Two Mystery Icons: Nancy and LInda

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Quick, tell me a character in a book who changed your life as a kid.  Meg in Wrinkle in Time, you say? Anne of Green Gables? Laura in Little House?   Beth or Meg or Jo or Amy?

Please. 

For many of us, there’s one character who still resonates. Say her name in a room of readers, and there’s always a rumble of admiration and agreement.

I know you can guess. But you don’t need to. Because we share the iconic young woman with a woman who’s become an icon herself.  Look who's here!  The amazing Linda Fairstein.                       

 Nancy’s Legacy

By Linda Fairstein

I would imagine that every one of my friends among the Jungle Red Writers had some childhood fictional characters with whom they identified, who drew them into the wonderful world of storytelling that keeps each of us at the keyboard today.

My earliest memories of books were the ones my mother read to me every night before I went to sleep, and then a bit later, those I found on our weekly trip to the public library each Saturday to pick out three new adventures.

One of my strongest attachments was to a smart young teenager – how sophisticated and mature she seemed to me as a kid! – named Nancy Drew.  She had a keen sense of justice, devoted loyalty to her friends, and an ability to right all the wrongs in the town of River Heights.  The Nancy Drew Mysteries were a series of books, and represented the first time I became hooked on a continuing character, whose return I anticipated with great delight and enthusiasm.  I collected those novels religiously – they were sure-fire presents for my birthday, Christmas, and the difficult days when I was homebound with measles or mumps.

Each mystery filled me with the same desire.  I’d look at the jacket art, hold the book in my hands, dream about actually crawling into the story somehow and becoming one of Nancy’s posse of crime-solvers.  If she and Bess and George were going to learn what the secret in the old clock was, I wanted to be there with them.  If there was room beside Ned Nickerson in the blue roadster, then that was the ride that I wanted to take.

I was very close to my mother, who died at the age of 88, eight years ago.  Among her papers, we found that she had saved something I had written in the 5^th grade – my very first crime story, The Secret of Apple Gate Farm.  When I reread that paper, which had been dedicated to my favorite librarian, it re-ignited my desire to create something for kids of the same age.

 Nancy Drew was my inspiration for writing a series of crime novels for adults, featuring a strong protagonist in a non-traditional role for a woman.  When I started my Alexandra Cooper books in 1996, the prosecutorial leadership role was far more uncommon than it is today, which marks a really great advance in the practice of law.

But I couldn’t get the idea of writing for kids out of my head, and Nancy Drew is also the reason for this series and its first entry, INTO THE LION’S DEN.  I wanted to create stories for the young girls and boys in my life that might appeal to them just as my childhood heroine ‘spoke’ to me.  I have no desire to compete with the great women who wrote as ‘Carolyn Keene’, but I do want to bring some modern forensic advances into a series for middle-grade readers, along with old-fashioned storytelling.

I’d given a lot of thought to my 12 year old sleuth, Devlin Quick, before I set out to tell her first tale.  Like Nancy, I instilled in her a great desire to see justice done, and wanted her to have a terrific relationship with her closest friends – Booker, Liza and Katie.  She’s very much a New York City kid, with a good sense of humor, a great love of books, and just a bit of an edge.  Best of all, she is the daughter of a very strong single mother, who also happens to be the first woman police commissioner of New York City – a job I very much wanted to have in the late 1980’s.

I’ve had such a good time bringing Devlin Quick and her friends to life, and I look forward to engaging with readers of all ages who might want to run along with her, just as I wanted to do with my beloved friend, Nancy Drew.

HANK: Oh, Linda, I can completely imagine you as the first woman police commissioner! (And more I will not say.)

Will there be more Devlins? Are you coming to Boston? 

And, hurray! SO excited about this:

The amazing Linda is giving away TWO copies of Into The Lion’s Den to very lucky commenters today!

Just tell us…what did you want to be when you “grew up”?  Something traditional? Or non?

(I had a brief cowboy fling, and wore my cowboy hat EVERY day, to my mom’s chagrin. And for a while, at age 13 or so, I wanted to be a disc jockey. And then a geneticist. But before that? Yeah, Nancy Drew.)

How about you?

****************

LINDA FAIRSTEIN was chief of the Sex Crimes Unit of the district attorney's office in Manhattan for more than two decades and is America's foremost legal expert on sexual assault and domestic violence. Her Alexandra Cooper novels are international bestsellers and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She lives in Manhattan and on Martha's Vineyard.