I Blame It All on Nancy Drew

     I am a reader. I read almost anything I can get my hands on. Newspaper (who has those nowadays?), magazine (not so much), billboards, signs, blogs, web pages, but especially BOOKS. And no, I am not a print snob. I love print, but let's face it--you don't have to dust a Nook or a Kindle, and those weigh far less than most hardbound books.
     But I digress. What I meant to post about today is the big confession that I love fiction more than non, and that I also love genre fiction more than anything. There, I've said it. I don't like "important" or "literary" books. In my mind, those words just mean "depressing." Who needs more depression in their lives? Certainly not I. No, I love books that will probably not stand the test of time. And my favorite of all is . . . drum roll, please . . . mystery fiction (or, as they say in England, crime fiction, although I think that is a bad description). And if you want to get into subgenres, my favorite is cozy mystery fiction. Other than the hapless Jackson Brodie, my protagonists really need to be amateurs, preferably women, who just happen to get involved in stuff. And if you want a sub-subgenre, I love clerical cozy mysteries. If there's a dash of the supernatural--okay, you can argue that anything having to do with entities not seen, whether angelic, deific, or otherwise, qualifies as supernatural--so much the better.

     When I start to dissect why this is so, I think back to what kinds of books I read as a child and a teenager. As a child and preteen, I remember loving Cherry Ames, the nurse who went from place to place and always ran into a mystery while she was there. Books about camps and boarding schools were big sellers for me. (The very best Cherry Ameses were Camp Nurse and Boarding School Nurse.) I guess I always wanted to leave home for big stretches of time . . . but that's another story. Books about supernatural things attracted me. I remember a chapter book called The Blue Nosed Witch that I must have checked out of the school library twenty times during the second grade. Back then, we read comic books that weren't about superheroes. My favorites were Casper the Friendly Ghost and Wendy the Good Little Witch.  A trend has developed here.

     And then, there was Nancy Drew. It all started with Nancy.
     Nancy always had it together. She drove well. She was independent--she had Ned, but he wasn't always around hanging onto her (or telling her what to do). She had friends--Bess and George--but she didn't feel the need to constantly travel in packs. She was logical. She was smart. She was resourceful. And she always solved the mystery! Nancy was my heroine.
     And then, sometime around the 9th grade, I discovered the wondrous writing of Mary Stewart. You can have your Victoria Holts and your Daphne du Mauriers. NO one can touch Mary. Her heroines stood up for the helpless, solved the mystery, and always got the guy in the end--and all in really cool settings like France or Greece. After drinking that kool-aid, I knew I would never be the same. I have never gotten over wanting to see all those places and maybe solve a small mystery along the way.

     I've read a lot of genre fiction since then, some other popular fiction, lots of classics, some nonfiction, but I always return to mystery, or at the very least, mystery lite--the romantic suspense created by Mary Stewart. Along the way, I wrote a couple of romance books, tried my best (and at this point, I think I've failed) to become a professional church worker, and planned lots of trips to those exotic locations that I never took. And I'm still reading mysteries.
     Thanks, Nancy. And Cherry. And Vicky Loring . . . And, of course, Mary.




The supernatural sub-sub-genre:

And the sub-sub-genre: