And I still would like to have a roadster, a blue roadster. 'Being a detective seemed to me like an excellent job,' she says. Lebowitz says Nancy's appeal was her independence. ' to sit by my bedside and read me Nancy Drew books all day long, because I couldn't read myself. 'When I was 7- or 8-years-old, I had an operation on my eyes, and my eyes were blindfolded for two weeks,' Lebowitz says. Lebowitz says she was obsessed with Nancy Drew and the entire cast of characters: Ned Nickerson, the sometimes useful kind-of boyfriend Hannah the housekeeper father Carson Drew and Nancy's adoring girlfriends, Bess and George. 'There may be casual readers of Proust, but not of Nancy Drew.' 'I don't think there is a casual reader of Nancy Drew,' says writer Fran Lebowitz. But she's really a free agent, and she's very much an independent, autonomous person at the age of 16, and when you're a little girl of 10 or 11, that's really thrilling. And her father does caution her at times, and does try to rein in some of her impulses. So Nancy begins without a mother at all, just this kindly housekeeper who doesn't have much say. 'It's interesting, if you go back and look at children's literature, how many of the really popular books are designed so that the parent figures are off stage.

'Her father does encourage her to be adult-like and to use her mind,' says Lippman. For instance, her father is very often saying, 'Nancy, this has nothing to do with you ? just stop.' In the old movies, she stands with her fingers crossed behind her back. She does things she's not supposed to do. 'One of the nice things about Nancy Drew books is that it validates curiosity as a virtue, which was not always the message in a lot of things that little girls were told,' Lippman says. Lippman's love of the girl sleuth put her on the path to creating her own best-selling series, featuring gal detective Tess Monaghan. 'I'm pretty sure I started at the beginning, The Secret of the Old Clock,' crime writer Laura Lippman says, referring to the first of dozens of Nancy Drew mysteries. She was born in 1930, but she's perpetually 18 - and always one step ahead of the adults: the iconic American girl sleuth, Nancy Drew. Nancy searches for the other Nancy Drew in this edition, published in 1932.

Cast of nancy drew mysteries