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Nancy Drew Mysteries – A Lot of Cozy Mystery Lovers Started Here

Just last month, Turner Classic Movies channel ran several of the old, black and white Nancy Drew movies. I watched all of them, sort of in a nostalgic trance. I enjoyed them immensely. I was transported back to when I was in the fifth grade, when Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys mystery books could be found in my bedroom. Back then I thought Carolyn Keene was the woman who wrote the Nancy Drew mysteries that I enjoyed so much. It probably would have been a surprise to most of us eleven year old girls that Carolyn was indeed not a “real person”.

Though the Nancy Drew series has always been attributed to “Carolyn Keene,” there never has been an author of this name, as the books were ghost-written by a series of anonymous and semi-anonymous authors. Edward Stratemeyer (creator of both Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys) first hired Mildred Wirt (Benson) to write the Nancy Drew mysteries, using the Carolyn Keene pseudonym. From there, Stratemeyer’s daughter, Harriet Adams, took on the task, and she was followed by a string of authors including Susan Wittig Albert.  (Yes, that’s right! Susan Wittig Albert, author of the bestselling China Bayles mysteries, the Darling Dahlias mysteries, and the Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter mysteries.) Actually, more than a dozen authors have written Nancy Drew books, all going by “Carolyn Keene”.

Over the years, and also since so many different authors donned the Carolyn Keene hat, Nancy Drew, as well as the mysteries, have evolved. In the 1960s there was a major revision of the earlier mystery books, which were quite dated. They not only shortened the books (to save on printing expenses) but they also got rid of the “dated” stereotypes that were in the earlier novels.

In the 1980s they over-hauled the series again, and created the Nancy Drew Files. Nancy Drew became a little older, so they sometimes added little romances as subplots in the books. In the 1990s they started two other spin-off series: Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew, which was intended for younger, elementary aged girls, while Nancy Drew on Campus aimed at older teenagers. (Yikes! That’s a lot of different Nancys! Or would that be Nancies?)

In 2004, they officially retired the Nancy Drew series and started the Girl Detective series. They wanted to bring in a whole new audience to the books. However, this didn’t happen, so it was officially cancelled in 2012, and was replaced by the Nancy Drew Diaries series, which is still finding its footing.

Despite the many changes that have occurred to Nancy Drew over the years, “Carolyn Keene” should be proud of her accomplishments – with over 500 books credited to her name, she’s easily one of the most prolific authors of all time! Pretty impressive for someone who never existed!

Comments

  1. Nancy Drew were the first mysteries I read. I was always checking them out of our school library. Heck, as an adult I have gone back and read them again! Love them! I also loved Trixie Belden and The Bobbsey Twins, too.

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  2. Oy those pseudonyms again! 😉
    Susan Wittig Albert? Seriously??? Any idea which were the ones she wrote?
    I got my first two Nancy Drew books for my 10th birthday & a love affair was born. (Note that I’d always loved mysteries, back as early as there WERE children’s mysteries!) Since then my 34yo daughter read them & loved them, as did my 20yo daughter. Currently my 13yo daughter is reading them, by now we own almost all of the original series — and btw, my 13yo says, that by comparison — the older books (older being up to #64, published in 1981) are MUCH better than the newer books written afterwards.

    For anyone interested, there’s a page on Wikepedia listing all the books, including authors (but I don’t see Susan Wittig Albert listed anywhere)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nancy_Drew_books

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  4. I loved those Nancy Drew books as a youngster and now collect them. There’s nothing like the vintage original ‘blue cover’ ones to bring back memories! And the Hardy Boys too – remember on the Mickey Mouse Club … the Secret of Applegate Treasure was taken from the first Hardy Boys mystery! Tommy Kirk & Tim Considine …. nostalgia at its best!

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    • Petie, I never watched the Mickey Mouse Club, and it looks like I probably would have enjoyed it, if they were showing mysteries! I hope you were able to catch the old Nancy Drew movies last month with Bonita Granville.

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    • Loved the Hardy Boys on the Mickey Mouse Club! I had such a crush on them both 🙂 I never really got into the books, though.

