The Not-So-Shy Sleuth…

      Hands on her hips, Nancy Drew stood in the middle of her bedroom and surveyed the situation. New clothes lay everywhere – strewn across the bed, draped over the backs of chairs, and spilling out of shopping bags.

       Laughing at the mess, Nancy reached for a just-bought pair of designer jeans. “How do you like the new look in private detectives?” she said, slipping the jeans on. “Undercover and overdressed!”

Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill

Nancy Drew seems only to wear designer jeans. In the paragraphs to follow, it is revealed that Nancy has gone out to buy an entirely new wardrobe for her first case in “Secrets Can Kill,” where she goes undercover as a high schooler.

That is, the first case in the 1980’s series of Nancy Drew books, aimed at an older teenaged audience. I should point out here that the case takes approximately one week to complete. That’s a hell of a lot of clothes for a week long adventure.

She crashes her Mustang GT convertible twice in this book.

Blink.

Her father surprises her with a new one after she blows it up the first time. She half-heartedly throws this into conversation with the blond hunk of an 18 year old boy who she is blatantly hitting on.

Which, of course, brings us to our next point – 1980’s Nancy Drew is totally a slut. We all remember Ned Nickerson, right? He’s Nancy’s steady, college-going preppy boyfriend. Yeah, you certainly wouldn’t guess that from the way she is throwing herself at Mr. Daryl Gray in this here book. It takes her all of ten minutes to start throwing out coy smiles and gentle touches and what not. She does this all while remembering that Ned is the one she loves, thereby deflating the balloon of guilt before it gets too big.

This would all be somewhat nifty if she were using her feminine wiles to find clues and coerce people into crap – hell, I’m down with the power of femininity, but she actually blinds herself to the situation by going all googly-eyed over Mr. Blond-and-Blue-Eyed. You’re left feeling kind of like she was deliberately duped.

Nancy Drew was my hero when I was a kid. I think she’s the reason I now where glasses – I would stay up until 3:00 am with a flashlight, avoiding the scolding of my parents, just to read, read, read. The fact that it was a quick read brought it to the top of my list for 52 books in 52 weeks, but I also have been wanting to reread one for years – these books are the books that made me who I am today, an avid, avid, book-lover.

So it was with a touch of shock that I discovered that 1980’s Nancy is, in fact, egotistical, angry, vengeful , and a little stupid half the time.

 

Oddly, this has not lessened nor changed my love for Ms. Drew. If it weren’t for my insanely long list of books I need to get to, I would have jumped immediately into “Deadly Intent,” Case #2. If long-ago memory serves, Nancy and Ned have some problems in the next couple of books, and I wanna see how she explains herself…teehee.