Abstract
What literary figure could be more perverse than the child detective? In The Case of Peter Pan, Jacqueline Rose provocatively argues that juvenile literature, in order to maintain a notion of childhood innocence, ‘carries with it a plea that certain psychic barriers should go undisturbed, the most important of which is the barrier between adult and child’ (70). In these terms, the union of children’s fiction and detective fiction should be most disturbing, impossible even: detective mysteries require the lurid display of exactly the deceptions, instabilities, and corruptions of the adult world that children’s fiction supposedly seeks to keep from the young. Yet this union of literary forms, wherein juvenile investigators discover and probe the illicit doings of their elders, has proven to be one of the most popular, and resilient of generic innovations. The phenomenal success of the children’s mystery series produced by Edward Stratemeyer’s syndicate of ghostwriters (see Billman 1–35; Johnson 1–17), particularly the Nancy Drew novels, is only the most striking index of the widespread pleasure taken in challenging such deeply held beliefs about the necessary segregation of child and adult, mystery and certainty, innocence and experience.
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© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Boone, T. (2001). The Juvenile Detective and Social Class: Mark Twain, Scouting for Girls, and the Nancy Drew Mysteries. In: Gavin, A.E., Routledge, C. (eds) Mystery in Children’s Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985137_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985137_4
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