      I was obsessed with Nancy Drew in second grade, which led to other favorites like Encyclopedia Brown, the Famous Five and the Three Investigators.

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  5. I read a great book a few years ago about the Stratemeyer family and the creation of Nancy Drew. It’s called “Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her” by Melanie Rehak. Fascinating…

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  6. To be honest, Nancy Drew was the second set of mysteries I liked. The first were the Encyclopedia Brown series of short stories.

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  7. Danna, thank you for the walk down memory lane and for the reminder that even publishers shouldn’t try to fix what isn’t broken.

    Blessings ~ Wendy ❀

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  8. I too loved Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys series. About 20 years ago I collected the whole collection for both series, telling myself they would be for my niece. (hah…they still have a place of pride at my house!) What about some of those other older series, like the Dana Girls, or Beverley Grey, and Cherry Ames? Trixie Belden and the Bobbsey Twins were fun too.

    Anyone else remember some older series as well?

    Oh, I also collect Nancy Drew items (not sure that’s a fit topic for this blog), but love my Nancy Drew wallet and matching card holder. and notebooks.

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    • I remember other older series too, Mary, although Nancy is the most popular, I also enjoyed Judy Bolton, Vicki Barr, Connie Blair and the Dana Girls.

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    • Mary – Nancy Drew was my favorite! My great grandmother noticed that my sister and I loved to read so she introduced us to Nancy Drew and the love affair to mystery began. Recently I re-read some of the first couple of Nancy Drew series in ebook format. Someone had converted to PDF. This was the only time that I can say that I did not enjoy a book on my kindle. It did not have the same magic. I also loved Trixie Beldon.
      Thanks Danna for another great topic!

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    • Mary, what a delightful collection you must have! I guess you could always have lent the books out (sort of an aunt’s special library) to your niece. If I had these books from my childhood, I am sure I would treasure them as much as you do.

      Oh my gosh, what neat Nancy Drew collectibles you have!

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  9. Oh, goodness! I think most mystery readers – the female ones anyway – started with Nancy and the other famous Girl Sleuths, as well as their male counterparts!
    I still have most of my childhood copies, and Stash Empress’s daughter is right. The new stuff is not a patch on them!
    (The ‘Younger Readers’ versions – ‘Clue Crew’ et al – in particular, are terrible! I think they were inspired by the age-grouped Sweet Valley books. ‘Nuff said?)

    I’ve even been lucky enough to pick up a few from the pre-1960’s era, over the years, and they are indeed, excellent.
    A piece of trivia – everybody’s favourite redhead started life as a blonde! Seriously! Gradually she became a ‘Strawberry Blonde’, and then eventually became the ‘Titian-haired’ teenager we all know.

    I have a copy of ‘Girl Sleuth’ somewhere, a gift from a friend, and one of these days I must get around to reading it properly! 🙂

    Nancy, for some reason always came second to Trixie Belden for me, but I still managed an impressive collection, which although currently in storage, is still not going out of my hands! Lol!

    Cheers!

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  10. Loved Nancy Drew as I was growing up. I became a mystery book lover because of her. I have some of the early books with the blue covers as well as the ones with the covers we are all familiar with. Was in Target the other day and someone has redone the covers – not working for me at all. As was stated in an earlier post if it aint broke don’t fix it.

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    • Denise, what a shame about the “new and improved” Nancy Drew covers. I guess the Nancy Drew marketing people want to spiff up Nancy, and make her more “with it” to young girls today. (It wouldn’t work for me, either!)

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  11. I still have many of my Nancy Drew (and Hardy Boys) books. But I always preferred Trixie Belden and Judy Bolton. 🙂

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    • I loved the Judy Bolton books! Many years ago, I was having lunch with a woman I had just met and we bonded over our love of the Judy Bolton books (she was the first person I had met who had even heard of Judy Bolton, let alone read her) and we have been friends since then. I also read the Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden books (also the Hardy Boys), but Judy Bolton always had a special place in my heart.

