This collection of essays focuses its critical sights on the figure of the girl sleuth, made famous by Nancy Drew but also characterized by other famous detectives like Cherry Ames, Trixie Belden, Linda Carlton, and even in contemporary media by Veronica Mars and Hermione Granger of the ""Harry Potter"" series (all of whom are represented in the book.) The girl sleuth is perhaps the ultimate in paradox - she is fearless but cautious; intelligent but undereducated; unbound yet always contained. She is almost impossibly feminine, perfectly appointed and impeccably dressed, yet she is also downright feminist, barging through barriers that her adult female counterparts would not get through for decades to come.And yet, in the face of the girl sleuth's paradoxical nature, solving mysteries is clearly her defining act. Fittingly, solving mysteries is what each of the authors represented in this collection strives to do, examining the questions and conundrums these girl sleuths have left in their wake as they have righted wrongs, stopped the bad guy, and saved the day.The topics include: the disputed origins of Nancy Drew and the Stratemeyer Syndicate; the firmly intertwined relationships between the Syndicate and Nancy Drew's many ghostwriters; the surprisingly distinct and evolving textual identities of the Cherry Ames series; the adaptation of the traditional girl sleuth archetype in contemporary girl detectives like Veronica Mars, Lulu Dark, and Ingrid Levin-Hill; and the ways in which Harry Potter's Hermione Granger, while a central female character in the series, is often at odds with the male-centric, fantasy-genre world of Harry Potter himself.