Mirkwood

On the radio show called To the Best of Our Knowledge, Anne Strainchamps talks to Melanie Rehak, author of Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her. In the interview, Rehaks mentions that in her latest incarnation published by Simon and Schuster, duly revamped for the new millennium, Nancy has a hybrid car, speaks the current teen lingo and narrates the mysteries in the first person.

I don’t know if kids around the world still grow up with Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys (probably not), but back in the day, my sister and I devoured books from both series, she faster than I. I started around the age of ten or eleven and in the space of five years had gobbled more than a hundred books. I remember keeping a list of the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and the terrible Case Files series, which I stopped updating around #102 or somewhere close. I read The Hardy Boys strictly as mystery stories and was never really impressed by Frank and Joe as personalities, but for many of my middle school years, I found that none of the girls in class measured up to Nancy Drew. How could I have known that she was “designed” to have no flaw at all?

Continue reading ‘Everyone has a Nancy Drew story’

Finished Alexander McCall Smith’s The Sunday Philosophy Club on the Hangzhou-Beijing train. This is the first mystery featuring Isabel Dalhousie, who attempts to resolve life’s muddles, while holding a part-time job as the editor of The Review of Applied Ethics. Isabel sees a man plunge to his death - falling “from the gods” in her words - and cannot help investigating the sorry affair. A nice story, comfortably short, tender, humorous and sincerely compassionate, but it has too much in common to McCall Smith’s earlier, and now famous, series on Mma Ramotswe.

Like Precious, Isabel lost her mother at a young age, and her father relatively recently. Like Precious, Isabel has had one relationship at a young age that ended badly. As Precious cannot do without bush tea, so Isabel cannot do without the Times crossword. Like Precious, she has an able, if flawed, assistant who is named Grace - when I think about this last, I am sure that it is not a coincidence, and I wonder if McCall Smith is making a private joke. Yes or no, I am too much in love with the “life” in McCall Smith’s characters to resist reading the next book in the series: Friends, Lovers and Chocolate. As The Globe and Mail gushed, “Isabel lives. A series is born.”