What would Nancy Drew: Kristi Martinelli, 18-year-old Grayson High School senior who holds a private investigator's license from the state of Georgia and thinks "It's pretty cool to follow people" was a big fan of the Nancy Drew detective novel series and is now apparently living the life ... court papers, drug-trafficking, prom dresses ... oh my! Read more ...

Nancy Wins: Mystery Writers of America have announced their 2006 Edgar Winners. Among them, as top book in the Best Critical/Biographical category, is Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her by Melanie Rehak from Harcourt. Read more about 2006 awards at MWA ...

Nancy Drew at AMAZON.CA : Tomorrow, Tuesday May 9th, is the release date for the 1995 Nelvana versions of both Nancy Drew - The Complete 1st Season and The Hardy Boys - The Complete 1st Season at Amazon Canada. Read more ...

All About Nancy ... well, not exactly ... but the short piece called "The Ghost of Nancy Drew" that Kihm Winship includes under "miscellany" at Faithful Readers where it almost gets lost among the many articles about beer such as "Beer Frames: The Meaning of Malty Movie Memories" not only gives an insightful history of the series, but also provides a sense of the fun the books provide and is well worth reading . You could do that right now. Read article ...

Project Sunshine: In their newly released title "The Fake Heir" we get what the Papercutz people call "a little peek at the type of thing Nancy Drew does when she's not solving a mystery" and learn that:

Nancy, along with her best friends Bess Marvin and George Fayne, appear at a local pediatric hospital in River Heights as Project Sunshine volunteers, wearing the organization's distinctive yellow T-shirts. In a comics panel, in which Nancy is making balloon animals, while George juggles, and Bess entertains as a clown, the classic Carolyn Keene character explains "once a month, we do a little act for all the children with serious illnesses, just to try to bring them, well, a little sunshine."

Project Sunshine is a nonprofit organization which provides many free programs and services to children with cancer, AIDS, and other life-threatening illnesses. Project Sunshine Week, a special week in NYC in which businesses collaborate to raise funds and awareness about Project Sunshine, is coming up May 8th to May 15th. Read more about Project Sunshine ... read news release ... or read more about the fifth Nancy Drew graphic novel from Papercutz, "The Fake Heir".

Seventy-six Years Ago: Claire Lui, editorial assistant at American Heritage magazine, has written an overview of the launch of the Stratemeyer Syndicate's Nancy Drew seventy-six years ago on April 28, 1930.

Nancy Drew, the linchpin of the Stratemeyer Syndicate for the next 54 years, would be Edward Stratemeyer’s last hurrah. Twelve days after the first Nancy Drew book was published, he died of pneumonia. Nancy now became the work of two separate women: Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, the new head of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, and Mildred Wirt Benson, the ghostwriter behind most of the early mysteries. Together, Adams and Benson were Carolyn Keene, the author listed in the Library of Congress as Nancy Drew's author. Their differing visions of Nancy would eventually be reflected in two versions of the series.

Lui believes that Nancy, who has never gone out of print, and who is now appearing in new stories will last for at least another 76 years. Read article ...

Nancy Prew: Huh? This blurb from westender.com in Vancouver tells you everything you need to know.

All-American teenage sleuth Nancy Prew (not to be confused with all-American teenage sleuth Nancy Drew, for obvious potentially litigious reasons) is transported from the 1950s to 2006, only to be faced with a dastardly group of conservative evil-doers that plans to turn back the hands of time to Prew's era of chasteness and "family values." Mmmm... that's good satire! The always disrespectful and irreverent Screaming Weenie Productions presents Clue in the Fast Lane, presented as a three-episode series April 11-29 at Odyssey Nightclub (1251 Howe), 7:30 p.m. Tickets $10 from ScreamingWeenie.com, Little Sister's and Tech Direct PC, or $12 at the door ($25 for all three episodes).

Wonder if this show will ever come east where I might have a chance to see it. I suppose I'll just have to settle for Lucy Liu in "Lucky Number Slevin" ... movie also stars Josh Hartnett and Bruce Willis ... hmmmm. Read more ...

Teen Spirit: Nancy Drew and others are used by author Ilana Nash in her book, "American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture", from Indiana University Press to show, by "illuminating oppressive patterns of representation of teenage girls in American movies, plays, novels and TV and radio shows from 1930 to 1965", a mass culture campaign intent on maintaining "patriarchal hegemony" ... sounds like serious stuff ... might be too much for me but maybe you want to learn more ... and you can in this review ... or if you buy and read the book ...

The "Lost" Outlines of Carolyn Keene are revealed by Cleolinda Jones - self proclaimed "writer, grad student, webmistress (whp-chaaaa!), editor, ersatz entertainment journalist, erstwhile translator, feminist, dragonslayer, heroine addict, space cadet, and former CIA operative to Cuba" with the web product to back these claims - at her Occupation Girl Livejournal site. Good stuff with heavy comments from Cleolinda's peeps. Read the outline ...

Hollywood Update: Filming is apparently underway for The Mystery in Hollywood Hills which I stumbled across and mentioned some time early last month. Cinematical seems to have the most comprehensive scoop on this and as of 17 Feb is reporting:

It's on. Starring Eric Roberts-spawn (and Aquamarine's girl-who-finds-the-mermaid) Emma Roberts, the Nancy Drew movie has had a lot of people (many of whom totally won't admit it) in a nostalgic frenzy since news of its existence was announced way too long ago. Now, finally, there's some good news: production has begun. Woo hoo! Not only that, but we've got a plot (the news of which is possibly slightly less good).In order to get her somewhere with lots of pretty people and parties ...

Hey, I'm not gonna cut and paste the whole piece. If you really need to know more (some will, some won't ) you can read all about ND MHH and more directly at Cinematical. Do it now ...