Nancy Drew - The Secret at Shadow Ranch
Carolyn Keene (Mildred Wirt), 1931
Key words
Young readers, adventure, feminism, role models, adventure stories, series, women writers, reading
The book that changed me
When interviewing fellow writers and writing teachers (check out my Between the Lines series) I always ask about a book that influenced them before they were 18.
My answer to that question is not highfalutin: the book(s) that most influenced me as a child were Nancy Drew Mysteries. For the sake of expedience, let’s take The Secret at Shadow Ranch as a representative example.
Minds wide open
Books can open worlds to young readers, if they’re allowed to explore.
One of my students (a reluctant reader) once told me he’d liked the first book of some fantasy series or another.
“Did you read the rest?”
“No. My teacher said the lexile level was too low.”
That broke my heart a little. And made me want to shake that (doubtless well-intentioned) teacher. No wonder the boy didn’t like reading. The minute he found something he dug, some snide adult told him to put away childish things.
Perhaps I’m biased. I made it through grad school (twice) without having a clue what a lexile level was. Blissfully ignorant of this particular prescriptivism, my younger self read everything from Anne of Green Gables to The Guns of August (so far over my head, it was read with a dictionary open beside me; that’s where I learned what ‘hegemony’ meant).
Who knows. Maybe if you graphed my youthful reading on a scatter plot the line would correspond to a lexile level, but my actual literary intake swerved from high to low to eccentric. (Hence why I can still quote Douglas Adams and First Corinthians with equal accuracy.)
Not a moment spent in pleasurable commune with books was wasted; especially not the hours spent reading and rereading Nancy Drew. Here’s why.
The big idea
Life can be an adventure.
Nancy Drew books might not have soared on literary merit but they offered an invaluable glimpse of what life could be: idealized, improbable (impossible?) but beguiling.
The Secret at Shadow Ranch combined Nancy’s sleuthing with two of my other favorite things: the West and horseback riding. If it had been written to order, it couldn’t have more neatly tapped into my overlapping fascinations and underlying fantasies.
Above all, as a child, I wanted to be free. Home was not a space of freedom or safety. Between my megalomaniac father and fundamentalist mother, everything from what I wore and ate, to whom I was permitted to speak to, was decided, without consultation. In their perfect world, they would have controlled my opinions as well.
Books were an escape hatch, a respite. None more than Nancy’s adventures.
The mysteries themselves were interchangeable, even unmemorable. What thrilled me was the heroine’s blasé confidence, physical courage (see her waltz along a secret corridor or climb the stairs to a web-festooned attic!) and uber-competence.
Recognizing the outlandishness of her spontaneous mastery everything from ski-jumping to bag-piping to circus-riding in no way diminished my pleasure. My ‘what I want to be when I grow up’ wish list included ballerina, vet, dog breeder, National Geographic wildlife photographer, and model. If Nancy could, why not?
At one level, incessantly rereading the mysteries was pure escapism: a few hours away from cold, dull, confined reality. As a very young child, I’d lay awake at night and continue the stories in my head, subbing in a thunderbolt black stallion as Nancy’s mode of transport.
As an adult, I can better-articulate the charm of it all: affluence and agency.
Nancy always had a swish car – described in the pale blue, 1930s cloth-bound first editions that had belonged to my grandmother as a coupé, later – in what had been my mom’s childhood collection in the ‘50s and ‘60s’ – as a more prosaic ‘convertible’. She was always selecting a smart frock for a college dance, or a whole wardrobe for some overseas excursion.
In one early book, she flies to New York with Bess and George. It was only rereading this in the 2020s that I appreciated the status marker; civilian air travel was limited and luxurious in the 1930s.
Affluence bequeathed agency. Nancy came and went as she pleased, unworried by the niggles that kept me awake. Her father, Carson (the wise, benevolent, respected attorney) appeared only to disperse funds, approval and the occasional legal insight.
Not infrequently, Carson and Nancy’s nominal love interest, Ned Nickerson, would rescue her from the villains. They were never exasperated that she had got herself clopped on the head, bound, gagged and stuffed in a closet again; there was never any real remonstrance. Their job was to make sure Nancy, Bess and George were okay. They did so, then vanished into the background where they belonged.
Bess and George deserve a special salute as integral parts of a classic girl power trio, 60 years before the phrase was coined. It was ‘tomboyish’ George with her cropped hair and – gasp – trousers to whom I most related, but each was indispensable. They were role models of female friendships and their interactions resoundingly passed the Bechdel test.
In their privileged, implausible, day-dreamy way, the Nancy Drew Mysteries asserted that female intelligence, aplomb and expertise were possible and desirable.
Mildred Wirt, who wrote more than 20 of the titles, including The Secret at Shadow Ranch, was feminist trailblazer, graduating from the University of Iowa with a Master’s in Journalism in 1927 to begin a long, storied career as a writer and journalist. She was also, among other things, a licensed pilot.
Of her most famous creation, Wirt said, “[Nancy] was ahead of her time…. She was what the girls were ready for and were aspiring for, but had not achieved.”
That rather beautifully sums it up. Thank pickles no officious adult was on hand to lecture me about lexile levels.
My take
The good books do is more than the sum of semantics and vocabulary. Young readers don’t need selection advice from grown-ups; they just need regular excursions to the library.
Their take
“A patron let me borrow a copy of the book in its original 1931 form, and it was such a fun throwback. I particularly liked how when Nancy and Co. couldn't get a man to accompany them on their hike into the mountains, their aunt thought they should at least take a revolver to keep them safe.”
– Jessica Schwarz, Goodreads, Oct 27, 2015
Must read for
Kids who need to dream
Read also
Jane Withers and the Phantom Violin by Roy J. Snell
Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh