Meet Nancy Drew – Her Hobby Is Catching Crooks!
Trailer titles for Nancy Drew… Detective (1938)
“Arrogance means to me that you know what you’re doing, and you’re not polite or humble about it… It’s like self-confidence, but self-confidence is Nancy Drew. Nancy Drew was self-confident and, if anybody said to her, ‘Nancy, you suck,’ Nancy would say, ‘Okay,’ and walk away. Now if Nancy had been arrogant, she would have said, ‘Fuck you.’”
– Janis Ian, quoted by Melanie Rehak, Girl Sleuth (2005)
“Judy has no choice but to shoot it out.”
“Judy Drood, Girl Detective,” Richard Sala, Black Cat Crossing (1993), reprinted in Maniac Killer Strikes Again! (2004)
“After her father is sent to prison for life, Judy Drood is left somewhat psychologically scarred and jaded, with a cynical distrust of law enforcement and some rather severe anger issues. While still in high school, she becomes obsessed with solving mysteries and uncovering crimes - often where none exist. Her unorthodox (not to mention illegal) methods annoy and antagonize the local police. However, she does manage to solve enough real crimes that the local papers refer to her as the ‘teen girl detective’ - a label Judy despises, but which, unfortunately, sticks.”
“19. Judy Drood ~ ‘Girl Detective,’” Richard Sala, Skeleton Key #6 (2012)
A partial list of girl detectives … continued (2)
Connie Blair
Jean and Louise Dana
Ginny Gordon
Hazel Green
Beverly Grey
Veronica Mars (TV)
Penny Parker
Kay Tracey
Shelby Woo (TV)
“I got dozens of statements like this one – from letters, from phone conversations, from interviews. It went on for months, and each day the material expanded, grew in geometric surges, accumulating more and more associations, a chain of contacts that eventually took on a life of its own. It was an infinitely hungry organism, and in the end I saw that there was nothing to prevent it from becoming as large as the world itself. A life touches one life, which in turn touches another life, and very quickly the links are innumerable, beyond calculation… All well and good, perhaps, and one might say that this surplus of knowledge was the very thing that proved I was getting somewhere. I was a detective, after all, and my job was to hunt for clues. Faced with a million bits of random information, led down a million paths of false inquiry, I had to find the one path that would take me to where I wanted to go. So far, the essential fact was that I hadn’t found it.”
– Paul Auster, The Locked Room – part three of The New York Trilogy (1986)
“
She was an inch or two taller than I, which made her about five feet eight. She had a broad-shouldered, full-breasted, round-hipped body and big muscular legs. The hand she gave me was soft, warm, strong. Her face was the face of a girl of twenty-five already showing signs of wear. Little lines crossed the corners of her big ripe mouth. Fainter lines were beginning to make nets around her thick-lashed eyes. They were large eyes, blue and a bit blood-shot.
Her coarse hair – brown – needed trimming and was parted crookedly. One side of her upper lip had been rouged higher than the other. Her dress was of a particularly unbecoming wine color, and it gaped here and there down one side, where she had neglected to snap the fasteners or they had popped open. There was a run down the front of her left stocking.
This was the Dinah Brand who took her pick of Poisonville’s men.
”– description of Ms. Brand, Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (1929)
Don’t give in to Nancy Drew!
