Since 1930, a plucky girl detective has tagged beside the feminist movement, inviting readers from their girlhood into a sisterhood of bravery and progress. Never unprepared and always up for adventure, she’s literature’s iconic Nancy Drew, a heroine since the emergence of the young adult genre. In mysteries credited to the eponymous Carolyn Keene, Drew has imparted life lessons shared mechanical wisdom. She’s enriched our vocabularies and taught us to prevail through the flowery, yet often pedantic prose of her mystery stories. Behind a single moniker, a team of ghostwriters have collaborated for generations to create the teen detective.
Nancy Drew Mystery Story #4, The Mystery at Lilac Inn, is a quintessential example of the scope of Keene’s influence. The book opens with the titian-haired sleuth and her best gal pal engaged in a high-speed canoe chase with a mysterious stranger. By page 2 the vessel has capsized, and scrappy Nancy has sprung into action, “kicking off her [shoes] and plunging into the water.” The girls evade a lurking stranger — these are adventure stories, after all — and safely dock at Lilac Inn by the conclusion of Chapter 1 (and just in time for brunch).
At least that’s how it goes in the 1989 edition. I first visited Lilac Inn the summer I was 12, sitting on my suburban couch, clutching the lemony-yellow hardback while Nancy endured “The Mysterious Canoe Mishap.” It’s the same copy on my shelf today. Another spine sits near it, also a version of The Mystery at Lilac Inn, this one published in 1930. This is the original, the version my grandmother would have read as a child. Between these two sit a dusty mustard-colored hardback: it’s the 1961 edition, my mother’s Lilac Inn.
Adapted with each release, the copies share little more than a title and protagonist. The canoe chase is missing entirely from the earliest edition. Instead, the story opens with Nancy pulling her “bright blue roadster, low-swung and smart” into the lot of a local inn when she glimpses an enticing ad:
“’The driver, a pretty girl of perhaps 16, attractive in a frock which either by accident or design exactly matched the blue of the automobile, smiled whimsically as she read the sign,
“LILAC INN: CHICKEN DINNERS OUR SPECIALTY.
‘My specialty, too!’ Nancy Drew told herself. ‘The thought of chicken almost makes me expire from hunger. I think I’ll stop here for luncheon.’”
In the original, the chapter I had known as “The Canoe Mishap,” is titled, “A Chance Meeting,” and it introduces a plot entirely disparate from the story of forgery, impersonations, and ghostly apparitions I encountered one preteen summer morning. This time, Nancy uncovers a ring of jewel thieves and is kidnapped from Lilac Inn, barely escaping her captors and her prison aboard a sinking ship.
You could say the plots vary a tad.
Today, whimsical Nancy of 1930 feels archaic, as I look back from the comfort of my modern home office. But Drew has always been progressive. Even famished and demure in the original, she was portrayed as an independent motorist, a radical notion for a woman at the time.
Comparing the copies reveals a metamorphosis in teen detecting: Nancy ages two years, and by the 1961 edition she is 18, though still a strawberry blond in a blue convertible. The storylines and language in each respective edition remind us the Nancy they featured spoke to the values of the time they were released, from the verbiage to the intensity of the action.
With every update, the storyline was suited to the era, and a reflection of social progress. This was the less idyllic reason behind rewrites: an examination of the first editions revel problematic racial slurs and stereotypes. These were removed from the 1961 and all following editions.
Perhaps the enduring resiliency of Drew’s character is due to the evolving plotlines, updated as social progress was made. Without the audacious and agile Carolyn Keene, Nancy’s pages would have started collecting dust just as feminism’s second wave emerged.
When the rewrites of the early books began in 1959, new Nancy Drew Mystery Stories were still being written. When the first 56 volumes were completed in 1978, the series had seen three publishing firms and there had been eight authors behind the name Keene, though that was widely unknown at the time. The writers had all signed agreements with the publisher surrendering their identities.
They were ghosts writing mysteries like Betty Crocker penned recipes: anonymously.
Details around the identity of Keene emerged in the 1980s, when fans learned the volumes were written by multiple authors, most prolifically Mildred Wirt Benson and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, the daughter of Edward Stratemeyer of The Stratemeyer Syndicate. Benson wrote 23 of the original mystery stories. Adams authored 26 and revised eight.
