Today's Under the Influence post...

[seawasp]

... is on Nancy Drew, teen-sleuthing her way through books since 1930!

Comments

[nuranar.livejournal.com]

I loved this! I had finished all of my mother's yellow-cover Nancy Drews by the time I was 7, as well as my grandmother's 4 blue-backed 30s books. The Hidden Staircase was a 40s printing but the same text as the 30s ones; it's still my favorite version. As is the 30s Red Gate Farm in preference to the 60s one. The agelessness and the way she's good at *everything* gets old when you read them repeatedly, but she really is such a good role model.

As for lying to the police... well, Perry Mason did some pretty crazy stunts in those books, as did Gardner's other protagonists. Not unheard-of in 30s crime fiction.

It's interesting how the Nancy Drew franchise held on through the years. The children's novel series was a big thing in the 30s and 40s, but as far as I know, except for Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys, none of the others were reprinted past the 60s.

[seawasp]

Tom Swift has survived off and on. I think it's currently active, even.

[kengr]

I think they are currently on Tom Swift III. I know I read some Tom Swift, Jr books. And by not paying attention to the "Jr" part, when I asked for some mom mistakenly asked for "Tom Swift" at the used book store. And decided they were too expensive.

The original tom Swift books are long out of copyright, and are available online.
http://tomswift.bobfinnan.com/ts1.htm

There were a few series from the 50s/60s that I've heard of but not Read. One was Rick Brant. Having seen ads for those in some other books, I'd be interested in checking them out.

[djonn]

There have been five Tom Swift series to date:

The originals (...and his Motor Cycle, etc.), in which Tom meets, courts, and actually marries sweetheart Mary Nestor in the course of the series.

Tom Swift Jr. (...and his Spectromarine Selector, etc.). The orange-spined and best-known incarnation, featuring a cast of dozens, a good deal of Cold War intrigue, and actual if mostly-offstage aliens. Explicitly written as a sequel to the first series, with Tom Sr. and the prior cast often onstage in secondary roles.

The third Tom Swift series (referred to by the S&S "Wanderer" imprint under which the books appeared), appeared in the 1980s and kicked Tom forward into an outer space setting, maintaining almost no continuity with the prior incarnations. In themselves, they're not bad, but they really don't fit comfortably under the "Tom Swift" umbrella.

The fourth series (appearing in the 1990s under S&S's Archway imprint) updated the original Tom Swift Jr. into a contemporary setting. Swift Enterprises had moved its HQ to California, but there were explicit character and continuity callbacks to the first two series. A notable item: most of these were ghostwritten by established genre authors, including Robert E. Vardeman, F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, and collaborators Debra Doyle and James Macdonald. I liked these quite a bit, and still own the whole sequence (13 books plus two "Ultra-Thrillers" co-starring the Hardy Boys).

The fifth series ran in the mid-2000s, relocating back to New York under the banner "Tom Swift, Young Inventor". This one was pretty short-lived, and was pitched down toward the middle-grade market segment -- the books being noticeably shorter and more simply written than any of the prior series.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

You can also check Project Gutenberg's collection, which is where I got my epub versions.

Having found four of the original Tom Swift books on my grandparents' bookshelves, I was terribly disappointed in the Tom Swift Jr tales.

[kengr]

Probably as bad as the mismatch between the "old" and "revised" Hardy Boys.

Easy way to tell if a book is the old or the revised. On the old ones the endpapers are line art with a "beige" background.

On the revised editions, the endpapers are plain white with the black line art (and the line art wasn't copied well)

[nuranar.livejournal.com]

Almost mentioned that one, but I never ran across it as a child; just in antique stores and online.

[kengr]

I was lucky, the two 5th grade classrooms at my school had doors between and we were allowed to go back and forth between them when class wasn't in session. this was great because one had a cart with most of the (old, before the actual bindings had the cover printed on them) Hardy Boys and the other had one with most of the Nancy Drew books.

I bought some copies of my own over the year, and only got one of the "updated" editions. (After that I was careful to check the inside to see which I was getting).

Got rid of them at some point and then at another started picking up the Applewood Press reprints. I only have the first dozen or so of each. I'd love to own the rest, but neither finances nor space allow it.

At some point in grade school I was given a book from another female detective series. The Dana Girls. It's sitting somewhere in storage. As I recall it was pretty much on a par with Nancy Drew.

[djonn]

If you haven't seen it, you really need to look up Chelsea Cain's Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, written as Nancy Drew's autobiography. The marketing for this insisted on describing the book as a parody, probably for legal reasons, but I disagree; I think it's much more in the way of a pastiche, and in a way what Cain does with Nancy is not unlike what you've done with Polychrome.

[chuk-g.livejournal.com]

Did you see the movie starring Emma Roberts?

[seawasp]

No, but I did used to watch the TV series back in I think the 1980s.