And to Open the Floor for Discussion…

…and get things hopping here, let’s pose a question which seems to be at the heart of our girl-sleuth interests, especially within the confines of our hostess Deanna’s Girl Detectives in Trouble world! To wit, what’s the best way to put an adventuresome (or, as Lars Beckert might put it, troublesome) girl detective in peril in the course of her solving a mystery? And why?

After all, there’s a long history to girl sleuths ending up in various perils, predicaments, and outright deathtraps! Nancy Drew has been hit on the head by so many flashlights and various other heavy blunt objects that she must have been dealing with post-concussion syndrome since the franchise’s founding in 1930! Nancy and her cohorts Trixie Belden, Penny Parker, and so on, have fallen into hundreds of traps and had miles of rope applied by bad guys (and bad girls) in hopes of keeping our heroines from solving the mystery and saving the day. But what’s the best? How do we most enjoy seeing our sleuthing heroines wind up in peril?

Speaking as one who, a very very long time ago, started out as a wide-eyed boy filching furtive reads of Nancy and Trixie (particularly Trixie), nothing said peril as much as finding Trixie and/or Honey, or Nancy, George, and/or Bess, tightly tied up and gagged, particularly in a dank basement or ship’s hold or (a personal Trixie and Honey favorite) the pilot house of a supposedly abandoned riverboat. There was usually some threat involved before the binding, usually along the lines of you’ll-never-see-the-light-of-day-again, and then the leaving of the helpless sleuth to ponder her fate. But even as a young lad, I always knew (usually because I’d peek at the end of the book) that my heroine Trixie or Nancy would escape and bring the wrath of justice down upon the villains, who would always regret having fallen afoul of Miss Drew or Miss Belden or Miss Parker. Sometimes, the plucky heroine would work herself free; in others, she would manage to send out a distress message and bring help to her rescue. But to me the best scenes were always of the heroine or heroines tightly tied up by the villains…

So what about you? What to you puts the peril in girl-sleuth peril? Traps? Hidden swamps or forest dangers? Dungeons or cages or traps owned or set up by the evil villain? Do tell!