Nancy Drew’s Fans Have a Clue

Spunky Nancy Drew might faint with fright--golden locks flying, high heels twisting, pearls askew--if she knew what was to befall her flapper girl self:

The ‘90s Nancy is a university journalism major who drives a Mustang, colors her hair and thinks way too much about boys.

“They have changed Nancy Drew in a frightening way,” sniffed Beth Caswell, founder of the Nancy Drew Detective Club, “taking away her manners, her roadster, her white gloves.”

The club’s 40 members met for the first time recently in Seal Beach, clucking over the demise of Nancy’s zippy blue roadster and pining for the oh-so-gentle mayhem of the original ‘30s books. Members are mostly baby boomers who remember a kinder, pre-chain-saw-massacre time. And, hush, please, on those en vogue academic theories about Nancy’s alleged lesbianism and the recently published Jungian analysis of Nancy’s psyche.

Instead, the all-female group plans to honor the teen sleuth’s memory at special events, including a Nancy Drew sleuthing expedition through Orange County, and to promote the identity of the books’ original writer, who used the pseudonym Carolyn Keene.

The author, who wasn’t publicly acknowledged until April 1993, is Mildred Wirt Benson, a 90-year-old newspaper columnist for the Toledo Blade in Ohio. Benson is bewildered and a little cranky about all the attention.

“It’s endless,” says Benson, adding that several Nancy Drew clubs exist nationwide. “It’ll die down and then it’ll start up again with a bang.”

The big bang came nearly three years ago at the first Nancy Drew Conference, a three-day affair at the University of Iowa to celebrate one of the best-selling juvenile book series in the world, with more than 70 million copies in print.

Book sleuths had recently discovered Benson, the first woman to earn a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Iowa, as the original Carolyn Keene. Because of a confidentiality agreement with the publisher, the former Stratemeyer Syndicate, Benson had never before claimed authorship.

Benson was paid $125 for each of the 23 books she wrote and got no royalties from the syndicate, which also created the Bobbsey Twins and the Hardy Boys series.

Updated books on the teen detective are published by a division of Simon & Schuster, which acknowledges Benson as the author, says Anne Greenberg, editor of the new Nancy Drew series. But, Greenberg adds, Benson did not create the Nancy character--the syndicate did--and she wrote from plot outlines supplied by the publisher.

The identity of Carolyn Keene was one mystery unraveled, but others popped up with reckless abandon, much the way they did in Nancy’s world of broken lockets and hidden staircases and old clocks.

At the conference, academics bandied about a theory that Nancy is a lesbian. Consider, the theory goes, that boyfriend Ned is always on the back burner and that Nancy guns speedboats and finds herself in locked car trunks.

Or consider author Betsy Caprio’s Jungian analysis of Nancy Drew as the goddess-heroine archetype that all women allegedly yearn to be.

Caswell and other die-hard Nancy fans say the theories are misguided attempts to get to the heart of the teenager’s enduring appeal. Nancy, they say, simply evokes memories of a warm-and-fuzzy girlhood, the times when they snuck under the covers with a flashlight to find out what trouble was brewing in River Heights.

“Some people look at it and say, ‘Why are all these adults looking backward on something that is no longer part of our time?’ ” Caswell said.

“I think [it’s] the fact that she is a best-selling book at a time when we’re all out of the age group that they were originally written for. . . . People have an interest in analyzing anything to death that’s successful.”

For club member Colleen Crossen, a writer in her early 40s, Nancy Drew was a hero.

“Reading Nancy Drew gave a lot of women my age [hope],” the Seal Beach resident said. “It . . . opened the door for us to be doctors, to be lawyers, to be professional people. . . . Back then, doctors were male, lawyers were male, and Nancy could do everything.”

Caswell, a public relations consultant, started the club after word spread about the real Carolyn Keene.

“Part of my concern was [that] lost forever would be [the facts on] the woman who really created Nancy Drew . . . an appreciation of who she is and how she sees her world,” said Caswell, who plans lectures at libraries and bookstores to talk up the author.

Meanwhile, the club wants to re-create Nancy Drew mysteries, with members ages 18 to 75 dressing in costume and acting out parts at a restored Victorian mansion or an old house with a spooky attic or creepy staircase.

Maybe someone could slam a door--the way Nancy did when she was in a hurry, forever startling Hannah, the warmhearted housekeeper.