Clued In to a Life of Adventure

It is recognizable from across the room, and across the years, the yellow bookshelf that has decorated the bedrooms of millions of American girls. Ten, 20, 30 spines side by side, running from pale lemon to dandelion, depending on the age of the book, titled in identical typeface and carrying that small but familiar profile with the magnifying glass--Nancy Drew.

It’s hard to accept that Nancy Drew is dead. Certainly her publishers would have us believe it is not so. Archway Paperbacks finally got the girl detective into college six years ago where she continues to stumble upon crimes that now include dorm thefts and date rape. But for women of a certain age--let’s be kind and say 30 and older--there was only one Nancy Drew--the slim, titian-haired girl of the early books, the ones written by Mildred Benson, the first of several writers to use the pen name Carolyn Keene for the series, who died Tuesday.

Nancy Drew is an American icon, perhaps the most widely recognizable detective this side of the Atlantic, certainly one of the most enduring figures in adolescent literature. Her name has become shorthand for an adventuresome young female, the girl who, upon hearing creaking floorboards and muffled knocks, advances, flashlight in hand, while all her friends whisper after her, “Are you crazy?”

Benson’s vision of Nancy Drew, the early Nancy Drew, is a rare alchemy of fairy tale, adventure and camp, the magical elixir of literary immortality. Her mother was dead, her father took her seriously, her friends--Bess, fretting endlessly over her “irrepressible plumpness,” and tomboy George-- were neurotic enough to make her look good, her boyfriend was true, if dull, she was pretty and smart and, most important, she had a blue roadster of her very own.

For pre-”Buffy the Vampire Slayer” generations, she was all that stood between us and our induction into the grim world of adult literary heroines--the Madame Bovaries, the Sister Carries and the Anna Kareninas, even the Elizabeth Bennets for whom happiness equaled a wedding day. Nancy Drew would have found her runaway sister herself, before the family’s honor had been compromised, and the only way Nancy Drew would throw herself under a train was if there were a very important clue dangling there.

“She could do everything,” says Lea Fox, who runs a Web site devoted to the foreign editions of the books (Drew has been translated into 22 languages). “People criticize her for being perfect, that she wasn’t realistic, but I wasn’t looking for realism in my books when I was 12. I aspired to her level of competence.”

Nancy never got older, says Fox, 36, and she never got too involved with the stalwart Ned Nickerson, which Fox also appreciated when she was young. Where even feminist maverick Louisa May Alcott capitulated to the traditional desires of demanding “Little Women” fans and married off Jo March to her dreary Teutonic professor and a life of maternal servitude, Benson refused to even entertain such a notion.

Her Nancy flew her own airplane, was up and about moments after being bashed on the head or almost suffocated. She coolly faced down jewel thieves and kidnappers, ducked out of dances in pursuit of clues, never left her friends in danger and almost always picked up the check. As for the dated details of the early books--the gloves, the pumps, the constant mention of the heroine’s blazing blue eyes--well, what’s accurate in one era is enjoyably campy in another, even when you’re 12.

Although it wasn’t until 1980 that Benson revealed herself as the author of the first 23 books, somehow my friends and I knew that, although Carolyn Keene was a pseudonym, this wasn’t the work of a guy in a porkpie hat churning out copy for a buck a page. Keene, we knew, had to be Nancy’s aunt, or Nancy’s pal, or Nancy all grown up.

We also knew something changed after her first couple dozen books. Numbers 24, 25 and 26 (“The Clue in the Old Album,” “Ghost of Blackwood Hall” and “The Clue of the Leaning Chimney”) were pretty good, but then Nancy lost some of her oomph, became too ladylike, more apt to help trusty housekeeper Hannah Gruen with the dishes than slam out the back door with the carefree thoughtlessness of privileged youth. And, indeed, there was a concerted effort in the 1950s to tone Nancy down, to keep her, with the rest of American women, closer to home. An effort Benson had nothing to do with.

Like Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, Benson grew sick of her famous creation. She wrote many other books, including several series of other girl detectives that she liked better than Nancy, but to the reading public, Nancy Drew she was, and Nancy Drew she remains.

When fans learned of Benson, of her days as a pilot and adventurer, of her career as a journalist when that was still a breakthrough job for women, even of the fact that she died just hours after being in the newsroom working on a column, it validated all the hours so many of us had spent with our heads bent over those pages.

Thousands of us, millions of us, trying to learn Morse code and the stickman alphabet, reaching for our flashlights in the half-hope that the rattle we heard outside our window wasn’t just a branch in the wind, that something exciting was about to happen to us. We weren’t just dreaming all those hours away. Nancy Drew had been real after all.