Elusive Korean Nancy

There in an entry in Worldcat.org for this book under the Carolyn Keene section, indicating that there is officially at least one Nancy Drew that was published in Korea. I was lucky to find a blurry image of the cover. The translation of the Korean title is "Secret Stairway" so it is probably The Hidden Staircase.

Russian bootlegs?

I have found the text of several Nancys translated into Russian and posted online. Some of the sites are sponsored by libraries, so I guess this is some kind of Project Gutenberg for Russian girls needing suitable detective fiction! Not sure how Simon & Schuster feels about this.... Some of the sites have even gone to the trouble of cobbling together some fake Russian covers to accompany the text. Unfortunately it does not appear that these have ever been published with paper and bindings, but the images are kinda neat.

Little Korean girls using Nancy Drew to learn English

Wonder & Learn has released some of the Crew Clue titles as aids to teach English to Korean girls. There are workbook pages included with the story, and all new artwork (cover and internals). So far books #1-4 have been produced.

A whole new language to add to the lexicon!

While at the annual Nancy Drew Sleuths convention I received an email from Austin Johnson, another series book enthusiast. He sent me a clue about the existence of some Nancy Drew books in Vietnamese. Further investigation led to the discovery of 2 Girl Detective titles which were translated into Vietnamese in 2009, plus the apparent existence of some earlier works from the classic series issued in the 1990s. The reason these had not been noticed by me previously is that the 1990s books used the French "Alice" name instead of Nancy Drew. This would sort of make sense since Vietnam was once part of the French colony Indochine.

I am attaching the image of one of the Girl Detective books - I have not been able to find an example of the older books as yet. I think I have found a source for the Vietnamese Girl Detective books as they continue to be in print. I'm so excited that I can now officially declare that Nancy Drew books have been translated into 28 languages!

Be A Detective - Thai style

I stumbled across this book cover online but have not been able to hold it in my own hands, so don't know a lot of details. It appears the be Danger on Ice from the Nancy Drew & Hardy Boys Be a Detective series. They have recycled the UK artwork for the cover rather than use the US image. I'm not sure exactly when it was printed - possibly back in the 1980/1990's when the originals were issued, or maybe it is a newer book.

Next title released in Japan

Here is the cover of the next story from Tsogen of Japan - The Clue in the Diary. Guess that's Ned peering over Nancy's shoulder helping her decipher the Swedish in the diary. Glad that they are continuing to publish these - hope they are selling well.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I recently stumbled across a foreign edition Nancy Drew reference in an unexpected place - in the best selling thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson. At one point a journalist is researching the September 1966 disappearance of a teenage girl named Harriet Vanger and investigates her father's cabin. An excerpt from page 319 reads:

Of the books, about half were mystery paperbacks from Wahlström's Manhattan series: Mickey Spillane with titles like Kiss Me, Deadly with classic covers by Bertil Hegland. He found half a dozen Kitty books, some Famous Five nivels by Enid Blyton , and a Twin Mystery by Sivar Ahlrud...

While I was reading this, I smiled a little to myself at the reference to Bertil Hegland, who was the illustrator for the original Swedish translations of Nancy Drew, but my smile only got wider when I saw that Kitty was mentioned in the next sentence! By the way the name is simply thrown out, with no explanation of who Kitty is (i.e., doesn't need any extra information such as the name of the author, as in Enid Blyton) that leads me to believe that Kitty is pretty universally known in Sweden, similar to the way that Nancy Drew is a commonplace cultural reference in the US, even for people who have never read any of her mysteries.

To accompany this post I am uploading the cover of Kitty och nyckelmysteriet (The Clue of the Black Keys) which is the Swedish translation that was published in 1966, the year of Harriet Vanger's disappearance. Naturally the cover is one of Bertil Hegland's.