Karen Coats

The Mysteries of Postmodern Epistemology: Stratemeyer, Stine, and Contemporary Mystery for Children

In the early 1930s, Edward Stratemeyer conceived of a heroine who would quickly become a cultural icon. Smart, sure-footed, and virtuous, Nancy Drew combated the evils of her time with flawless grace. With the occasional and often superfluous help of her father and friends, the young detective made River Heights and the rest of America feel confident in the competence of its youth, and reinforced a general faith in the sufficiencies of human reason to challenge and ultimately triumph over the irrational evils of war and economic crisis. But to paraphrase Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, we are not in River Heights anymore. Postmodernism in many ways challenges the supremacy of the rational, opening new questions regarding the limits of our reason in the face of the irrational. That which is abject, excluded from rational inquiry and discourse, reasserts itself. Resolution, such as we find in those tidy endings in Nancy Drew mysteries, is displaced by the opening up of new networks of complexity. Hence today’s mystery series fiction for youth responds to different cultural preoccupations. R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps and Ghosts of Fear Street series, for instance, continually breach the borders of the world as we know it. The works of Australian writer Gary Crew elide the mysterious with the mundane making the mundane mysterious, and vice versa. Contemporary mysteries for children challenge their readers to explore new paradigms of the normal, and, concomitantly, a new paradigm of the mysterious.