"...I'm sure there are many other girls who could do the same." (Nancy Drew)

"...I'm sure there are many other girls who could do the same."

I'd like to take a moment before I begin this new article to thank the well-wishers who have helped me keep my spirits up after my recent hospitalization.  

For those who weren't clear on exactly what happened, I had to go to the hospital and get some ablations done to my heart.

Rest assured, I have been thoroughly examined.  My heart and blood-pressure and pulse and everything else have been checked and monitored.  My heart is undamaged.  The procedure was a total success.  I feel weak from post-surgical recovery, but I also feel better than I've felt in a few decades because this painful problem has plagued me since then.  But, on the plus side, I took an photo that's been inexplicably described as sexy by some - a picture of my transwoman self lying in my hospital bed wearing a gown an covered with wires and tape.  Enjoy, fetishists.

Personally, I think my nose looks huge and shiny, but honesty is honesty, and I like to take unvarnished photos of big events in my life now, because, as I've said, this blog is as much a biography of my life as it is a celebration of heroic women in fiction.  In fact, getting back to writing it has been a goal over the last week of recovery time.  Considering I couldn't get up from a lying position when I got home on Thursday of this last week, I think it's good progress.  Considering also that until last night I didn't have my glasses because of a mix-up at the hospital - they lost them after checking me in from the ambulance that brought me to OHSU - I'm just glad to be reading at all.  A few days ago, I couldn't even make out the largest font on my Kindle without my eyes feeling like they were going to explode, which made the time waiting to get better, lying in bed every day, seem like an eternity.

Kudos should go to the kind OHSU staff for referring to me as "Dee" and also for using the proper pronouns.  That made the whole situation a heck of a lot easier to deal with, even if it was a minor part of an overall unpleasant situation where I had very little to distract me and had a lot on my mind.  Sometimes, when those two circumstances, commingle, I'm wracked with anxiety.  Because the OHSU staff worked so hard to alleviate that anxiety, I was instead able to think about other things that were more pleasant, like contemplating the subject of this blog article.

But inspiration eluded me - that is, until Cartoon Network began airing episodes of What's New, Scooby Doo? in a block while I was waiting to go in for my surgery.  As I stared at the animated exploits of Daphne Blake and company, inspiration finally hit me:  as soon as I was feeling better, I would write about some of my favorite  "Women of Mystery" in a series of articles, and the first piece would focus on my absolute all-time favorite heroine of the mystery world: Nancy Drew, Girl Detective.

My first exposure to Nancy as a character, however, din't come from the book series.  Rather, it came instead from a television show.  The year was 1977.  I was five years old.  Regular readers of this blog will know that I was a voracious consumer of media.  I still am, but back then I had a lot more time to indulge it.  Realizing with the benefit of hindsight that I was looking for heroes doesn't change the fact that I was a Good Little Television Zombie, as were so many people from my generation.  

Regular readers of my blog will also know that my early childhood was often spent in a great deal of frustration with the world around me, because I didn't have the mental tools to reconcile how I felt about myself with how I was treated.  Likewise, I was old enough to understand sexism, but not old enough to understand its origins and motivations.  Even a very young child is capable of figuring out that something is going on when the adults in the room would talk about women in very different terms than men.  Likewise, even a very young transgirl can figure out:  "Hey, wait a minute - they don't realize it, but they're talking about me when they talk about women ... but they don't know they're talking about me."  And, of course, even a very young transgirl - thanks to our treatment of human differences in general - knows to keep quiet about that sort of thing as much as the pressure-cooker of a learning brain allows.

But, every so often, I'd find an anchor - however  trivial, however ultimately meaningless - that would soothe the pressure in my head.  One of those anchors came in the form of a television show that aired that year:  The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries.  As long-time readers likewise know, I have a very good memory of the events of my early life, and I recall vividly sitting on a plush brown couch in a little house in New York, eating popcorn out of a giant bowl, as a wave of strange images appeared on the television screen.

Whether because of my age or because of my autism, I saw this opening in a very literal light, and I was chilled to the bone - but in an excited, curious kind of way.  I didn't know what the show was going to be like, but the image of the three people investigating the strange maze left me puzzled and scared.  Why would someone drop three people into a giant maze in the middle of that strange, bleak setting?  Were they there volitionally?  What were they looking for?  I remember those specific questions going through my head.

