Nancy is unequivocal in her perfection.

"What I was reading were dozens of variations on a single story, which went something like this: Nancy Drew, a sixteen-year-old girl in the suburb of River Heights, visits a friend and learns of a mystery, typically involving a lost treasure or a missing heir. An anonymous note slipped under her door warns her, "Keep off the case, or else"; high jinks and a car chase ensue. While sleuthing, Nancy gets knocked out by a crook, and comes to in an elegant old mansion ("Nancy saw lovely damask draperies, satin-covered sofas and chairs"), where she partakes of a refreshing tea service and cinnamon toast; renewed, she discovers a secret passageway, thanks to a cunning knob of some kind, rapidly solves the mystery and restores social order.

As Bobbie Ann Mason points out in her excellent 1975 history, "The Girl Sleuth", Nancy Drew is a paradox - which may be why feminists can laud her as a formative "girl power" icon and conservatives can love her well-scrubbed middle-class values. She climbs fences like a tomboy but cries "How dainty!" upon spying a gold bracelet. Her friends have marvellous weddings, but Nancy never frets about her future; more than a kiss from Ned Nickerson, her worshipful beau, would only interrupt her sleuthing. Like many juvenile heroines of her time, she is missing a mother. (Hers died when she was three.) But there are no shadows behind her "sparkling" bright-blue eyes. The shadows are in the world and they are easily detected and vanquished, for they have squinty eyes, poor grammar, badly mended clothes, and a habit of wearing too much rouge."

~An excerpt from "Nancy Drew's Father," by Meghan O'Rourke and in the November 2004 New Yorker