For 75 years, a teen titan

MELANIE REHAK, author of “Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her,” has taken on a feat of daring worthy of Nancy herself. Writing about the teenage detective of River Heights and her creators is akin to writing about the historical Jesus. The eyewitnesses are gone and the documentation open to interpretation. Nancy’s most devoted followers worship her and defend her from any perceived slight. Her detractors don’t find her appealing in the first place. Most of the great group in the middle would rather do without the history lesson. Rehak may change their minds, though, because the tale of Nancy’s creators has as many false trails and secret compartments as any story told by the series’ pseudonymous author, Carolyn Keene, whoever she may be at the moment.

The mystery of Nancy Drew’s popularity adds another layer of intrigue, a puzzle that Rehak is far from the first to try to solve. In the post-Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, era, why is this 75-year-old series about a girl who drives a blue roadster still selling so well? Why do parents still give Nancy Drew books to their daughters?

After all, Nancy Drew isn’t the only detective designed for children. She’s outlasted a lot of her competitors, some with more to recommend them. For example, Walter R. Brooks (who later created the talking horse, Mister Ed) dreamed up a porcine detective, Freddy the Pig, who appeared in 26 novels in a series that ran from 1927 until 1958. Freddy arguably has more personality and a better sense of humor than Nancy. Freddy is intelligent and sensitive; he’s a poet as well as a sleuth. Thrown into one adventure after another, he does the job without being knocked unconscious very often, whereas Nancy Drew ought to be the poster child for Head Injury Prevention Week.

Although the girl with the titanium cranium is still going strong these days, it’s easier to find truffles than new adventures of Freddy the Pig; moreover, the series was out of print for 30 years. Even if he had been Frederica the Pig, I suspect matters would be the same. After all, there haven’t been several generations of mama pigs who have needed books to teach their piglets to have faith in their own piggy intelligence and not give it all up to the first handsome hog that snuffles near their trotters. As it turns out, all pigs, even girl pigs, are allowed to shove at the trough, and this is encouraged rather than frowned on. Some of the information human girls need, pigs already know. Human mothers must manage their teaching more subtly, so they’ve been handing a set of secret-code books to their daughters over the last 75 years, and Nancy Drew has carried the messages.

What messages? Aren’t the books just fun?

The messages: A girl doesn’t have to stay home while the boys have adventures. A girl doesn’t have to be the detective’s helper; she can be the detective. A girl can be in all sorts of trouble and danger and find her way out of it by using her head, even if it’s throbbing. A girl can take risks to do the right thing. A girl can be smart and active and have a boyfriend who isn’t threatened by her intelligence and independence. She can even find a guy who likes that about her and believes in her worth.

The fun: Nancy is rich, attractive and athletic; she has her own car; she has a devoted boyfriend and sidekick cousins to do the boring stuff. Her father dotes on her, and although Nancy’s mother died when she was young, housekeeper Hannah makes the meals, cleans the house and worries as needed, without the maternal “Oh no you don’t, young lady!” Nancy gets away with being a bit bossy herself. “Keep Out” signs mean nothing to her.

In other words, teen paradise.

You may suspect Nancy of being a feminist. (Annoyingly, Rehak often uses the pejorative “women’s libber” to mean “feminist,” apparently believing the terms equivalent.) Rehak sees Nancy as a “guide for the ages” and a role model for the “fighting days still ahead of us.” Yet she believes that you’d never find Nancy Drew marching for women’s rights, and she’s doubtless correct. Nancy isn’t given to political statements, or even to noticing things like World War II. She’s too busy finding clues and enjoying her privileges. If she seems to embody conflicting traits, “Girl Sleuth” may help you to understand why.

The pleasures of “Girl Sleuth” come from what most of the book is devoted to -- the stories of the forceful personalities behind the series and how their lives were affected by historical events. Historical context is presented awkwardly at times, almost like commercial breaks: We interrupt this biography for a word from our research. There are scattered and perfunctory references to the Great Depression, World War II, the civil rights movement. Rehak is on surer ground when she writes about three key individuals: Edward Stratemeyer, whose publishing syndicate at the turn of the 20th century produced such long-running series as the Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys, and who conceived of the character of Nancy Drew; his daughter Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who managed the company after his death in 1930 and served as Carolyn Keene from the mid-1950s through the 1970s; and Mildred Wirt Benson, an intrepid female journalist and the series’ first author. The working relationship between Adams and Benson was complex and often stormy, and Rehak’s research into this aspect of the saga makes “Girl Sleuth” a must read for anyone who has ever wondered where Carolyn Keene got her ideas.

Progress doesn’t have a blue roadster, but it gets there eventually: Nearly 50 years after Nancy started solving cases, adult female detectives began to be as brave and bright as the girl from River Heights. Rehak, however, fails to give more than the slightest notice to the Nancy Drew series as part of the crime-fiction genre, and you’ll forgive me if I find this an odd omission. Although I never read more than a handful of the stories as a child, I’m distinctly in the minority among American women who are crime-fiction authors. Most of my colleagues, asked when they first began to love mysteries, will immediately answer, “With Nancy Drew. I read them all. Twice.”

So here’s to Nancy. Long may she snoop. *