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  12. Thanks for the informative post, Danna! I knew that Carolyn Keene was a pseudonym (in fact, that is probably when I learned about pseudonyms!) but had no idea about the other things you posted.

    The Nancy Drew books from my childhood still have a place of honor on my bookshelves alongside Trixie Belden and classic authors like Christie and Sayers. Encyclopedia Brown was so popular in school that there was a continual waiting list! BTW, there are lots of Pinterest pages of Nancy Drew book covers for those who are interested in taking a visual walk down memory lane. (I added a few to my Marvelous Mystery Book Covers Pinterest page.)

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  13. Oh my! The Secret of the Old Clock was the very first Nancy Drew book I read! And that was in the ’60s! I also loved the Hardy Boys, Bobbsey Twins, The Happy Hollisters….
    These books sparked my love of reading in general and my love of mysteries in particular! I’ve never really gotten interested in romance novels, give me a good mystery and I’m one happy camper!! Thanks for the stroll down memory lane!

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  14. I also loved the Judy Bolton series but couldn’t find very many of them. (Remember, no internet in those days, no Amazon.com, no Ebay, etc. — all you could find was all you could physically *FIND* — in your local public library, or bookstore if you had actual money to spend on books, & in your friend’s bookshelves).

    I think I did also read some Dana Girls, but they were also very thin on the ground — interestingly enough — guess who wrote the Dana Girls series? Yup — “Carolyn Keene”!

    I think my favorite mystery writer when I was a kid was Phyllis Whitney — I just adored her books — they all took place in such interesting & mostly exotic settings! And after I read all her juvenile books, then I started on her adult books — I think that was my “bridge” between kids lit mysteries & grown up mysteries. (And then to Dame Agatha, around age 12 & so on…)

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    • One of my favorite things from my childhood was our annual trip to the Visiting Nurse Book Sale. The whole family would stand in line with our shopping bags and then rush to the tables and start filling our bags with books! That is how I ended up with a lot of the older Nancy Drew books and discovered Judy Bolton. And I picked up some Dana Girl mysteries because they were written by Carolyn Keene. I don’t have many Hardy Boys books because my brother was getting them and I read his copies.

      I also loved the Phyllis Whitney books, but I don’t own as many of them because I was getting those from the library.

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  15. How I became a mystery fan is a mystery to me. As a child my mother (who was a school teacher) pushed me towards biographies. In fact I can’t remember too many books I read back then. Don’t get me wrong I read some Nancy Drew books but they belonged to friends and cousins. I loved them but couldn’t convince my mother to let me buy them or get them through the library. I guess the ones I was able to get my hands on helped me to become a mystery reader fanatic.

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    • Sheila, it almost sounds like a case of the forbidden fruit! 😉

      My mother was a non-reader, so books were never a priority in my house. When I look back, I cannot really remember anyone other than my father and me enjoying reading. School libraries were a big source of my books back then, oh, and my visits to my grandmother’s house (my father’s mom) were always filled with reading.

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  16. Just to be a smart-alec, in the original comment, you mention Carolyn Keene must be one of the most prolific authors of all time – I can think of three or four ‘real’ people off the top of my head who easily beat her record. 🙂
    All different genres, but John Creasey wrote mysteries – between 7-800 of them. Apparently even he could never remember how many he’d written, himself!

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  17. A funny comment about the Nancy Drew books… I loved them. I lusted over them, and saved my allowance money to buy just one more. My father took me once to the nearest “big town” library, and I was sure the kids section would have every book in the series. But the librarian “kindly” told my father and me that the books weren’t considered worth the library collecting them. I was shattered.

    But a recent conversation with a modern-day librarian opened my eyes. She spoke of what is now considered a mistake by the libraries in not stocking these, and similar books. No, they weren’t highbrow, like other childrens classics (and I did read those too), but she said they lost a generation of readers. Children who read Nancy drew or the Hardy Boys became excited about reading…wanted to read more of the same, and were turned away by their public libraries. Not everyone found Phyllis A. Whitney or Mary Stewart. The librarian said it was bad policy at the time, and something they have learned from. Here’s to finding goosebumps in Grade One these days!

