Looking for clues

Nancy Drew (Emma Roberts, centre) is assisted in her sleuthing by Ned (Max Thieriot, left) and Corky (Josh Flitter, right) in the new Nancy Drew movie. (Warner Brothers)

Every woman who had a childhood Nancy Drew fetish has a story about how the books first entered her life. Usually, they were given hand to hand, in nostalgia and trust, from another woman, a mother or a sister, passing the talismans down the line.

My box came from a teenage cousin in Saskatchewan. Our family was driving through the country in our Volvo station wagon, Vancouver to Toronto. I was eight, just old enough to be cool-literate, and I initially scorned the musty stacks of old hardcovers with their goofy titles (The Clue of the Dancing Puppet? Are you kidding me? Check out my North Star runners and satin shorts!). In the illustrations, the girl detective looked seriously uptight: her titian hair in a perfect coif, waist cinched and magnifying glass in hand. But then I opened the damp pages, and found myself completely pulled in, consuming one book after the other through several provinces — and back.

Unpacking a different adventure in each book, Nancy, self-appointed teenage snoop, proved that seemingly other-worldly phenomena could be slain by a few good clues and a healthy dose of rationalism. Phew, America is safe! The mysteries were Scooby-Doo simple, involving “shadowy” characters and inheritances that Nancy needed to redirect to their rightful owners. But the stories mattered less than Nancy; she was the real mystery, a girl like none I’d encountered in fiction or in life.

In part, this was because by the time I discovered her in the late ’70s, she was already an artifact. The Nancy Drew series started in 1930, ghostwritten mostly by Mildred Wirt and the team at the Stratemeyer Syndicate (they also churned out the Tom Swift and Bobsey Twins’ series) under the much breezier name Carolyn Keene. But Nancy has had a few facelifts through the years, starting in the '50s, the age of the teenager. That new, baby boomer-era Nancy Drew turned in her roadster for a convertible, and lost the dodgy depictions of blacks and Jews. But Nancy was still all business, content to watch her friends get married (her age had been upped from 16 to 18) while she obsessed about clues.

In 2005, hopping on the self-esteem bandwagon, a division of Simon and Schuster revamped Nancy for the series’ 75th birthday. The All New Nancy Drew is clearly designed so teenage girls will find it “relatable.” Contemporary Nancy is a first-person narrator with girlish insecurities who worries about getting her skirt caught on the passageways she glided down before, the klutz.

I loathe the idea of the Bridget Jones-ing of Nancy Drew. What is Nancy if not the personification of the mercenary drive for success? How can she ever doubt her MacGyver mad skills, pulled off with a knitting bag at her side? Much has been written about Nancy Drew as a feminist pre-riot riot girl. Yes, she had a touch of Helen Reddy in her — though less roaring than tsk-tsk-ing — as she revealed the bad guys’ true identities and shimmied through tunnels. And she did it while staying fresh, and pressed and toying with poor, besotted beau-in-waiting Ned Nickerson like a kitten batting a ball of string. While her many modern have-it-all traits probably appealed to me on some level, what I liked most about Nancy was just the opposite: she was an old-fashioned gal. To girls growing up during the heady sexual politics of the ’70s, flipping through Our Bodies, Ourselves at snack time, Nancy’s ordered world was a baffling, wondrous place of refuge.  She said “Gee, whiz” and lived by a clean, certain code of morality where all complicated issues were solved in less than 200 pages. Paradoxically, Nancy’s preppy normalness made her an exotic Other.

So it seems right that today, the film version of Nancy Drew turns her prissiness into the film’s running gag. Nancy (Emma Roberts, niece of Julia) is a beloved girl sleuth from River Heights, Flyoversville, the kind of kid who lectures her high school principal on the necessity of nutritious lunches and CPR training. Her hobbies are capturing scoundrels and finding secret compartments in Chinese boxes. 

As Nancy, Emma Roberts (Julia's niece) sports vintage clothes and retro values. (Warner Brothers)

Nancy’s father, lawyer Carson Drew (Tate Donovan), gets a gig in Los Angeles, taking his baby fish out of the water; it’s a sort of Pleasantville in reverse. Nancy’s Jackie O. sartorial sense and her “sleuth bag” (which includes low-tech gadgets like a pencil and string, and a hi-tech iPod for a hit of product placement) mean she’s supposed to be glaringly out of place amidst the clattering bling and sea of sunglasses at Hollywood High. But Roberts is beautiful, if inappropriately frail, and the idea that her resemblance to Julia Roberts and her impeccably tailored, vintage clothes wouldn’t catapult her to popularity is insulting to style-conscious teens everywhere, even in Los Angeles.

Nancy Drew seems to suffer its own adolescent identity crisis. The film isn’t exactly a send-up of Nancy’s retro values, but it doesn’t achieve the liftoff that a true celebration of this kick-ass (which is seriously hard to do in a pencil skirt) heroine deserves. The film snaps to when Nancy delivers an emergency tracheotomy — always be prepared! — and defuses a bomb, but these bursts of surprise and energy are scarce. For the most part, the movie Nancy Drew rests, safe and quiet, in some liminal zone between the old and the new.

Dad wants Nancy to stop sleuthing and become a normal teen, but their house is the site of an unsolved mystery involving a murdered Hollywood starlet (Laura Elena Harring). What’s a girl detective to do? Anyone older than eight will probably be able to solve the riddle by the third act, which involves, as per usual, a shady caretaker, a lost will and, yes, a secret passageway.

Perhaps there’s something to be said for Nancy Drew’s reluctance to be cool. It’s not a film that panders to parents with an onslaught of clever pop culture asides (though Bruce Willis does make a cameo), and it has a nice message for girls about resisting the makeover and staying true to yourself. But I suspect that tween girls will find the whole endeavour too square. Devoid of the compelling curtness and unattainable, unironic charm of the old Nancy, forever cemented in the memory of her aging readers, adults, too, will probably want to turn the page.

Nancy Drew opens across the country June 15.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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