The second Nancy Drew mystery, and one that was again extensively revised from its 1930 version for republication in 1959. And I do mean extensively. If you read a comparison of the two books you’ll see how not just the characters’ names but most of the plot has been changed. Mildred Benson, writing under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, considered this to be a personal favourite books but I don’t think I can make any comment on that since the book she wrote wasn’t the one I was reading.

As things kick off it seems as though there are two mysteries in play: a couple of old ladies (Helen Corning’s great-grandmother and great-aunt) are living in a mansion that seems to be haunted while Nancy’s lawyer father is involved in a real estate deal that is coming undone in ways that are too complicated to explain (and that I’m not sure make any sense). Is there a connection? Of course there’s a connection. But it will take a while before things can be sorted out.

Nancy herself is feisty, fearless, and formidable. You don’t mess with this girl. If she sees a suspicious man (a man with an “athletic build” and cauliflower ear) checking out where she’s parked her car in an isolated field she takes off chasing him! Her friend Helen may be nervous about ghosts, or about ancient passageways crumbling down upon them, but Nancy just charges and barges ahead. And all this unarmed! In the 1930 version she’s packing a revolver, but here she only has a flashlight. When the police tell her she’ll never break the witnesses they have in custody she wins them over in mere seconds. There’s really no stopping her. And when it comes to noticing things she’s more machine than detective. I had to wonder, reading this passage, if she was perhaps being ironic. But I don’t think so.

“What did he look like?” Nancy asked.

The officer described the man as being in his early fifties, short, and rather heavy-set. He had shifty pale-blue eyes.

“Well,” Nancy replied, “I can think of several men who would fit that description. Did he have any outstanding characteristics?”

“Harry didn’t notice anything, except that the fellow’s hands didn’t look like as if he did any kind of physical work. The taximan said they were kind of soft and pudgy.”

“Well, that eliminates all the man I know who are short, heavy-set and have pale-blue eyes. None of them has hands like that.”

“It’ll be a good identifying feature,” the police officer remarked.

Maybe people noticed soft hands more 80 years ago. It’s certainly the case that today you wouldn’t feel a radio “to see if it were even slightly warm to prove it had been in use.” (“The music wasn’t being played on this,” she determines, “finding the radio cool.”) And how many teenagers today would be able to use a buttonhook even for its intended use, much less to open a secret wooden panel in the ceiling? I had to look up what a buttonhook was.

I shouldn’t be too hard on the Nancy Drew novels. After all, they’re YA fiction, directed primarily at girls, and written very much on an assembly line. Just as the end of almost chapter gives us a cliffhanger, so the end of each book hooks you into the next in the series, the title of which is already helpfully provided.

That said, aside from the historical interest I have to register that I don’t care for them very much. The plot in this one anyway I found hard to follow, with far too many secondary characters and the legal stuff, as in The Secret of the Old Clock, just a lot of fudge. More than that though, the writing struck me as lazy. To take just one example, on page 101 Nancy is referred to as “the young sleuth.” She’s called this again on page 103. On page 109 she’s “the young detective” and on 112 she’s the young sleuth again. And she’s the young sleuth again on pages 117 and 119. This list isn’t meant to be exhaustive, even for these twenty pages, as I know I’m missing some. But you get the point.

So these books are interesting as cultural touchstones. And I also found something compelling in the family dynamics at play. The housekeeper Hannah Gruen is usually presented as a kind of surrogate mother figure, but most of the time Nancy herself seems to be her father’s partner. It has a bit of the air of Haworth Parsonage about it. But even that doesn’t make me eager to read a lot more.

Drew index

A fun squib by Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie. Barrie was a friend of Conan Doyle and, as with the other Holmes parodies he penned, “The Late Sherlock Holmes” has the flavour of a shared joke.

The story takes the form of a breathless newspaper report on the death of the great detective, with Dr. Watson being arrested for murder after the events at Reichenbach Falls described (from Watson’s own point of view, of course) in “The Final Problem.” Drawing on the evidence presented in that story, which is heightened for humorous effect, the report makes the case for why Watson may have wanted to do away with his famous former companion. “Latterly,” we’re told, the two men “have not been on friendly terms, Holmes having complained frequently that whatever he did the other took credit for.”