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    • Thanks for that interesting addition to the discussion. There were never any Nancy Drew (or other similar series) books in our libraries when I was growing up. (And Los Angeles is not exactly a “hick town” –there were LOTS of books — just not these series). I never knew why that was. So every once in awhile my brother-in-law (who lived in New York) would find a couple of old Nancy’s at used book stores & send them to me for birthday presents & the like. I TREASURED those volumes & lusted for more! The summer I was 12yo I spent with my sister’s family in a bungalow colony in upstate NY & there were some girls around my age who had brought some Nancy Drew (and other) books that they had taken out of their public library for “summer loan” — I was amazed — both that there was such a thing as “summer loan” (we didn’t have that in Los Angeles) & also that there were public libraries that actually had Nancy Drew books! You can be sure I spent that summer wisely — every spare moment begging/borrowing Nancy Drew from those girls! I never realized *why* our libraries never had the series, but now that you explain what the prevailing policy was, it makes a lot of sense.

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    • Mary, I wonder how many children could have ended up becoming voracious readers if those libraries hadn’t had that awful attitude about children enjoying a book for the fun of it, regardless of their literary value! What a shame!

      Stash Empress, I remember one of my elementary schools carrying them >>> in the northeast.

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    • My grade school librarian also wouldn’t carry Nancy Drews because they had, in her opinion, no literary value. There were three in the libray’s book collection – all were purchased prior to this librarian’s tenure. I was fortunate, though, in that I not only had older sisters, but also a mother who knew that reading should always be encouraged even if her taste was not my taste.

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  18. No doubt about it, Nancy started my love of reading & mystery books. As an adult I scoured flea markets, used book stores& library sales and completed “My Nancy”(roadster and all!)
    Grosset & Dunlop published series.(50’s-60’s)
    My daughter read that series and is waiting to hand them down to her daughter!
    Thanks “Carolyn Keene” you don’t know how beloved you are!

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  19. I had a lot of Nancy Drew mysteries, some bought for me and some inherited from my eldest sister, although my second sister and I tended to collect more Trixie Beldens. We also had a few Hardy Boys, but my brothers never really took to them so the supply was limited.

    Actually anything mystery oriented was fair game in my house, so we also had some Dana Girls books, and some Annette mysteries (which were surprisingly good, as I recall), and (one of my favorites), Phyllis Whitneys (both her juvenile and her adult fiction). I know they’ve released a number of classic juvenile mystery authors on Kindle, and I’ve picked up a few, but I’m still waiting and crossing my fingers on the Phyllis Whitneys.

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  20. Danna, I very much remember reading the Nancy Drew mysteries as well as several others of that time. I recently came across a copy of one of the stories and realized how much I had forgotten about the characters and the writing. Thanks for bringing us down memory lane.

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  21. I used to read those Nancy Drew books under the bed covers by flashlight when I was a kid. I had the double thrill of staying up past my bedtime and following the adventures of the intrepid girl sleuth. I can trace my desire to write mysteries back to Nancy. BTW, when I was writing for the popular Sweet Valley High series in the 1980’s (there was a stable of us, like the writers who were “Carolyn Keene”), public libraries were still turning up their noses at what was considered low-brow YA fiction. From the way I was treated by some, you’d have thought I was peddling drugs on the playground! Totally stupid thinking. I used to get letters from girls from all over the world when I had my own teen series, and many wrote to say mine were the first books they’d read and it had inspired them to read books by other authors. Fortunately, times have changed.

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    • Eileen, how neat that you wrote some of the Sweet Valley High series! It’s a shame that so many children were probably turned off to reading by libraries (and even parents!) who wouldn’t let them pick the “fun” books they wanted to read.

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  22. Hi Danna,
    Just wanted to say thank you so much for all the work you do here. This is just my very favorite blog ever!! Today, when I wanted to tell a friend about a book series I totally couldn’t find the author’s name, so I just came here and found it almost right away. Of course, I also told her about this site too so she can have as much fun as we do!

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