Melanie Rehak Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created

Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her

Melanie Rehak

Harcourt, Sep 2005, $25.00

ISBN: 0151010412

This is an interesting biography in that Melanie Rehak looks into the creation of one of the most popular fictional detectives of all time, Nancy Drew and the creators who wrote the stories. As with the Hardy Boys, the Girl Detective story lines followed a precise formula to include fun but impossible twists and red herrings as well as escapes that MacGyver would have been proud to have made. Still Nancy Drew became and is an icon as the courageous teen willing to risk much for what she believes is right.

Edward Stratemeyer, the genius who established the Rover Boys and the Bobbsey Twins novels, developed the formula (with help from his assistant) for a girl sleuth combining the Ruth Fielding tales with the boy detectives Hardy Boys. He hired journalist Mildred Wirt, who authored the Fielding books for him, to ghost write the Nancy Drew thrillers starting in 1930. She scribed the first dozen with an emphasis on an energetic never quitting Drew, who did not fear getting dirty. After Stratemeyer died, his daughter Harriet wrote the stories with a different but still energetic Drew that accentuated the teen's deportment as much as solving the mystery. Ms. Rehak provides a fun look behind the scenes that anyone who read (or watched the TV show) the Drew novels including this reviewer will appreciate.

Harriet Klausner