Nancy Drew and those authors
So you could say I've been revisiting my childhood by rediscovering my interest in Nancy Drew. Like a good canon girl, I started at the very beginning with The Secret of the Old Clock. This canon has an inherent problem. In the 1950s, the Stratemeyer Syndicate revised a number of the early books, partly to update them (i.e. Nancy's blue roadster become a convertible) and partly to make them more PC. However, they didn't anticipate all the changes, namely Nancy's appearance. I mentioned in my last entry that Nancy had a blonde phase, but they'd liked the reddish cast given her hair in one cover that they'd made it canon. They'd adjusted all the covers to account for Nancy's titian hair. But the text of The Secret of the Old Clock still calls her an attractive blue eyed blonde. Oops. Also missing from these early books are Bess and George and Ned. They wouldn't be introduced for another few books. But they've become so associated with the Nancy Drew canon that you just imagine they've been there all along, don't you?
Harriet Stratemeyer Adams died when I was younger, so I remember the fuss over the "death of Carolyn Keene". Mildred Wirt Benson's contributions weren't mentioned or remembered. The Stratemeyer legacy was all that mattered, not that it was written by a bunch of unappreciated ghostwriters. I remember my girlhood disappointment that there really wasn't one smart young female writer creating all these wonderful characters I'd followed. Not just Nancy and Frank and Joe, but Kay Tracey and the Dana Girls. It was like discovering there was no Santa Claus.
But what if Carolyn Keene and Franklin W. Dixon were real? What would they have been like? Gordon McAlpine attempts to answer that tantalizing question in the ultimately disappointing Mystery Box, dropping them in the middle of 1920s era Paris during the height of the "Lost Generation", when disenchanted writers and artists found their way to the Left Bank. The book is peppered with references and appearances by these famous people, including F. Scott Fitzgerald & his wife Zelda, Ernest Hemingway, Alice B. Toklas & Gertrude Stein, and Dos Passos. It's also peppered with in-jokes and references to the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books themselves.
On the one hand, this shorthand works, because the obviously not-so-clever readers can go "Oh that's where they got that from." On the other hand, the references are too literal, the names and places exactly the same. Carolyn Keene is indeed a prominent lawyer's daughter from River Heights and Frank Dixon is one of two brothers from Bayport. While there are some similarities, though, some things are very different. Joe Dixon disappeared or deserted after WWI and Frank spends a good deal of the book on his big investigation for his missing brother. Carolyn's relationship with her father is anything but the picture perfect one we know from the Nancy Drew books. Carson Keene comes off as quite unsympathetic as a philanderer. I find it equally hard to forgive him as his daughter does. I'd rather have had the names different, because in the end, it feels like Carolyn and Frank were guilty of the exact whitewashing accused of the later revisions. They wanted to remember their families and lives as they wanted them to be -- the perfect idyllic small town lives with the occasional adventure, rather than sad or sordid tales they were, sort of the opposite of Peyton Place. I don't know that that's a bad thing exactly, but it just struck me as odd. Wouldn't their friends or families notice their names used in the stories? Of course, the other Mrs. Keene, the evil Anne, if she bothered to pick up a book that wasn't literary or famous, would note that she was not included in Nancy's idyllic life, just as she didn't want to include Carolyn. So maybe there's some justice after all.
In the end, it's mostly a love story of two would-be writers finding a life's work together. I just wish it didn't come with the odd aftertaste of bathtub gin.
Harriet Stratemeyer Adams died when I was younger, so I remember the fuss over the "death of Carolyn Keene". Mildred Wirt Benson's contributions weren't mentioned or remembered. The Stratemeyer legacy was all that mattered, not that it was written by a bunch of unappreciated ghostwriters. I remember my girlhood disappointment that there really wasn't one smart young female writer creating all these wonderful characters I'd followed. Not just Nancy and Frank and Joe, but Kay Tracey and the Dana Girls. It was like discovering there was no Santa Claus.
But what if Carolyn Keene and Franklin W. Dixon were real? What would they have been like? Gordon McAlpine attempts to answer that tantalizing question in the ultimately disappointing Mystery Box, dropping them in the middle of 1920s era Paris during the height of the "Lost Generation", when disenchanted writers and artists found their way to the Left Bank. The book is peppered with references and appearances by these famous people, including F. Scott Fitzgerald & his wife Zelda, Ernest Hemingway, Alice B. Toklas & Gertrude Stein, and Dos Passos. It's also peppered with in-jokes and references to the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books themselves.
On the one hand, this shorthand works, because the obviously not-so-clever readers can go "Oh that's where they got that from." On the other hand, the references are too literal, the names and places exactly the same. Carolyn Keene is indeed a prominent lawyer's daughter from River Heights and Frank Dixon is one of two brothers from Bayport. While there are some similarities, though, some things are very different. Joe Dixon disappeared or deserted after WWI and Frank spends a good deal of the book on his big investigation for his missing brother. Carolyn's relationship with her father is anything but the picture perfect one we know from the Nancy Drew books. Carson Keene comes off as quite unsympathetic as a philanderer. I find it equally hard to forgive him as his daughter does. I'd rather have had the names different, because in the end, it feels like Carolyn and Frank were guilty of the exact whitewashing accused of the later revisions. They wanted to remember their families and lives as they wanted them to be -- the perfect idyllic small town lives with the occasional adventure, rather than sad or sordid tales they were, sort of the opposite of Peyton Place. I don't know that that's a bad thing exactly, but it just struck me as odd. Wouldn't their friends or families notice their names used in the stories? Of course, the other Mrs. Keene, the evil Anne, if she bothered to pick up a book that wasn't literary or famous, would note that she was not included in Nancy's idyllic life, just as she didn't want to include Carolyn. So maybe there's some justice after all.
In the end, it's mostly a love story of two would-be writers finding a life's work together. I just wish it didn't come with the odd aftertaste of bathtub gin.