Nancy Drew is the ultimate girl private investigator. Her adventures began in 1930, when Mildred A. Wirt Benson (1905–) wrote the first Nancy Drew mystery novel, The Secret of the Old Clock, under the pseudonym "Carolyn Keene." Like the Hardy Boys (see entry under 1920s—Print Culture in volume 2) series, the Nancy Drew stories were produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, a company that specialized in mystery series. The Nancy Drew mysteries soon became the best selling juvenile fiction in America. The mysteries remain in print in the twenty-first century. Nancy has adventures every bit as exciting and dangerous as the Hardy Boys', but many of her cases are solved through her "feminine" interest in the arts, in crafts, and in fashion.

Nancy, whose mother is dead, lives with her father and their housekeeper, Hannah Gruen, in the town of River Heights. She manages the household affairs...