On the other hand, the suspected accomplice [Watson] has been heard to say “that Holmes has been getting too uppish for anything,” that he “could do very well without Holmes now,” that he “has had quite enough of Holmes,” that he is “sick of the braggart’s name,” and even that “if the public kept shouting for more Holmes he would kill him in self-defence.”

Then the screw gets turned a little further as Barrie plays on Doyle’s own desire to do away with Holmes, introducing the author himself into the story as a “dark horse” candidate for Watson’s accomplice. And if you’re a real Holmes aficionado you’ll like the reference to the Ardlamont murder case, the trial for which took place the same year, 1893, that this story was first (anonymously) published. One of the expert witnesses at the Ardlamont trial was Dr. Joseph Bell, the man who inspired the character of Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes index

Sapiens: A Graphic History Volume One: The Birth of Humankind

By Yuval Noah Harari

Page I bailed on: 28.

Verdict: I really enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, which was a blockbuster Big History bestseller. Harari has a wonderful way of explaining ideas in a popular voice. Unfortunately, this graphic version tries to be even more reader-friendly without adding anything of value. The character of Harari’s niece Zoe is introduced to be a surrogate for the audience, so I take it the target reader here was young people. Younger than me anyway. I found it to be too cutesy by half and gave up pretty quickly. It did make me go back to re-read parts of Sapiens though, which I enjoyed very much and frankly found easier to follow.

If you just read graphic versions of books because you can’t bring yourself to read full text, then fine. Otherwise I don’t know why you’d bother.

The DNF files

I have to start with the matter of dates. I’d always thought of the Nancy Drew (and Hardy Boy) mysteries as being products of the 1950s, the golden age of capitalism that apparently was the period of “greatness” that America has ever since been wanting to return to. And this isn’t an entirely false memory. The series actually got started in 1930, with this novel, as a new franchise from the Edward Stratemeyer Syndicate, a book packaging company that published a number of popular children’s and YA titles. The name “Carolyn Keene” was a collective pseudonym for the authors assigned to write the Nancy Drew books, following outlines laid out by Stratemeyer and his daughters. As far as I can gather, Mildred Wirt Benson was the author of The Secret of the Old Clock, but not so much the author of the book as I read it.

More explanation: the Nancy Drew books were extensively revised under the editorship of Harriet Adams starting at the end of the 1950s. There were cosmetic changes made, like Nancy being 18 instead of 16 and her blue roadster changing to a convertible (which makes her getting caught in a thuderstorm an even greater emergency), but also more significant ones that adjusted the order of events and the presentation of characters. Critics have pointed out how with the revisions Nancy (a prototype of the modern, liberated young woman circa. 1930, whose name was originally going to be Stella Strong) became less of a tomboy and even more of a “daddy’s girl” thirty years later. The myth of the ‘50s was already well on its way to being written by the end of that decade.

What surprised me the most about the date though was that 1930 was the year when America was first facing the full shock of the Great Depression. While some of the people we meet in the novel are tight for cash – they could sure use that money from Josiah Crowley’s will! – there are no breadlines or tent cities. Women wear gloves when they go out, and people schedule luncheons. I haven’t heard the word luncheon in a long time. Yes, all seems quite happy in River Heights and its environs.

Selecting a recently constructed highway, Nancy rode along, glancing occasionally at the neatly planted fields on either side. Beyond were rolling hills.

“Pretty,” she commented to herself. “Oh, why can’t all people be nice like this scenery and not make trouble?”