I also remember thinking Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy were EXTREMELY handsome, which drew me further into wanting to know more about them.  But my real focus of interest was on Pamela Sue Martin, for entirely different reasons.  The image of this mysterious woman roaming the maze, with the creepy one-color book covers showing sublime images of skulls and ciphers all around her, made me feel intensely curious.    I could read at that age, and I knew from the title that she must surely be Nancy Drew, but I had no idea who Nancy Drew was at that time.  I'd never heard of the character.  So I simply asked, and the exchange went pretty much exactly like this:

"Mom, is that lady Nancy Drew?"

"Yes, that's Nancy," my mother helpfully replied.

"What are those weird pictures?"

"They're the covers of Nancy Drew books."

"They're books?"

"Yes.  Shhh."

"Are they good?"

"Not really.  The Hardy Boys books are better."

"How come?"

"Nancy only solves mysteries like the case of the missing horse at the ranch.  The Hardy Boys fight pirates and smugglers."  

"What's 'smugglers?'"

"Thieves.  Shhh."

"Oh.  Okay.  So there are Hardy Boys books?"

"Yes.  Now, shhh."

"Okay."

What interests me enough to mention this conversation now is how my mother, a woman, viewed the Nancy Drew books.  Now, it's true, there were some Nancy Drew adventures where she did, indeed, find out who stole a horse at a ranch, that wasn't really an accurate portrait of the types of adventures the character had.  Since I've read many of the books in the time since, I now know that Nancy fought lots of smugglers and pirates, too.

But something about the fact that Nancy was a woman meant that, for whatever reason, my mother saw her as having only "girls' adventures" and something about that meant the character was limiting my my mother's eyes.  Likewise, even then - at five - I understood that my mother was basically saying that the girl character's adventures weren't as good because she was "too girly" and therefore her adventures weren't as dangerous or exciting as the more "manly" adventures of the Hardy Boys.

It's an important point to me, because I think it illustrates so many issues of so-called "casual sexism" in our culture.  My mother was basically telling me that girls weren't as good as boys, because of the things with which American society defines girls. As an adult, I see the inherently circular logic of this concept - but that doesn't change what I believe to be its incredibly destructive power.  Think about it as a simple "logic" statement:  Girls are bad because of the things that make them girls, which are bad, which are defined not by girls but by the culture around them.  That conversation may, in fact, have been my first conversational exposure to the insular nature of patriarchal structure and the circular dismissal of women, never mind that it was also totally wrong.

While the first episode of The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries that week focused on Frank and Joe Hardy, the second episode the following week featured Nancy Drew in an adventure called "The Mystery of Pirate's Cove." I remember it with vivid detail. 

A mysterious glow in a far-away lighthouse?  Nancy trapped in a cave with the water-level rising?  A pirate treasure hunt?  Sure, this was the television version and not the book series, but the first Nancy Drew adventure I ever experienced didn't bear much of a resemblance to finding the stolen horse at the ranch.  

If anything, I suspect my mother may have been put off by the covers and titles of the books, never really paying much attention to the contents.  

Of course, as a fan of Annie Warbucks (who'll get her own article, eventually),  I know that a broken locket doesn't necessarily mean a boring time.  In fact, it often means an awesome musical.  But I think titles like that one contributed to my mother's poor opinion of Nancy.  

My opinion, however, bolstered by the television show, was that Nancy was far more interesting than Frank and Joe.  And I wanted to know more, so I asked my parents to get me a Hardy Boys book ... and a Nancy Drew book, by the way.  

By asking in this fashion, I reasoned that I would be able to slip the Nancy Drew book I wanted past my parents' guard because I was clearly only asking for one of each because of the television show.  Wasn't I clever?

My parents, who never missed an opportunity to buy me a book, complied.  The Hardy Boys book I received was The Twisted Claw and the Nancy Drew book I got was The Secret in the Old Attic.  You'll be not-terribly-shocked to know I preferred the Nancy Drew book.  But it wasn't specifically because of Nancy's gender.  Rather, it had more to do with the connection of the character to her environment, and, ironically, the somewhat mundane nature of the mystery.  I say that this is ironic because I just wrote about how Nancy's pirate island adventure on the television show conflicted with my mother's appraisal of the Nancy Drew books as mundane, and yet here I am praising my first Nancy Drew book being more rooted in typical goings-on than the museum thefts of The Twisted Claw.

