- #WILL THERE BE A NEW NANCY DREW GAME MOVIE#
- #WILL THERE BE A NEW NANCY DREW GAME FULL#
- #WILL THERE BE A NEW NANCY DREW GAME SERIES#
#WILL THERE BE A NEW NANCY DREW GAME MOVIE#
By now, there are multiple movie and TV adaptations, and book translations into Vietnamese and Icelandic, and there is the possibility of purchasing a shirt that says “I’M NOT SAYING I’M NANCY DREW. Nancy’s personality has been tweaked, too in the perfect words of some anonymous Wikipedia editor, she has become “less unruly and violent” with the passage of time - a curious reversal of the trend in which heroines are increasingly as bloodthirsty as their male counterparts. Revised editions of the core 64 titles have been released over the decades with the covers evolving - Nancy in a flapper outfit transitions to Nancy in jeans - and questionable elements of the originals, like racism, edited out. By 1969, more than 30 million copies had been sold.
#WILL THERE BE A NEW NANCY DREW GAME SERIES#
Like all of the books that followed, the first Nancy Drew was published under the Carolyn Keene pen name.īy the late 1930s, the series was so popular that it had been translated into Braille. He came up with plot ideas, wrote three-page outlines, and distributed them to staff writers who fleshed out the books at warp speed for a flat fee of $50 to $250 per title. Stratemeyer ran a syndicate that originated nearly 1,400 books, including the Bobbsey Twins and the Hardy Boys. The first volume came out in 1930, written by Mildred Wirt Benson from an idea devised by an author named Edward Stratemeyer. I’m not alleging that the series’ pseudonymous author, Carolyn Keene, planted a crypto-lesbian in her detective tales, but I’m not alleging she didn’t. Of all the characters, George is the most futuristically out of place in the original books: She is inevitably described as boyish and handsome with short hair and a taste for athletic competitions. Along the way, she interacted with her boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, who made passive-aggressive comments about the way his girlfriend was always doggedly pursuing clues instead of him, and hung out with her best friends, George and Bess. (Literally: A lot of the books have Nancy losing consciousness at a vital moment, like one of those fainting goats.) She solved the mystery. She got knocked down, and she got up again.
The mysteries generally turned on something like a phantom horse or Indian amulet or set of purloined African documents, and they relied on line breaks and exclamation points for narrative velocity. Nancy, an amateur sleuth, was customarily described somewhere in the first few pages as “titian-haired” - a phrase that no child in recent centuries has read without confusion - before stumbling into a mystery and becoming obsessed with it. The conventions of the series were stable.
I would describe them less as novels than as “fodder.” I liked the way Nancy looked on the covers, which was tastefully made-up and inquisitive, and I liked sniffing the pages, which smelled like stamp glue. Lined up on a shelf, the yellow spines formed a banana slug of escape opportunities. The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories were designed for bulk acquisition. If you are me, Nancy Drew is the first thing you collected, meaning the first thing I desired with completist gluttony and could, at $2 a pop from the local used-book store, afford. And there are over 70 million of the books in print - a number that includes both the classics and their spinoffs.) If you are a network executive, she is marketable intellectual property. (The original Nancy Drew books still sell more than 350,000 copies a year. If you are in sales at Penguin Random House, she is a cash cow. ( Why are girls at school mean to me? Why do I bleed from the crotch every month?) If you are a woman who has aged out of that demo, she is nostalgia.
#WILL THERE BE A NEW NANCY DREW GAME FULL#
Who is Nancy Drew? At the New York Public Library, she is filed under “Women Detectives” and “Action and Adventure Fiction” and “Code and Cipher Stories.” If you are the target demo of a Drew book - tween, female, and solitary enough to spend time reading - she is the antidote to a life full of mysteries with unsatisfying conclusions.