Nancy Drew, redrawn

 ...Nancy is also very noticeably white. She lives in a place called River Heights sometime between the 1930s and the 1980s; her Wasp status makes her so privileged that the Great Depression and second world war are only ever alluded to, and she knows people who have black servants (Beulah the African American servant is changed to Anna, a “plump smiling housekeeper” in a later rewrite). She never has a job, drives a fancy roadster, her handsome lawyer dad and motherly housekeeper dote on her, and she and her friends date lovely varsity boys called variants of Buck, Burt and Ned. After Nancy is described as the “attractive Titian blonde” with “baby blue eyes” for the umpteenth time, you start getting she might be white (and probably hot). 

But she won’t be so white for much longer: this week it was announced that Nancy Drew is going to be adapted for the screen for the umpteenth time – and she won’t be Caucasian. President of CBS Entertainment Glenn Geller told the Hollywood Reporter: “She is diverse, that is the way she is written. [She will] not [be] Caucasian. I’d be open to any ethnicity.” 

This transformation of crime’s most vanilla gumshoe follows a run of more diverse casting of book characters: a black Hermione on stage in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Idris Elba possibly signed to play Stephen King’s Roland in the Dark Tower TV show. Lucy Liu plays John (Joan) Watson in Elementary, Michael B Jordan was Johnny Storm in Fantastic Four. Why the hell not? It may offend people with no sense of priority or inherited privilege, but these castings are small acknowledgments of the decades-long lack of representation of BAME characters in mainstream media and literature.