Nancy Drew and the mystery of the mean girls

WHEN NANCY DREW stole on to the scene of the crime 75 years ago last April, complete with her shiny blue roadster and her finely tuned sense of good and evil, the teen detective was the very model of the independent-minded young lady on a mission. She was invented in the waning days of the Roaring Twenties by a children's book mogul named Edward Stratemeyer, also the father of the Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins, who envisioned his creation (his final one, as it would turn out, since he died just a few weeks after the first Nancy Drew stories were published) as ''an up-to-date American girl at her best, bright, clever, resourceful and full of energy."

Ghostwritten from Stratemeyer's outlines under the pen name Carolyn Keene by a young midwestern journalist named Mildred Wirt, Nancy was young America's first full-time girl detective, and she immediately cracked not only a host of mysterious cases but a barrier no girl had cracked before. ''Nancy is the greatest phenomenon among all the fifty-centers," wrote one admiring journalist in the early 1930s, referring to the 50-cent series books of the era. ''She is a best seller. How she crashed a Valhalla that had been rigidly restricted to the male of her species is a mystery even to her publishers."

She did it, in part, by being unconcerned with the practical necessities of the teenage world around her: getting a college education, earning a living, and surviving the deepening Depression. And she did it by refusing to even entertain another feminine mandate of her era: finding a husband. After watching sales of its earlier girls' series plummet when their heroines marched down the aisle, Edward's company, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, decided its new star would never even consider tying the knot, and it stuck to its convictions forever after.

But there was also another, related reason for Nancy's success, one that stands out all the more these days now that we're intensely interested in the meanness, manipulation, and backstabbing that seems to be the dominant strain of contemporary female adolescence. In addition to her intelligence, sense of fun, and amazing ability to save a drowning swimmer, diagnose and treat an injury within seconds, or escape from any number of treacherous situations, often while dressed in a perfectly matching skirt and heels, Nancy was, and has remained, the quintessential Nice Girl.

Her long-suffering boyfriend Ned Nickerson became a regular fixture in the series in 1932, but there was never a hint of a long-term commitment that might require sex of any kind. You would never catch Nancy being openly sassy to anyone. She's a good friend and a loyal daughter, the kind of girl who manages to be smart and sweet and somehow popular in spite of it (perhaps her tragically dead mother is the key to that bit of luck). As we learned in her very first adventure, ''The Secret of the Old Clock," published in the spring of 1930, she has always had ''a way of taking life very seriously without impressing one as being the least bit serious herself."

In this same book, there's also abundant evidence that the mean girls who ruled the high school halls in Nancy's early days are not, perhaps, so different from the ones who do it today. When Nancy discovers two spoiled heiresses, the Topham sisters, abusing a department store employee, she greets them politely even as she takes an internal stand against them and all they represent, muttering to herself and to us: '''Snobs!...The next time I won't even bother to speak to them!"' She triumphs, among other ways, by being such a good customer as she selects, naturally, ''a party frock of blue crepe which match[es] her eyes," that the saleswoman tells her, '''It's a real pleasure to serve you, Miss Drew... But how I dread to see the Topham sisters come into the store!"'

In short, Nancy is about as far as you can get from the nasty likes of the Tophams, and so, too, from the kinds of girls we seem to be so fascinated with right now, the girls that poison the whole ecosystem of teenaged life but, as so many other stripes of villains have, nevertheless inspire a kind of awe in us. We marvel at their calculated coolness even as we hate them, perhaps because we're watching them act out the same kind of hierarchy struggles and vicious competition we still face as grown women. Peer pressure and insecurity, long considered the banes of teenagerdom, are alive and well from boardrooms to the benches of playgrounds where we surreptitiously check out everything from how quickly the other mommies lost their baby weight to how much their strollers cost.

So it's no wonder girls of all ages are suckers for the viciousness born of insecurity that fuels girls like Regina George, queen of the Plastics, the predatory reigning high-school clique in ''Mean Girls"--the 2004 film based on ''Queen Bees and Wannabes," Rosalind Wiseman's pop-sociological study of the webs of loyalty, cruelty, and dominance that structure adolescent girls' lives. Regina punches her classmates in the face, spreads nasty rumors about their sexual orientation, and even turns her supposedly loyal henchwomen against each other when she needs a boost of self-esteem. And this summer brings a worthy successor in icy rich girl Kimberly Joyce of the film ''Pretty Persuasion," who levels false sexual harassment charges against one of her teachers when she doesn't get the part she wants in the school play, and who, like Regina, dispatches her would-be bosom buddies to do her dirty work even as she slowly destroys them.

We've been watching these social train wrecks for years, but through the decades Nancy has offered an incorruptible alternative and faced down challenges to her wholesome outlook far more formidable than a pair of snotty heiresses or schemers who have their eye on Ned. As the youth culture of the 20th century swirled from the staid 1950s into the swinging '60s, it seemed her days as America's preeminent sleuth were over. The primness of the previous decades was shattered--and with it, so the thinking went, would go the girl detective, who, in spite of having her clothes and slang updated to go with the times, was still as pure as ever and would never have dreamed of burning what were no doubt some very sturdy undergarments.

As it turned out, however, girls wanted to be groovy, but they also longed for some consistency, and they found it in Nancy. ''Apparently there is a rock-ribbed streak of conservatism in the nine-to-eleven group," noted an amazed father in a 1969 Saturday Review article called ''The Secret of Nancy Drew." ''[Girls] will participate in outlandish fads for the sake of show, but they like things simple, basic, well organized.... the loudest little cynic will retire to her room, curl up among the psychedelic pot posters and Legalize Pot buttons, and devour some forty Nancy Drews with deep concentration and heartfelt involvement."

A sociologist asked by McCall's magazine to analyze the continuing Nancy craze in the early '70s, right around the time that Congress finally passed the Equal Rights Amendment, echoed the point: ''We sense things are changing very quickly. Traditional values are being challenged. When this happens, one looks inward to anchoring points for some kind of stability."

There were some inevitable missteps in Nancy's evolution around this time. In the '80s, she was plunged first into the world of designer jeans and worrying about Ned's feelings for her (''He sounded so cool! Would he ever forgive her for the way she had acted?") and then, in the ''Nancy Drew on Campus" books, into the world of student loans, date rape, drinking, and drugs. The series, launched in 1995, was a flop, proving once again that the quality that has kept the original Nancy in vogue for all these years was not a willingness to roll with the times but its exact opposite.

Nancy has recently been re-launched for the new century, in smart paperback editions and with a blue hybrid car to get her from crime scene to crime scene. She's absolutely up-to-the-minute when it comes to slang and even her hobbies--she likes to ride charity bike races and hang out in bookstore cafes--but something about this new incarnation is pleasantly familiar: She's gone back to being nice. Ned's still around, but she's not taking any chances by putting him ahead of her real job of solving mysteries and there's nary a drug problem in sight.

Suddenly, she's the kind of girl we can all rely on again, and her young fans have rewarded her by turning her into a best-seller again. Nancy has a new mean girl nemesis to face off against named Dierdre Shannon, who has her eye on Ned and ''seems to think the world revolves around her--or at least that it should." But, as she always has, the girl sleuth is the one that gets our attention, proving once more that queen bees come in all kinds, and that in a truly just world, it's not always the nice ones who finish last.

Melanie Rehak is the author of ''Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her," published this month by Harcourt.