31 Days of Nancy Drew Topic #10
Nancy Drew Spinoff Series - Files, SuperMysteries, River Heights & Nancy Drew On Campus - A Brief Overview
When I tell people that there have been over 600 Nancy Drew books published since 1930, many (outside of our circles) can't wrap their heads around that figure. Most people remember the classic 56 and some know of the continuing paperbacks, but they can't seem to figure out how the 600 figure comes about. If you visit the Nancy Drew Books section of my website - you'll soon see how it all adds up between classic books, paperbacks and all the various spinoffs and newer modern series still being published.
In this posting, I'll briefly focus on 4 spinoffs and the rest of the
spinoffs will come in future 31 days of Nancy Drew postings. Today's
spinoffs are very reflective of a direction to modernize Nancy Drew and
let her compete with older teen YA fiction that was becoming hugely
popular at the time these spinoffs came out, while still preserving
classic Nancy Drew's "safe and sane mantra" in the existing Nancy Drew
Mystery Stories paperback series. You can find library bound versions of
these books and foreign editions too. Grey Castle Press also issued
hardcovers of at least 10 of the Nancy Drew Files - if anyone has more
than 10, let us know. And some of these books made it into hardcover
book club editions like the Especially For Girls book club. I've
pictured one of the Grey Castle editions and one each of the book clubs
for Files and River Heights.
Simon & Schuster started publishing the Nancy Drew Files series
in 1986 and it ran for 124 volumes until 1997. This was the longest
running spinoff series as far as number of books. These books were for teens and included more romance and
murders. These came out when I was in middle school and during my high
school years, so I was right at the target age for these and enjoyed
them. I read them through about book #50 and then I was off to college
and stopped. After college and during law school, I had to go back and
collect all the ones I'd missed when I started collecting Nancy Drew
past my childhood books. As with the regular series, these went through
various cover layout and cover model/art changes over time as the
publisher tried to keep them fresh and boost sales. There was a lot of
publicity when the series debuted and there were some promotional items
you can find that are fun to collect - I'll highlight these in a future
31 days posting.
As far as modernizing Nancy Drew, the Files
series did the best job in my opinion of doing so - and you can see she
was always in the latest fashions and that sort of thing on the covers. I
own a couple of Files original cover art paintings - the Tricia Zimic
painting for #83 Diamond Deceit which I've shown in the images of this
blog along with the final Nancy Drew Files cover for #124 Crime at the
Chat Cafe, illustrated by Bill Schmidt.
Book #100 was billed as a
special collector's edition. Books 112-119 were published with images
of the actresses from the 1995 Nancy Drew TV show starring Tracy Ryan as
Nancy Drew.
The Hardy Boys had their own Casefiles series that was similar to the Nancy Drew Files, so naturally Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys teamed up in the SuperMysteries series and there were 36 of these paperbacks published from 1988 to 1998. Often Nancy and pals were off working a case or doing something and the Hardy Boys had their own case going and then boom they'd merge into the same case they were all trying to solve. Like the Files series, there was romance and murders in these books - and often flirtation between Nancy and Frank.
River Heights (Loosely tied spinoff from Nancy Drew Files)
This series focused on Nancy Drew's neighbor Nicki Masters and her
high school pals and really had little to do with Nancy Drew - another
way to hook the teens in these kinds of series which became popular in
the 80s/90s. There were only 16 books in this series plus a super
sizzler special edition.
Worst. Idea. Ever. At least in how it was executed. In 1995, this
series debuted where Nancy goes off to Wilder University to have a much
wilder time than she was having in River Heights apparently. Wink Wink.
And fans could call in and vote if she should stay with Ned. Supposedly
they voted to have them break up, which of course was convenient since
that was clearly what the editors wanted to help drive plots involving
more romance and college dating drama than actual mysteries. The big
mystery of these books was mostly navigating college with real mystery
being more of a back burner in contrast to the Files or the regular
Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series. The 2002 ABC Nancy Drew TV pilot that
had Nancy and pals going off to college was way more exciting than
these books - had this series been written more like the TV pilot,
perhaps more fans might have given it a chance. There were only 25
volumes published before the plug was pulled.
If you want to
purchase any of these spinoffs, you can find them at sites like eBay or
in the wild and some can be downloaded at sites like Amazon. Often
you'll see lots at eBay of large sets or full sets of these books - so
it's a great way to get an instant collection to begin with and start
reading.
In the comments, let me know, if you own any of these
spinoffs? Some of you may have them in your collection because they are
related to Nancy Drew - like me - but have you read any of these? Which
spinoff series is your favorite and least favorite? Does anyone have a
favorite story in any of these series? Any On Campus fans here?
1 comment:
My favorite series are the Mystery Series, ND Files, and SuperMysteries. I've read On Campus series and I still hate it -- like you said, more drama than mysteries. I could think of a lot of potential mystery plots when Nancy goes off to college. I'm glad the On Campus series ended.
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