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When Benson’s identity was connected to the Drew series, her alma mater’s publication, the Iowa Alumni Review wrote a feature, and within it a tribute to one of Keene’s strongest voices:
“Before Geraldine Ferraro, before Gloria Steinem, before Jane Fonda — there was Nancy Drew. And before Nancy Drew, there was Mildred Wirt Benson.”
Lilac Inn was written by Benson, later revised by Adams. The two women were reported to have creative differences, which can be noticed in the evolution of Nancy’s character across the series and through rewrites.
There were more writers behind the pen name, too: Walter Karig, George Waller Jr., Wilhelmina Rankin, Margaret Scherf, Alma Sasse, and Charles Strong all wrote under the name Keene before Adams took over the rest of the series.
The Thirteenth Pearl (#56) was released in 1978, and with it the canon closed. But Nancy Drew isn’t one to sit still for long.
Nancy reemerged in 1985, as an older, more mature sleuth than we left her 7 years prior. Readers saw Drew trade in her smart sweater sets for French-cut bikinis in The Nancy Drew Files, a 124 volume series of paperbacks released as a spin-off. The Files were marketed to young adults and were a sporty take on the Harlequin Romance. On the cover of Hit and Run Holiday, Drew’s long-time beau Ned Nickerson lurks behind her, ogling her Aqua-net bangs with a longing smolder.
To be frank, it was smut.
A testament to her diverse appeal, on the other side of the moral spectrum, Drew donned a preppy headband and entered the world of children’s literature in the Nancy Drew Notebooks, a series of chapter books written for grade-schoolers.
In 1998, Nancy drove her bright blue roadster off the bookshelf and into a series of interactive, mystery-themed computer games from HeR Interactive, which are still popular across the internet today.
An abundance of projects followed: movies, graphic novels, new games. Most recently, Nancy emerged in a 2019 Canadian series on The CW.
Throughout the 90-year history of the Drew franchise, ghostwriters have propelled the teen detective to near mythical status, an emblem of girlish tenacity across the Western world. In The Secrets of Nancy Drew, Kathleen Chamberlain writes:
“…the Nancy Drew series has told readers that they can have the benefits of both dependence and independence without the drawbacks, that they can help the disadvantaged and remain successful capitalists, that they can be both elitist and democratic, that they can be both child and adult, and that they can be both ‘liberated’ women and… little girls.”
An ever-present companion in the progression of the feminist narrative, Nancy has modeled strength and resilience. In this sociopolitical climate, it’s comforting to know she’s beside us, even when the metaphorical canoe has a mishap.
Fresh from the loss of her 2016 Presidential bid, Hillary Clinton made a comment to Wild author Cheryl Strayed in which she hailed Drew as a personal inspiration,
“I read a lot of books when I was growing up, but that had a big impact on me, because she was, dare I say, a little bit of a role model. She just seemed like such a go-getter and really smart and brave [….] She was taking care of the house, she was going to school, she was solving mysteries.”
Nancy is a role model for generations of women because previous generations of women created her to endure, a reality difficult to imagine without the team of ghostwriters who continue to drive the brand and who still share the Keene moniker.
The title ghostwriter is spectacular, conjuring images of the supernatural. A haunting presence enduring beyond death. And Keene’s ghost is alive, long past the deaths of her most famous hosts: Adams in 1982, Benson in 2002. The authors of all 56 original mystery stories have all passed on, yet Drew’s character reigns in the hearts of strong girls everywhere, leaving liberation and progress in her wake.
As we continue to press for progress, Nancy’s daughters will face new challenges. We will grapple to reconcile our world of personal brand and identity with the anonymous authorship of the literature that raised us. And we must integrate the legacy of affluent, middle class Drew with the intersectional values we learned in the third and fourth waves of feminism. While reactionary revisions have removed glaring issues of racial and social inequality, there is still room for intentional diversity and inclusion in the Drew empire.
She is adaptable and evolving, and a testimony to the legacy and reach only a team of writers could create. As such, she is a character we can continue to define.
We can do it. It’s our turn to be the voice of Carolyn Keene, and Nancy deserves nothing less.
