Nancy Drew Trivia
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99 free Nancy Drew trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Nancy Drew was pitched as 'Stella Strong', written for $125 a book by an Iowa journalist nobody was allowed to name, and sold out Macy's Christmas order in days. Ninety-five years later the first four books are in the public domain, 80 million copies have sold, and two Supreme Court justices credit her with their careers. These 99 questions cover the books and everything built on them: Edward Stratemeyer and the Syndicate, Mildred Wirt Benson and Harriet Adams, Carson Drew and Hannah Gruen, Bess and George, Ned Nickerson's college, the blue roadster, the titian hair, the 1959 rewrites, the Files and On Campus years, what the French call her, Russell Tandy's flashlight covers, Bonita Granville, Pamela Sue Martin, Emma Roberts, Sophia Lillis, The CW series and the HeR Interactive games. Easy questions ask where she lives; hard ones ask which book made her 18. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a book club.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Under what collective pseudonym are the Nancy Drew books published?
Carolyn Keene
Carolyn Keene. No such author ever existed: the books were turned out by hired ghostwriters, who took a flat fee and signed away both their rights and the right to say they had written them.
Q 02Who created Nancy Drew as a female counterpart to the Hardy Boys?
Edward Stratemeyer
Edward Stratemeyer. He had launched the Hardy Boys three years earlier and wanted a girl detective to match, but died less than two weeks after her first books went on sale.
Q 03What colour are the spines of the hardback Nancy Drew mysteries published since 1962?
Yellow
Yellow. The bright spines arrived in 1962 as the early stories were being reissued in shorter, modernised versions with the ethnic stereotypes of the 1930s texts removed.
Q 04In what fictional town does Nancy Drew live?
River Heights
River Heights. For a sleepy, tree-lined Midwestern suburb it has an astonishing crime rate: burglars, jewel thieves, smugglers and kidnappers all turn up there in the course of the series.
Q 05What is the profession of Nancy's father, Carson Drew?
Attorney
Attorney. Carson Drew is a famous lawyer and former prosecutor, and some of Nancy's mysteries start out as his cases, which she follows up while he is away on business for weeks.
Q 06What is the name of the Drews' housekeeper?
Hannah Gruen
Hannah Gruen. The early books treat her as a servant to be sent back to the kitchen, but in the revised texts she has helped raise Nancy since Mrs Drew died and is closer to a mother.
Q 07Nancy's two long-term best friends, Bess and George, are related how?
Cousins
Cousins. The two are written as opposite foils for Nancy: Bess is timid and fond of food and boys, while George is an athletic tomboy.
Q 08What is the full first name of Nancy's friend Bess?
Elizabeth
Elizabeth. She arrives in the fifth book, The Secret at Shadow Ranch, and from then on plays the timid, food-loving foil to bolder Nancy.
Q 09Nancy's boyfriend Ned Nickerson is a student at which fictional college?
Emerson
Emerson. Ned plays football for the college, but he patiently drops everything whenever Nancy has a mystery on her hands.
Q 10What colour is Nancy Drew's famous roadster in the original series?
Blue
In the later books it becomes a blue convertible instead.
Q 11In the revised books, Nancy's hair colour was changed from blonde to what?
Titian
Titian. The reddish hair first appeared on a late-1950s cover painting, long rumoured to be a printing-ink accident, and the text was soon changed to match.
Q 12The original, sixteen-year-old Nancy Drew has graduated from where?
High school
High school. In the original books she is sixteen and finished with school, which leaves her free to spend her days on mysteries rather than on lessons or a job.
Q 13Which mystery series about two boarding-school sisters was published under the same pen name as Nancy Drew?
The Dana Girls
Q 21After Nancy Drew's creator died, which daughter ran his Syndicate for over fifty years?
Harriet Adams
Harriet Adams. She took over with her sister Edna, who stepped back in the early 1940s, and for years she claimed to have written every Nancy Drew book herself.
Q 22Besides Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, which series did the Syndicate's founder create?