It's not as much of a contraction, really, as it might appear, because I'm talking about my childhood perspectives.  For me, as a child - perhaps because of my age, and perhaps because of my autism - I tended to take a view of things as an all-or-nothing equation.  Things were either THIS, or they were THAT.  Day-and-night differences were all I really understood at that age, and I didn't get the idea of subtlety.  Some people would argue that I still don't understand it.

The take-away to remember in all this is that my experiences with the Hardy Boys was that their adventures were all somewhat exotic, having read one book and seen one episode of the TV show.  With Nancy, the combination of exotic mystery on the TV show and the more homespun mystery of ill-gotten music sheets told my brain that Nancy was, to my limited understanding, somehow more involved wirh local social justice, and that was something that appealed to me considerably.  In the case of both the TV episode and my first book, Nancy's cases both centered around some kind of local trickery, in which some very specific people were being wronged under very specific circumstances.  Furthermore, Nancy wasn't just appointed to solve the cases - as was the case in the Hardy Boys stories.  No, Nancy got involved DESPITE the protestations of many who told her to keep her nose out of these matters.  Her total unwillingness to obey these authoritarian figures was intensely appealing to me:  she was a rebel.  Plus, the fact that these authoritarian individuals somehow dismissed her as "just a girl" AND also viewed her as a major threat to her plans spoke to me, as well.  It's one of the inherent paradoxes of patriarchy:  "Women are worthless and shouldn't be considered in anything we do.  Women are intensely dangerous and must be kept out of anything we do."  I got that out of Nancy Drew books, and the fact that Nancy brought the house down on people who acted that way thrilled me to no end.  As a result, she won the battle between the Hardy Boys and herself, and I was locked in as a fan for life after just one TV episode and one book.  But what I didn't realize at the time was just how influential Nancy would be in my life.

Where Nancy and I connected the most was in her inscrutable attention to detail.  People with Asperger's Syndrome are often very attentive to certain kinds of details, but inattentive toward others.  With me, one of my primary areas where I was most attentive to detail was in terms of dismantling what I was seeing in life when someone was trying to trick me - in debunking what I'd been told.  Sure, there was an element of rebellion in it - you can't really grow up a transgirl and simply accept the evidence of your eyes.  I think it's part of being a transgirl that you develop an understanding that what you see isn't always necessarily what you get:  you don't need to look any further than at your own body to understand that.  

What Nancy and I most shared in common, then, was that keen attention to detail when it came to debunking what the adults in the room were telling us.  I found her delight in solving puzzles and riddles and uncovering hidden mysteries delightful in and of itself, but I also loved it when she'd get that sparkle that I could see even when simply reading her adventures on the printed page.  There was, in many of the books, that delicious undercurrent of gender politics, no matter how much rewrites and revisions tried to eliminate it.  

There was so often that moment when an adult character would say something to the effect of:  "Officers, she's just a girl - you can't possibly believe what she's saying."  Nancy would always have a wry smirk, the barest uptick to the corners of her mouth - I could see it even if the writers didn't put it on the page; I could just tell; then she would proceed to unload all the facts on the police, or the judge, or whomever - proving categorically that the evil authoritarian was not only lying, but a total sexist jerk for getting them to even momentarily consider dismissing her intellect.  And, yes, I do get that this means I was - in a way - living out a sort of revenge fantasy for the moments in my own life where I was dismissed by adults who insisted they knew better about so many things, especially things about who I was and what my lot in life was to be.  But that didn't mean that the revenge didn't taste anything but sweet, just the same.

More than that, though, Nancy taught me that success came through knowledge, that understanding the world meant reaching out and grasping at every little detail - facts & figures and also the truths of human nature.  Nancy may have solved her cases by her wits, but she was often led to the facts by a keen sense of observation - she noticed the slightest of suspicious behaviors in people, and I loved when she detected those traits and was rewarded with the discovery of some new clue in her case.

