I didn’t read much Nancy Drew when I was a kid so it has been fun to read through the books as an adult. Right now, I am on the original books, which were published in the 1930s, with revisions made later.

I have read some of the books in order but have also been jumping around. I already knew that Nancy’s boyfriend was Ned Nickerson but he wasn’t in the first six books. He was in later books I had read, though.  When I recently read The Clue In The Diary I found out that it was the book where he first appeared.

His appearance was one of the reasons the book is now one of my favorites, but also because the mystery held up well even all these years later.

Ned’s introduction in the book is so cute. It is clear from the start that he is taken with Nancy and hopes to become more than friends. She, of course, is also very smitten, but does her best to pretend she isn’t. What interests her right away is how he becomes interested in the same mystery she is interested in.

That mystery involves a fire at a house that she and her friends, Bess Marvin and George Fayne stumbled upon while driving home from a carnival. At that carnival they met a little girl and her mother and felt both of them looked malnourished and poor. They are talking and worrying about the little girl when they see the fire at a large mansion on the hill.

They pull over to see if they can help. Nancy runs toward the house and tells Bess and George to find a nearby house where they can call the local fire department.

Nancy yells to see if anyone is in the house but there is no answer. She hopes that no one is inside and when she runs toward the back of the house, she sees the shadowed figure of a man in the bushes, but he disappears before she can speak to him. She also finds a journal lying in the driveway and she thinks it might be a clue. The journal is written in Swedish though so she can’t read it.

The fire department arrives and begins putting out the fire and Nancy strikes up a conversation with a neighbor who says the house has been shut up all summer and she doesn’t think anyone is inside. She isn’t too thrilled with the neighbors either. Their names are Raybolt and they aren’t very nice, the neighbor says.

When Nancy goes back to her car she finds a young man climbing into it and moving it. She thinks he’s stealing it, but it turns out he’s actually just  moving it out of danger.

“The young man pulled as close to the edge of the drive as possible. He was about nineteen, Nancy decided, surveying him critically. His hair was dark and slightly curly, his eyes whimsical and friendly. He wore a college fraternity pin.”

Nancy is suspicious of him but later he begins directing traffic to help people get around the fire and her mind is changed. During the rush to get away from the fire, another car rearended her and she pulls off the road to inspect it. The young man pulls off too.

That’s when he introduces himself as Ned Nickerson. As the book goes on there will be more chance meetings and some that aren’t by chance as Ned makes it a point to visit Nancy and help her with finding out what happened at the fire.

One reason Nancy wants to find out what happened at the fire is because of the suspicious man who was outside and because Mrs. Raybolt later says her husband was inside and is dead. Nancy isn’t so sure if this is true or not.

Nancy also learns that the husband of the woman with the little girl was the man sneaking around behind the burning house. Could he have set the fire and caused the death of Mr. Raybolt? If so, why?

As I said above, I enjoyed this one. I wasn’t as pulled in by the cover for some reason so I, for some silly reason, had it in my head I wouldn’t like it. I did, though. I’d put it right up there with The Clue of the Whistling Bagpipes, which was my favorite book of the original Nancy Drew’s before I read this one.

I loved the romance part of it. It was subtle and sweet.

Here are some of the cute romance parts:

“After Ned had hung up, Nancy fairly danced back into the bedroom. He sent one slipper flying toward the bed, and the other into the far corner of the room. The young sleuth attempted to convince herself that her jubilant spirits were the result of Ned’s discovery. The ring might be a clue to the identity of the person who had set the Raybolt house on fire. Bess and George, she knew, would have interpreted her reaction very differently!”

“The suggestion was not displeasing to Ned, for he had mentioned the show merely as an excuse to spend the evening with Nancy.”

Have you ever read this particular book?

What did you think?