None Too Keene: Nancy Drew Noir

Performance art of Nancy Drew, in a more hardboiled style:

"She knew. About the coded phrases served up at social teas. About the untidy passions externalized in a broken locket. About what goes down on a hidden staircase. With one hundred and seventy five mysteries solved by age eighteen, Nancy Drew had seen more than Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and Mike Hammer combined. And she'd seen enough. On graduating high school, she quit sleuthing, and took to writing her memoirs. "For profit," she once told an inquiring librarian. "And no other fool reason." When the manuscript for The Secret of the Old Clock hit Grosset & Dunlap's desks in 1930, they knew they had gold, but they balked. "On prose like that," said friend James M. Cain, "You could've cracked a shotglass". Enter "Carolyn Keene," a collective pseudonym for a group of editors who cake decorated Drew's language with enough twee adverbs to choke a Girl Scout. It worked. The books sold 80 million copies, a new role model emerged, and Nancy Drew laughed all the way to the bank.

In the process, American literature got swindled.

To help restore this lost voice of hard-boiled crime writing, we called on the best: noir preservationist Eddie Muller, author of Dark City; The Distance; and Grindhouse, and founder of The Film Noir Foundation, and San Francisco's Noir City Film Festival. In celebration of this literary justice, we are presenting an evening of selections from Ms. Drew's first original manuscript, read by streetwise gamine of local theater, Lydia Odette Warren. Muller will be on hand to provide context and commentary, and piano-bar veteran Richard Leiter "

: o )

(via)