Who made Nancy Drew?

It sounds like you found yourself more compelled by Mildred and Harriet and their stories than by Nancy Drew, the character.

Well, I think it was really all three. I think Nancy Drew is a great character, and her place in American culture is obviously really important. But she's a fictional, stock character. She's not that complicated. You couldn't really write a "biography" of Nancy Drew. To me, the appeal was that I could examine this character in a social context and then have behind her these real stories of real women who actually put into her all the experience and troubles and triumphs that they had had. As with every book or every movie or whatever, there's always a story behind the story. And had she been done by other people, she might not have been the pioneering character that she was.

So you read Nancy Drew books a lot when you were younger?

I did, yeah. I mean, they were not my favorite. But I had many favorites. I was just sort of a crazy reader. I loved mysteries. I read "Encyclopedia Brown" and I read Agatha Christie, and so, you know, I definitely read them all. And I read them all a thousand times. My sister had read them and my mother had read them -- and I think that that's a very common Nancy Drew feature. A lot of people get them from their mothers who remember reading them as a kid; they get handed on in that way.

How many Nancy Drew books did you read during the course of writing the book?

Well, I read all 56 of the original ones.

It sounds like you knew all the nuances and differences between when they were reworked ...

Right. So I read all 56 originals, and I've read a bunch of the rewrites of the original ones. I didn't read every rewrite, I don't think. And then I read some of the ones that came out in the '80s -- you know, the "Nancy Drew Files" and the ones where she goes to college. And then I've read some of the really new ones, the Simon and Schuster ones that just launched last year. So I don't know. A lot is the answer.

It's fun, though. One of the great things about writing this book is that on the really bad days that everybody has writing a book, it was like: "I'm just going to read some Nancy Drew today." And it counts. It's not like I'm secretly reading a romance novel and eating a chocolate. I can actually count this as two hours of work I did today.

What else was part of your research? You were obviously at the University of Iowa. And you had access to the Stratemeyer papers?

Right. The Stratemeyer Syndicate archive is at the New York Public Library, and it's huge. I would say the bulk of my research came from there. All the correspondence -- really between everybody -- came from there. Most of the early history of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, like when Edward Stratemeyer started up, came from there. There have been a few books written about that -- academic books -- but those papers were only opened to the public in the late '90s. So actually, I think I'm the first person to really sit down and go through them box by box.

There are a lot of questions that had persisted amongst people who had studied series books for years that -- I don't mean to brag, but now, finally, I have answered [some]. Nobody was ever sure what year he started the Syndicate. But if you read through all these papers, it's very clear. I quote a couple of letters in the book about when he gets the idea and then when he writes to the first person that he wants to ghost-write [his books]. There's a lot of stuff like that that just was really exciting. And then there were some great things I didn't expect to find: the whole file of letters between Harriet and her sister, Edna.

Why do you think Nancy has remained relevant all these years? Does it have to do with the characteristics that Harriet and Mildred infused in her?

I think that they really put into her all of their drive and stubbornness. They were both unbelievably stubborn in different ways. Even though she is very superficially outlined in some ways, those qualities in her are very real. And those qualities are timeless. It's an earlier version of "girl power." One of the things I wondered about as I was writing this was what would have happened if Edward Stratemeyer hadn't died, and he had been the one editing the books, and Mildred was writing them. Would he have made her different? And would she have just been another one of his characters that had a good run and then died out?

I really think [the relevance has to do with] the fact that it's these two women who were both living that same challenge. Harriet was trying to run this company and she was surrounded by men. And Mildred was trying to become a journalist, which was also a completely male world. They both basically just busted their way in. They said, "I'm here, and I'm not going anywhere, and you're going to do it my way." Especially reading all the books over again, I think you get that from Nancy Drew, which is maybe not something people remember that specifically.

If you haven't read them in a while, I think you do tend to think of them as less complicated. But that was something that surprised me when I read them over: She is complicated. Even though the books always follow the same trajectory and even though she always gets away in the end, she's not without her moments of self-doubt and her moments of sentiment. They're never about Ned [Nancy's longtime boyfriend]; they're about other things. It was interesting to me to actually find in the book the reasons why the series lasted so long. It's not just hype. Even though the original ones have problems with racism and dated language, they're still just really good. They're really fun to read. And they're gripping. You want to know what's going to happen. That never died for me even though I was reading them constantly. It was, like, I gotta know, I gotta know.

Next Page: Was Nancy a trust fund baby, or a proto-feminist?

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