Confession time: I grew up on Nancy Drew and if I could have bought a secret decoder ring with her name on it, then I'd still have that souvenir in my possession today. There was one blissful holiday where everyone bought me a Nancy Drew book - about 15 of them which was HUGE for me. I also read the Bobbsey Twins (too saccharine), Trixie Belden (loved her too) and The Three Investigators (Jupiter Jones was an early hero). If there was a book about a crime solving kid then I was all over it and especially, especially, Nancy Drew.

And yes, I watched the tv show too.

When I moved into adult mysteries I fell hard for Travis McGee (I have been to Bahia Mar where Slip 1-17 is still reserved for him) and Spenser for Hire (my father got me hooked on him - loved that show too). I especially liked the lady detectives, V.I. Warshawski and Kinsey Milhone were big favorites and I read many of their books over and over. But the problem was they read as adult PIs (which they were) and not former girl detectives all grown up. There is a difference of course and if the girl detective was part and parcel of your childhood reading experience then you would know it. Perfectly fine detectives all of them, but not kid crime solvers who graduated to the big leagues.

But then - but then I received How We Got Insipid by Jonathan Lethem from Subterranean Press which included the novella "The Insipid Profession of Jonathan Hornebom". An acknowledged satire of Robert Heinlein this is a story of art and mysterious blackouts and Max Ernst and birds but what makes me love it sooo much is that the detective at the center of it all is one Ms Harriet M. Welch*, still eating tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, still secretly entering the homes of others and still 100% exactly who she was (although now grown up) when I first discovered her in elementary school.

Be still my heart Mr. Lethem.

All of this is to say that I have mad love for Sara Gran's divine mystery, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead. Gran is not new to mystery-writing (I reviewed her novel Come Closer several years ago) but with Claire DeWitt she dives full force into the girl detective world by creating a character for whom the mystery is only one small part of the story. (Sort of a much hipper, angrier, rawer version of Maisie Dobbs - plus set in New Orleans two years after Katrina.) Claire is the greatest living detective in a world where that matters (so very much our world but just wee bit skewed) and equal parts capable and falling apart. She is in New Orleans to find a D.A. gone missing after the storm. He probably drowned but still, his nephew wants to know for sure. To Claire this is pretty straightforward except, well, it is New Orleans (a place she used to call home) and nothing is ever straightforward in Claire's life. So down an utterly surreal rabbit hole readers go with Gran as she takes us on a tour of NOLA's confusion and chaos and also, even more importantly, the deep dark corners of Claire DeWitt's head.

Only a superior writer could have made this work and that should be enough right there to get you to read the book. Now.

No small part of the text is taken up with Claire being reminded of her Brooklyn childhood and her two best friends - all three of which were committed girl detectives. One is still detecting, another has been missing for years. Claire has tried to move on, her friend has refused. They were the last to see the missing girl and it is a case they can not solve. On top of that is the murder a few years back of her detecting mentor in a senseless robbery; she still misses her horribly. And over all of this is the shadow cast by the great French detective Jacques Silette, whose handbook is the guide to Claire's life (as it well should be), who haunts Claire's dreams and who tragically could not solve the missing person case of his own baby daughter.

You can see how Claire has a lot to think about.

But this is all why the book works on so many levels and why it is really genre-defying in the way that truly great fiction can (and should) be. At the heart of Claire DeWitt is much of the girl detective mythos - the long held desire to know all the secrets that lurk behind all the doors, all those secrets adults keep from children. Part of the appeal of Nancy Drew was that she opened those doors and even though she was kinda cheesey (yes, I know that), still she went looking for what really happened while most of us, to be frank, are taught to just not question. But Claire is Nancy on steroids, Nancy indomitable, Nancy in her most powerful and destructive moments. Claire is Nancy of 2012, bruised and tired, demoralized and energized, unstoppable and exhausted. Claire is who all those girl detectives I knew in 1970s-whatever were afraid to become because they (even Trixie, even Harriet) were supposed to meet a nice boy and get married and live happily ever after. (Ned Nickerson had boring couplehood written all over him and still we loved that Nancy had a boyfriend.) But Claire perseveres in spite of everything life has thrown at her including society's expectations of tween detectives to grow up and she is so bloody smart and interesting that I could not look away.

I now know who I really wanted to be when I grew up; I just wonder how Sara Gran knew before me.

* It's very interesting in reading reviews of Lethem's story how most reviewers did not catch the Harriet connection. To them (pretty much all men) she is just the female detective. They have no idea of her long and illustrious detecting history. I pity them.