The Bobbsey Twins
The Bobbsey Twins. The two sets of twins began their adventures in 1904, a quarter of a century before Nancy, and ghostwriters kept the series going for 75 years.
Q 23What is the title of the first Nancy Drew book?
The Secret of the Old Clock
The Dana Girls. The Syndicate launched Jean and Louise Dana in 1934 to cash in on Nancy's success, though the sisters never sold as well as she did.
Q 14Which early friend of Nancy's, from the first books, was supplanted by Bess and George?
Helen Corning
Helen Corning. The flighty, fun-loving Helen shares the earliest adventures, but the series soon swapped her for a contrasting pair of sidekicks and she is barely glimpsed again.
Q 15Which boy-inventor hero from the same book syndicate got a short-lived TV spin-off from Nancy Drew in 2022?
Tom Swift
Tom Swift. The 2022 spin-off made him a Black billionaire inventor, but the network cancelled it within a month of its premiere.
Q 16Which ghostwriter wrote most of the early Nancy Drew books and gave her a feisty spirit?
Mildred Wirt Benson
Mildred Wirt Benson. She wrote 23 of the first 30 books for a flat fee and a promise of silence, and her authorship only became public when she testified in a 1980 court case.
Q 17Why did Nancy Drew's first ghostwriter skip books eight to ten?
A pay cut
A pay cut. With money tight, the Syndicate reduced its ghostwriters' fees, so she walked away and a man, Walter Karig, wrote the next three.
Q 18At 59, the first Nancy Drew ghostwriter took up which pursuit, the subject of her column 'Happy Landings'?
Flying planes
Flying planes. She earned her pilot's licence in 1964 after years of chartering bush pilots to reach Mayan ruins in Central America.
Q 19The first Nancy Drew ghostwriter earned the University of Iowa's first master's degree in which subject?
Journalism
Journalism. She later admitted writing a Syndicate novel when she should have been working on her thesis, reckoning that as the only student on the course she would have to be passed.
Q 20Which talk-show host was a producer of the 2019 film Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase?
Ellen DeGeneres
Ellen DeGeneres. Her company made the film for Warner Bros., which gave it only a limited cinema release, and it took well under a million dollars at the box office.
The Secret of the Old Clock. Its original 1930 text entered the US public domain at the start of 2026, so anyone may now reprint or adapt Nancy's first case, though not the 1959 rewrite.
Q 24In the first book, Nancy hunts for the missing will of which deceased man?
Josiah Crowley
Josiah Crowley. The old man had promised to remember the poor relatives who once cared for him, and Nancy's search proves that he kept his word in a later will.
Q 25Which snobbish family are the heirs presumptive Nancy dislikes in the first book?
The Tophams
The Tophams. Richard Topham, his social-climbing wife and their stuck-up daughters Isabel and Ada took a rich old relative into their home only once they hoped to inherit his fortune.
Q 26Which company published the original Nancy Drew books and issued the revised texts from 1959?
Grosset & Dunlap
Grosset & Dunlap. It had published Nancy from the start, and when the Syndicate took its new titles to a rival in 1979 it sued, keeping the right to print the first 56 books.
Q 27In the mid-1980s the syndicate that created Nancy Drew was sold outright to which publisher?
Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster. It had been publishing the new Nancy Drew titles since 1979, and once it owned the characters outright it launched a run of paperback spin-off series.
Q 28Which 1986 spin-off series gave an older Nancy Drew more romance and more murders?
The Nancy Drew Files
The Nancy Drew Files. The new owners wanted more mature mysteries with romance in them, and the paperbacks, published almost monthly, put malice and adventure ahead of the cosy puzzles of the originals.
Q 29The 2019 TV series Nancy Drew is set in Horseshoe Bay, a town in which state?
Maine
Maine. The show gave Nancy a new home town troubled by restless spirits, though its New England port was actually filmed around Vancouver.
Q 30In which 1995 spin-off does Nancy Drew split from Ned after a readers' phone vote?
Nancy Drew on Campus
Nancy Drew on Campus. The series sent her to Wilder University, where romance and student life pushed the mysteries into the background, and it ended after three years.