Alas, people do make trouble. In particular a snotty family named the Tophams had basically kidnapped wealthy old guy Josiah Crowley (with a name like Josiah I think you’re automatically ancient) and now stand to inherit his fortune. I’m not sure exactly how the Tophams did this, or what the deal was. If Josiah was being taken care of by them then I can see why they would want to be sure that they were getting paid. I know families where there have been arrangements like that. And while the Tophams aren’t nice people and Josiah doesn’t seem to have liked them at all, there’s no evidence of abuse. Nevertheless, apparently Josiah had to sneak away at some point to make a second will that leaves money to a collection of needy friends and extended family. Nancy is sure this second will exists somewhere and sets out to find it so that the worthy poor can be rewarded and the Tophams (a married couple with a pair of “mean girl” daughters Nancy’s age) are cut off.

Actually, Nancy is quite a bitch about this. When she finds the second will (yes, it’s hidden in an old clock) a scene is arranged where her father Carson (“there’s no better lawyer in River Heights”) will read it to all the beneficiaries. “I believe you’re more thrilled than if you were inheriting the fortune yourself,” dad remarks. Nancy responds: “I am thrilled. . . . I can hardly wait until the will is read aloud. Won’t everyone be surprised? Especially the Tophams. Do you think they will come?”

So while Nancy wants the Hoovers and Abby Rowan and the Mathews brothers get their deserved reward, what she really wants to see is the Tophams receiving their comeuppance. And this gets rubbed in, as Mr. Topham has been speculating in the stock market and is ruined. His daughters are distraught:

Isabel gave a shriek. “Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, Mother, all those bills! What’ll we do?”

Ada too had cried out. “I’ll have to go to work! Oh, I can’t bear the thought of it!”

Which is kind of funny, but then I don’t think Nancy is employed either and her response might have been similar.

In the original 1930 version of the story there is a scene after the reading of the will that underscores Nancy’s dark motivation even more. It was taken out in the revised edition so I’ll include it here:

After everyone had left the house, Mr. Drew turned to his daughter with a smile.

“Well, we administered the coup de grâce to the Tophams all right.”

“Yes, wasn’t it funny to watch their faces when they learned they were cut off without a cent?”

“They took it hard. It’s my opinion the Tophams won’t be able to hold their heads so high after this. Richard Topham looked rather sick when he left. I suspect he’s desperately in need of ready cash.”

“The Tophams deserved to be cut off without a cent,” Nancy Drew declared.

Damn, Nancy. That’s cold.

As an aside, and returning to the economic theme, I find it very strange that in the original novel under the will the Hoovers get $75,000 each, as does Abby Rowan. In 1959 the total estate is only valued at $100,000 and the beneficiaries only receive $10,000 each. And Richard Topham does actually get $5,000, so he’s not left without a cent. In terms of the amounts being handed out that’s quite a comedown, and remember that the issue during the Depression was that nobody had money.

Apparently they didn’t have much furniture either. The subplot here involves a trio of thieves with a moving fan who break into empty homes and steal all the furniture! Now this came as a real time shock, as most people today have to pay someone to take old furniture away, as half the time even charities don’t want it! But things were different in 1930. Indeed, it’s a matter of some dispute in the will as to who will get Josiah’s furniture. That stuff was gold!

Being both an old book and YA there is a lot to smile and shake your head at. Captured by the furniture thieves, 18-year-old Nancy is only locked in a closet when they leave the house they’ve broken into. There’s no hint of physical violence. And while lots of mysteries deal with wills and what’s in them, I thought the discussion of how this one worked was kind of questionable. But even more mysterious to me was how easily Carson Drew gets access to Josiah’s safety deposit box. I guess you just have to take it for granted that everything he’s doing is legit.

As for the mystery, there isn’t much of one. Nancy is a detective, but not the kind who puts things together or uses clues to figure things out. She just knows that there must be a second will and keeps asking people about it until she knows where it must be and then follows people around (trucks at the time left distinctive tire tracks on dirt roads, which makes things easy!) until she finds it. All of which leads to what is (for her) a satisfactory conclusion. There isn’t even any mystery to her thought processes, as she spends the whole book thinking aloud. But the hook is set as “a far more baffling case than the one she had just solved” beckons. Onward the franchise.

Drew index

An index to my reviews of the Nancy Drew books by “Carolyn Keene” (a collective pseudonym).

The Secret of the Old Clock
The Hidden Staircase

Mystery and Detective Fiction