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To say that the Nancy Drew mystery series has been commercially successful since its debut in 1930 is something of an understatement. In spite of the Great Depression and the period's conventional wisdom that series books directed at boys sold better than those for girls, Nancy Drew quickly became a publishing phenomenon. In 1932, Publisher 's Weekly praised the series as one of "the top-notch sellers" for the year, and in 1934 Fortune breathlessly described its sales as "the greatest phenomenon among all the fifty-centers" for young readers (qtd. in Rehak 156, 172). By 2007, nearly eighty years after the girl sleuth first stepped onto the scene, over 200 million Nancy Drew books had been sold worldwide (Taylor R7). Unsurprisingly, many critics have attempted to address the question of why this series became so popular. What made Nancy Drew a bestseller, particularly in the very difficult economic environment of the early 1930s? The Nancy Drew novels certainly benefited from being part of the larger Stratemeyer brand, which by 1930 was celebrating nearly twenty-five years as one of the most popular and prolific publishers of children's series books. The syndicate's founder, Edward Stratemeyer, had revolutionized the production and marketing of series books through his use of ghostwriters under tight editorial and contractual control and his emphasis on moderately priced, attractively bound volumes that could be marketed directly to young readers (Johnson 6-7; Keeline 19-21; Nash 34-35; Rehak 25). Within the ranks of Stratemeyer serials, Nancy Drew also distinguished herself by being "the first major full-time investigator in American girls' series books" (Billman 101). Nancy solves mysteries, and her appeal is thus targeted to fans of that genre as well as fans of serials more generally. As Anne Scott MacLeod has noted, "[t]he series . . . is focused"; readers are in no doubt that they will be reading a mystery story rather than "a school story or a romance or a career novel with a bit of mystery thrown in" (n.p.). The end result is a reading experience that is both comfortingly formulaic across the series and ever-changing in each individual volume.
Nancy's adventures proved to be wildly successful even by the high standards of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, however. In 1932, Nancy Drew easily topped the...