One of the areas where many people with Asperger's Syndrome struggle is in terms of dealing with other people.  To this day, eye-contact is very difficult for me, much less staking out someone's body-language to figure out how they mean something or if they're being weird or suspicious.  But I realized - with a little help from Nancy - that this is so much of a part of life, and so important in understanding real truth - that I knew I had no choice but to try to accomplish the monumental task of overcoming my Asperger's aversion to even looking at unknown people in real life to really studying the world around me, all without staring at them.

As I've indicated - these might not seem like big victories to you, but to me they're huge.  And I'm not exactly victorious, yet.  I continue to have trouble with these issues, to this day.  But I think I'd be a lot farther back in my efforts without Ms. Drew's inspiration in helping me to get motivated to not simply give up on those parts of life, to at least try to decode the cypher of human behavior.

As I grew older, Nancy grew and changed alongside me, and she never stopped being a part of my life - I never outgrew my love of her mystery-solving exploits.  I wasn't rushing out every month to buy her latest book, but her adventures became a sort of comfort food.  

When I was recovering from illness in grade school, my parents got me a trove of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books.  When I was in high school and had just had to read some dry piece of ancient literature like Catcher in the Rye, a Nancy Drew mystery was the perfect palate-cleanser before the next assigned drudgery.  When I was in college spending far too many weekends alone in periods of long depression, a new Nancy Drew book and a chicken-and-pesto pizza helped soothe the sting of another dateless evening.  

And, yes, I understand that this is a little sad - or maybe really sad.  I don't care.  "College guys are jerks.  On to The Case of the Vanishing Veil!"  It worked, and it got me through.  

And, yes, I know that this dates me a bit, and portrays me as one of those stereotypical bookish "geek girls" - and it's a fair thing to say.  And you know what?  I'm not ashamed of that classification.  Of course, I used to be.  By the time I got into college I went through a period I'm not proud of in my later life where I sort of hid my intellectualism and isolated myself.  My life hasn't been perfect.  But as I've said over and over in writing these essays, I'm determined to be as honest as my memory allows in writing this biography of my thoughts and experiences.  That people are still reading - and supporting - the blog is amazing to me.  I've just reached my 10,000th visitor to the blog and that's a stunning feeling, but I also feel like I'm obliged to be honest to every one of those 10,000 people, and I'll feel the same way if/when that number reaches 100,000.  My mind boggles about that, but I look forward to it, and to seeing what my life is like when I hit that milestone - and what I'll be like at that time.

However, unlike Nancy, I don't have a team of authors reinventing me to keep me relevant.  I don't have a new cover artist redefining my appearance.  And as much as I might be tempted to leave out the ugliness in my own past, I refuse to edit my life to make it easier to read for some people.  I have to rely on diet, exercise and buying new funny t-shirts from We Love Fine Tees.  Over the years I've collected and redistributed my Nancy Drew books, giving them to people when I'm done with them who I think will appreciate them.  I try to use the unexpurgated versions, despite the more unsavory elements found in those early versions.  As this blog attests, I think it's important to remember one's history, rather than refashioning it to satisfy some kind of desired narrative.  Isn't it our foolishness and silliness, our miscues and mistakes, that make the successful moments that much more of a success? 

Literary purists might scoff at this, but when I read about all the changes made to Nancy Drew books, I think of George Orwell.  A lot of people only know the "totalitarian, Big Brother" side of his classic book Nineteen Eighty-Four.  But many people don't know about the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's novel, who went back and rewrote materials from the past in order to rewrite and reframe history.  I feel the same way with these edited versions of Nancy Drew, to a degree.  There is, of course, the pragmatic argument that keeping the racist and misogynistic elements of these old books intact keeps them from being sold, but I find I'm nevertheless still troubled by any kind of revocation of the ugliness of our histories, even if it's in the name of avoiding offense or protecting people's "innocence."  This isn't to say I'd encourage anyone to hand one of those earlier editions to a child, but the fact that they were - for a long time - the only versions available, to me, is the same as someone trying to rewrite their own history to deny they "ever said that" or "ever did that."  Yeah, it happened, and we should remember those things others have done like that - just as we should remember it when we've made those mistakes, to correct them to ensure they don't happen again.  

