanghaied my parents, and they hastily deposited me at my grandmother’s home, in suburban New Jersey, for the weekend. I was sitting mournfully by the back-yard pool, without the prospect of a playmate, when my grandmother came down the flagstone path, a box in her hands, and announced, with an air of genial relief, “I’ve found your mother’s old Nancy Drews.” Warped and moldy, “The Bungalow Mystery,” on top of the box, appeared unpromising—and, at two hundred pages, long. But desperation will drive a child to great lengths. I began to read and, it now seems, didn’t look up for several years.

Meghan O’Rourke, writing in The New Yorker.

Photo from here.

adventure and domesticity

Bobbie Jean Mason, The Girl Sleuth, page 60.

I won't lie - one of my favorite parts of the Nancy Drew books were the tea sandwiches and cut-glass dishes of fruit cocktail with maraschino cherries dished up by her housekeeper after each harrowing adventure.

nancy

Every story began with the same line - or so it seemed to me and my knowing sisters. Nancy bounced down the front steps, her blue eyes sparkling, her blond hair blowing in the breeze.

She was Nancy Drew, the preternaturally talented and perpetually cheerful young detective who could swim like an Olympian and nurse like Florence Nightingale, who could pick locks, solve puzzles, stare down crooks, and change a tire on her zippy blue roadster with the same ease she shopped for an evening gown. She was always polite but ever firm, brave but sensible, gracious but independent.

Her father, handsome attorney Carson Drew, indulged her; her mother had conveniently died years before. She was a high-school grad with no apparent plans for career or college. In the sunny town of River Heights, some vaguely Midwestern locale that never seemed to experience winter, her days were her own: She was always bouncing down those front steps with only a cardigan for warmth, climbing into an open car and roaring off on another adventure.

I think that was her appeal most of all, her autonomy. At the magic age of 18, she was already endowed with the freedom that we girls dreamed adulthood would bring. It was a freedom unencumbered, of course, by both the deeper pleasures and the daily drudgery of real adulthood, things of which girlish readers did not yet want to know. Housekeeper Hannah Gruen cooked the meals, Carson Drew picked up the bills, and boyfriend Ned Nickerson never required more attention than a peck on the cheek.

Of course, we had an inkling there was something unnatural about this world.

 Kate Taylor, writing in the The Globe and Mail, June 16, 2007.

crimefighters