I’m currently reading Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, which is pretty good – lots of social context (kid lit, late Victorian to present; role of women, ditto) without being too footnotey or jargony.
Picked it up, of course, because I grew up on Nancy Drew – and I’m wondering, do girls today still read these books? Do boys read Hardy Boys?
And if not – when did that fall off the cultural radar?
I grew up in the '60s (I’m 54 now), and Nancy Drew was still incredibly popular then. If you read them, approximately when was that? And if you didn’t, during what period were you, say, 8-12 years old, and what were you reading instead? Plus, of course, if anyone is the parent of kids currently in that age range – are they reading them?
I read about 35 of the '50s - '60s versions to my daughter, as well as a dozen of the Hardy Boys / Nancy crossover books (for a slightly older age range - people actually get murdered in them) and one or two of the facsimiles of the original ones. We never read the dumbed down versions they have today. They still seem to be selling - at least there are tons of them in the bookstores.
BTW, she really likes the Nancy computer games, and has done at least half a dozen of them, maybe more.
I did take some liberties. She once read a book we were in the middle of herself, and only then realized that the housekeeper’s name wasn’t Hannah Gruesome.
When I was a kid (in the early 90s) I was really in to mysteries. I ate up Encyclopedia Brown and this huge book of short Hitchcock mysteries. I also liked The Boxcar Children.
I read a Nancy Drew book one year and did a book report on it. I remember being really bored by the book. I never read one again - nor did I read The Hardy Boys or The Bobbsey Twins (I tried the Twins - didn’t like them).
After I got out of my mystery phase, I moved right on to The Babysitter’s Club, which was the hot series at the time. Loved 'em!
Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys are still being published today under the famous pseudonyms of Carolyn Keene and Franklin W. Dixon. There are actually manga now.
I read everything I could get my hands on as a child…including Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden, and Nancy Drew. Had some of the first edition Hardy Boys…passed down from my dad. I was born in '65, and probably started reading that kind of stuff around age 7-8 until I was 11ish or so.
I read both Drew and the Boys as a kid (born in '76, quick reader, so it would have been 82 - 86 or so). My mom was a big Nancy Drew fan, but I sort of found her… prissy? Anyway, I liked the Trixie Belden books better. And then I discovered Madeleine L’Engle, and teen detectives fell off my radar screen.
I was born in 1978 and read every Nancy Drew book I could get my hands on when I was 9-10 or so – I think there were about 80 books in the series at that time (though maybe I’m thinking of the Sweet Valley High books, which cough I also read). George was my favorite character.
I also read the Trixie Belden and Encyclopedia Brown books, but not the Hardy Boys. I only read books with female protagonists (Encyclopedia had tomboy Sally for me to identify with).
When I was a kid in the 80’s/90’s, I read mostly Encyclopedia Brown, Boxcar Children, and Trixie Belden mysteries. I tried a few Nancy Drew stories, but I just couldn’t relate to her. She had a CAR, she was so OLD!
I did end up reading the Hardy Boys as an adult with a dyslexic 14-year-old I was tutoring. To our modern, cynical eyes, the books were laughably unsophisticated. About the fifth time that the author knocked the boys unconscious to transition a scene, my student exclaimed, “They’re going to wake up with brain damage!”
Not only did I read Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown, I was a devotee of Danny Dunn, though the proto-computer in one novel and its “fifty thousand switches” is gradually becoming less awesome. And were there only two “Mad Scientists’ Club” books?
I still have my Hardy Boys Detective Handbook around here somewhere, thirty years later.
ZipperJJ’s experience mirrors my own almost exactly. Born in '81 and first got heavy into reading in the in '89, or '90. All the boys were reading The Boxcar Children and the girls were reading The Babysitter’s Club. Everyone read Encyclopedia Brown, oddly enough. I don’t think there was a gender split on that one.
We were aware of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, but I don’t think I ever saw anyone actually reading them. They were seen as being old fashioned I guess.
I haven’t thought about any of these books in years.
I was born in the mid 60s and read a whole bunch of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books, but my favorites were always The Three Investigators and Trixie Belden–the former because their mysteries were more interesting to me and I would have killed to have their Headquarters, the latter because they seemed more like “real” kids and as an only child I kind of pined for having a close-knit group of friends like that who had adventures together.
Nancy and the Hardys, though their stories were interesting, didn’t really click with me.
Also loved Encyclopedia Brown (and the somewhat older version, Two-Minute Mysteries, by the same guy) and Danny Dunn.
Wow, I was just thinking about those books! I couldn’t remember the boy’s name and I thought I’d never be able to identify them. Thank you! (My favorite was the one where they go exploring the ocean.)
Did any of you read the McGurk mysteries? They were for a younger audience than the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys books, probably 2nd or 3rd graders. Amazon tells me there are 25 books in that series and…oh, God, I’m 31 and I want to read them all. :o