Nancy has, of course, been reinvented over and over to keep up with the times - and to generate as much sales as possible, and to object to that is, in a way, to object to the entire concept of writing as a commercial enterprise - it's at the artist's liberty.  I don't get paid to write this blog, after all - it's all on my own time and despite all the links to commercial products, I don't make any money in any way from what I do on this project.  It's passion that drives me.  And with Nancy being a largely ghostwritten character, it's hard to know how much passion is involved in the books  written about the girl detective.  

It's worth noting, however, that there's been an interesting trend over the years in how Nancy has changed literarily to driv sales, and not always for the better, in my opinion.  The Nancy Drew Files was a series that shifted the focus of Nancy's adventures from primarily a crime-solving basis to more of a blend of adventure and romance.  While I don't mind romance - obviously! - I wasn't a huge fan of the way these adventures often found Nancy at the mercy of the romantic elements, her strength and individuality sometimes diminished so she could hang on the attentions of some sweater-vest wearing collegiate.

As I said, I don't oppose romance as a literary form - even trashy romance novels.  Dee's Trivia #57:  When my parents refused to ever sit me down and tell me the "birds and the bees" I actually learned the mechanical elements of basic human sexuality by pillaging my mother's  grocery bags of romance novels she hid out in the garage.  But the problem with many of these later, romance-heavy Nancy Drew books is that the focus of the story doesn't incorporate the romance into the overall narrative, but rather supplants it - with the result being that Nancy becomes less an active participant than the victim of a series of events in much the same way many Victorian so-called "heroines" take little-to-no control of their destiny.  It's not a literary flaw so much as a societal one, and I mean it as a societal observation rather than as any kind of specific criticism of any particular ghostwriter representing themselves as Carolyn Keene.

But, yes, it's a fact that as the times and fashions have changed, Nancy has been transformed by the writers around her.  By the mid-to-late1990s, we  saw Nancy's world shift in focus almost entirely away from mysteries in various spin-off and adaptation titles, including books about her time in college and the romantic travails of the supporting cast of characters in her life.  

To say that these books, like the Nancy Drew on Campus "adventures," aren't  really about "the work" is an incredible understatement, but they're worth including in my opinion because they actually dealt with some sensitive subjects popular American mainstream youth literature was only beginning to deal with, including some extremely clumsy handlings of subjects like date rape.  Some education is better than none, usually, but there was an unfortunate attitude in the books that still, not unexpectedly, blamed the victim.  I don't really want to focus on the negativity there, so I'll talk about something more positive in stating that these books also featured some interesting example of early "interactive reading" - a trend that has become incredibly popular of late in other types of mystery and thriller fiction.  Readers could call 1-800 numbers to vote on how they felt certain plot threads should be resolved.  Of course, these plot threads revolved around things like whether Nancy should stay with a particular character or break up with him.  But it's fascinating to me that the use of it in a Nancy Drew book predates it appearing in many thriller fiction books that use emails and websites to involve the readers further in the story.  

Would I have rather had the phone calls encourage young readers to do real-life research into detective work, the way the old Nancy Drew books did?  Of course.  But even I knew that Nancy was better than that, tougher than that.  It saddened me to see her fall so far, but Nancy survived that phase in her fictional life, the same way I survived the uglier periods in my own history.  And even those books weren't quite as unreadable as the River Heights series, where Nancy barely appeared and the stories were on a par with the worst "romantic" excesses of Beverly Hills 90210.  Note: am I the only one who thinks the cast here looks like a slightly-modified painting of the cast of TV series Who's the Boss?

It's interesting to me, with the benefit of hindsight, to see Nancy grow and develop through these periods, reflecting American history even as she changed for primarily commercial reasons.  The revisions for appearance, the shift from her tough roots to becoming an object in her own narrative, the change in focus from intellectualism to emotionalism in her portrayal as a woman.  

Knowing how far we've come in advancing the cause of women's rights makes for an interesting parallel to the various incarnations of the character, but it also shows how far we still have to go in that these variations occurred in times when many feminist texts of the time talked about how much progress was being made toward educating young girls to throw off the shackles of these societal tools of oppression.  Yeah, that's true, that the education was happening - but we were still giving our girls copies of River Heights books.  

It reminds me to always be wary whenever anyone tells me about the great progress we've made in any venue, on any subject - whether women, or transyouth, or even issues like gay marriage.  It's not enough to look at what your own peers are saying - you have to look to things like popular fiction, the sorts of commercial enterprises that will only accept and embrace social changes at the very last, when they've become entirely commercially viable and in no way contested.  That's when we'll know we've arrived, when we see these subjects handled without sensationalism in the most mundane of materials.  

