The case of the girl detective

George has no personality traits aside from athleticism and occasional unkind critiques of Bess' weight ("Eating is really a very fattening hobby, dear cousin"). Bess has little more: occasional glimmers of giggly timidity and a tendency to eat sundaes when the other girls choose soft drinks. Nancy is the median between their two moderate extremes, and in that sense is even more featureless than they. George is a tiny bit too thin and too masculine; Bess is a shade too plump and too feminine. Nancy Drew is just right, and though she's always the best at everything -- from horseback riding to water ballet, to name the two that impressed me most when I was 9 -- she has no interests, speech patterns or personality quirks that carry over from book to book.

The girls also have no troubling feelings besides curiosity and, occasionally, fear. They never get angry at one another. Nancy never misses her boyfriend, Ned, who is often conveniently "in Europe" or at college. She doesn't mourn her lost mother. She doesn't have the self-doubt that plagues most contemporary teenage characters. What she does have is a seemingly endless flow of cash. And a nice car. And the chance to take excellent vacations because she is neither in school nor gainfully employed. She has fabulous clothes, and is portrayed -- in the yellow hardcover editions that can still be easily found at the public library -- in sporty, clean-lined drawings that recall fashion illustrations.

In short, the Nancy Drew stories are both pure mysteries and glamour fantasies. The lack of emotion and character, combined with trademark cliffhangers at the close of every chapter -- "Within seconds, the canoe sank!" "Just then the agonized scream of a woman came from the house!" -- make the books read like exercises in pure plot-making. At the same time, the old illustrations are still reprinted because the neat little outfits and carefully constructed hairstyles are part of the books' appeal. Food, clothes and vacations to dude ranches, summer cottages and historic castles -- it's all closer to reading old copies of Mademoiselle magazine than it is to Agatha Christie.

Unlike the hardcovers, the contemporary paperbacks have no pictures except cover art that makes Nancy look more like Alicia Silverstone than Joan Fontaine -- but the prose style is remarkably similar to that of the Benson stories. Same digs at Bess' weight; same cool clothes for Nancy; still no job, no school; great car, great travel; no atmosphere or description other than meals and outfits. In short, the same fantasy.

Ironically, since her heroine had such a sense of entitlement and always proudly identified herself as a detective, Mildred Benson never collected royalties and was contractually bound from admitting she was a series writer until a court case in the 1980s revealed it. Also ironically, the yellow hardcovers, which I have always thought of as the "real" Nancy Drew books (as opposed to the contempo-romance-looking paperbacks) -- are actually revised, condensed editions of the stories as written by Benson and the other early Carolyn Keenes. In 1959, Harriet Adams had them edited to uniform length, excising racial slurs and other unpleasant bits. Nancy's age was also raised from 16 to 18 and her hair color changed: blond in the originals, she is "titian-haired" in the yellow books.

To find the original stories as Benson wrote them would take probably only a few minutes on eBay, but a 1930 blue-covered first edition of "The Secret of the Old Clock" is worth $1,500, whereas the revised, yellow-covered 1959 edition is worth $10 to $25. Libraries have the yellow. Bookstores have the yellow. Therefore this article, my memories and most of Mildred Benson's legacy are built primarily on a Nancy rather different from the original. Benson told Salon that the Adams edits "made Nancy into a traditional sort of a heroine. More of a house type. And in her day, that is what I had specifically gotten away from."

And yet, it is the yellow books that matter most, because they are the texts that have infiltrated the collective imagination of anyone born after, say, 1952. (That is, unless you are a true fan, or a collector, or a book historian -- in which case they are corrupt and second-rate.) In any case, Benson's passing is just a symbol. She wrote some of the books, but not all. She wrote some of the prose we see on the page, but not all. She was the "real" Carolyn Keene, and she was not. Her Nancy is the "real" Nancy, and it is not. The essence of the girl sleuth -- if the essence of a fictional character is somehow located in authorship or in textual sanctity -- remains an unsolvable mystery.

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