Author2Author: Chelsea Cain & Susan Kandel, pt. 1

I was so glad when, after I introduced Chelsea Cain and Susan Kandel to each other and arranged for each to receive a copy of the other's novel, their reactions were so positive. Chelsea had this to say about Susan's Not a Girl Detective, in which amateur sleuth Cece Caruso solves a murder intimately connected to the Nancy Drew ouevre: "I loved your book. You have a such a great voice, somehow light-hearted and wicked at the same time." And Susan told Chelsea that her Nancy Drew parody, Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, "was a hoot. I read it in the offices of Dr. Weintraub, orthodonist extraordinaire, waiting for my eleven-year-old daughter to have her braces removed. Within the hour, I had a seventeen year old and her mom enthralled with my explanation that Bess wasn't really fat, that Nancy's mom was actually alive, and that Frank Hardy--well, I don't really want to go there..."

Chelsea Cain: I suppose that we should start with the obvious: Nancy. I had such a great time re-reading ND books when I was researching for Confessions, and I was amazed at how I had merely to stack a few of the series on a table in a public place and streams of women would materialize all wanting to share memories of the titian-haired detective. (Okay, sometimes it was kind of annoying.) I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you read a few ND books as a kid? What role (if any) did those books play in your life as a reader/writer? What was your favorite ND book? And what was it like to revisit the books in preparation for Not a Girl Detective?

Susan Kandel: I never read a Nancy Drew book growing up. It feels good to get that off my chest. I came to Nancy Drew through my de-braced daughter. When she was in first grade, we used to sit in the park after school and I'd read her the books, one after another. By the time she was in second grade, Kyra, her little sister, Maud, who'd clamored to join us, and I were all really into the latent humor. We especially liked the names of the crooks. Our favorite was Benny "The Slippery One" Caputi. We somehow conflated him with Thomas O'Malley, Alley Cat, from The Aristocats, but that's another story.

Nancy was always exempt from our jokes. She is the alpha girl every zeta girl wants to be: confident, unflappable, unstoppable, loyal, smart, good. She should make you want to puke, but she doesn't because she makes no pretense of being human: she's a phantasmatic suburban superheroine who can eat pudding twice daily and still turn a mean cartwheel when needed. It's sci-fi for girls. What could be better? My personal favorite is Lilac Inn: it is the classic book, I think. My girls prefer The Double Jinx Mystery, which (sorry) goes for baroque.

Chelsea Cain: My favorite ND book was The Mystery of the Glowing Eye which opens with a helicopter flown by "remote control" crashing into Nancy's backyard. In it is a note from Ned, who has apparently been kidnapped and Nancy has to spend the rest of the book tracking him down. It's one of the yellow hardbacks from the 1970s, an era universally considered the low point of the series, but the interior illustrations of Nancy in bell bottoms are to die for. (Cece would approve.) Strangely, the whole remote-control helicopter crashing bit did not strike me as odd at all as a kid.

It is sci-fi for girls, isn't it? Having written a parody of the books, I've been a little amazed at what, uh, passion some grown-up women still feel for the intrepid Ms. Drew. (The Chums in your book really rang true to me.) They are very defensive of her character. I've heard the phrase "that is never how Nancy's life would have turned out," so many times I've wanted to bludgeon strangers with a magnifying glass.

Tomorrow: More tales of Nancy fandom!