Coming back to the subject of the mundane, I should point out that - being the fan that I am - I even found some pleasure and solace in reading titles like The Nancy Drew Notebooks, which were aimed at young audiences and focused on teaching simple moral lessons along with mysteries that actually fit closer to the ones my mother "warned" me about while we sat on the couch watching TV that day in 1977.

Of course, by that point in my life I was reading those texts more analytically than simply for enjoyment.  I've said before, to anyone who will listen, that it's possible to learn more about people and culture from popular media than from educated texts by college professors.  Collegiates are so often out-of-touch with the on-the-ground realities of the world that I find their work to be less persuasive than the simple argument of what does or doesn't sell.

As a feminist, I find that as each new iteration of Nancy Drew appears, it teaches us an incredible amount about what American culture - especially the American culture of youth - is thinking and feeling ... because commercial publishers do the work for us.  They spend millions on market research instead of taking to other academics.  And I think there's value in analyzing what they find, and recognizing that we may not always like what we see in their determinations.

To me, Nancy Drew has become a character who can, in a way, represent the canary in the coal mine when it comes to feminist theory and the power that patriarchal society doles out or takes away from our young girls, and market researchers are telling us where the mind of the young girl is focused - whether they interpret it correctly or not.  That interpretation, of course, is where academics have to come into the equation, because what the market researchers think the comments and opinions of young girls mean isn't going to be the truth.  How it's represented, and how that's received - that's where we can learn from the market, can learn how girls' body images can become damaged, so fragmented.  It's where we can learn how the market thinks girls see themselves, or don't see themselves, or perhaps most disturbingly don't want to see themselves.  It's where we can see how popular American media interprets what girls think about what they want to see girls doing, how they want to see girls interacting with each other.

We need to ask why girls' real voices aren't being heard.  We think we know the answer, but these can be tools to help us look into that more deeply than we do when we bury ourselves in professional academics and don't ook at the boots-on-the-ground reality.

And then it's up to us all to use that knowledge in ways those market researchers never anticipated.  We can use it to make sure that no girl feels fragmented or damaged.  We can use it to make sure that, in the future, nobody listens to market researchers who say that girls should be relegated or limited to one genre.  We can use it to break open the doors that keep up blockades against girls' voices.  It's not all pink and princesses, though those things can have their own merit.  There is a variety to girls' voices, to their expression, that marketers so often totally miss.

Let me put it another way by mentioning the Twilight series.  Yeah, sorry about that.  But hear me out here on this.  What I want to focus on here is the fact that no major studio wanted to fund the production of film adaptations of the Twilight books, despite the book sales, because they thought girls weren't a valid market.  They were also totally - completely - wrong.

They did the research, but girls went to see it anyway and made the movies some of the most successful films in history.  But what we can learn from that is that there was something in there that told the market researchers that girls weren't a viable market, and that they were wrong - and we can study that, figure out what mistakes those researchers made - and then use that to help produce materials that are actually better for girls than Twilight.  Is this a form of exploitation?  You bet - but it's exploiting forces I believe deserve to be exploited, the authoritarian producers who try to maintain that girls are only interested in the color pink and new hairstyles. 

Girls' stories are varied, unique.  Girls are all shapes and sizes.  Girls are sometimes this and sometimes that.   Girls are sometimes even transgirls.  It's simple observation, marketers.  And it doesn't take a girl detective to figure out those facts.

Continuing with the themes of films and girl detectives, I would like to take a special moment to praise the 2007 Nancy Drew movie from Nickelodeon Studios.  

It is by no means perfect, and suffers from a number of problematic issues, but I like square & straight-laced Nancy as portrayed by Emma Roberts.  She's a girl after my own heart who likes "old-fashioned things" not because she's old-fashioned, or just to be contrary, but because they happen to be the things she genuinely loves.  She has the courage of her convictions, ultimately doesn't compromise herself and is strong-willed in the face of danger and adversity.  

A more perfect Nancy Drew movie can be made, someday, but when one considers what was passing for Nancy Drew literature at the time the movie was published, it hearkens back to the true nature of the character as a problem-solver and sleuth - and, most importantly - kept its story primarily focused around Nancy and her exploits instead of making her a guest in her own story as was more and more common in the time period. 

And that, really, was the saddest part of watching Nancy growing and changing with the times.  The Nickelodeon film notwithstanding, Nancy was at that time in 2007 totally fading out of public perception.  

The original book series was screeching to a halt, the books were disappearing off the "Young Adult" sections of bookstores, replaced by Twilight clones about angels and werewolves and anything else that could be cribbed from the Universal monster film line.  Is there one about mummies?  I'll bet there is, though I don't know for sure.

Nancy should be an immortal character, one would think - a tough, intelligent girl who does whatever she can to preserve justice and speak out against wrongdoing.  What's simpler?  What's more relatable?  How could such a thing become seen as not relatable in the first place?  

Even format changes didn't help much.  Girls, perceived by marketers as being more interested in tweeting than reading, perceived as having too short an attention span for novels and needing manga to keep them interested, have been "treated" to Nancy Drew book series formats that have done everything those marketers can think up to try to draw back in the massive girl audience the character once had - short of, you know, actually making her a girl detective who stands up to the patriarchal structure of dismissing a girl.  

When I read articles about these new Nancy Drew books, I dismay - because the focus on "modernizing" the character has been, in fact, a focus on objects instead of traits.  They "modernize" Nancy by giving her a cell phone, or a fancy hybrid car.  These aren't the essentials of the character, and they're no different than the cosmetic changes that have been done to rewrite the older books in the past.

But the strength isn't there in these new incarnations - the gleam in the eye that comes out of the strength of the character in the text, the focus on a girl using brains and science to solve problems.  She's not about new fashions or electric cars; she's about being tough and resilient and unafraid.  She's not about references to Facebook or Twitter.  And she's not about being in manga versus being in print.  

One area where I will say that innovation has benefitted Nancy is in the HER INTERACTIVE series of Nancy Drew games.  Sometimes adapted from books, sometimes original, these games encourage girls to use intelligence and knowledge to solve their mysteries.  

I find them to be extremely worthwhile.  I have repeatedly given them as gifts and I will continue to do so as long as they portray Nancy in an intelligent and resourceful manner.  Their Nancy is the Nancy I knew in the books, less concerned with fashion than with forensics, less concerned with the rules of propriety than with the scientific method, and less concerned with people-pleasing than with finding and revealing the truth.

Seriously, they're terrific games and I would encourage them for anyone of any age and any gender identification.  Adventure games are tough enough to find on the market, and mystery games even more so - and these fit the bill for both.  Exercising one's brain, even in the venue of a game designed "for kids," is a pleasure to me that never gets old, and neither does this game series.  Go check out these games, in other words.

As I bring this article to a close, I find that I've unfortunately broken - to a degree - a few of my own rules about keeping my blog positive.  I've talked about recent problems with Nancy as a character, and the negative issues associated with marketing for girls.  It's sort of inescapable in examining my own relationship with the character and what she means to me, the way she gave strength to my own voice and helped me view the world in the critical manner of a detective while maintaining the positivity and belief in social truth and justice I admire in others and in myself.

In fact, when I started writing this article, my early research suggested that there was no current Nancy Drew series being published, so it began in a negative fashion despite my best efforts.

I have since learned, however, that Nancy Drew has proved to be the enduring and resourceful character I always knew her to be, and she has returned in a new book series called Nancy Drew Diaries.  The first book in this new series is called Curse of the Arctic Star.

I know nothing about this series except for reviews that have suggested the books are a return to Nancy's role as a strong adventurer who seeks justice wherever she finds a crime is being committed, who is a cunning sleuth who observes her environment and always finds the truth, as a hero with heart and sincerity and an honest appraisal of people no matter their situations and histories.

Will this latest series turn out to maintain those virtues?  I don't know.  I'm going to start reading that first book on my Kindle as soon as I complete this article.  I'm looking forward to finding out what the secrets of the Arctic Star are, and the cover image seems similar enough to the original Nancy Drew character on that very first book I ever saw that I'm hopeful to find out.

But until then, this new Nancy is a mystery to me. But it's one I'm determined to solve.  Nancy wouldn't have it any other way, I'd like to imagine.