Here I am with another recap of an episode from The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries show from 1977.
As I’ve mentioned before, in the first season of this series, the episodes switched back and forth from Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew episodes and in the next season, they started to join together. Eventually, they began to phase out the Nancy episodes and focus more on The Hardy Boys. A new actress also started as Nancy when Pamela Sue Martin became disenchanted with the parts that were being written for her character.
*Disclaimer: These posts do spoil the entire episode. Also, I do joke around a lot about the cheesiness or plot holes or the “weird” 70s hairstyles, clothes or music, but please know it is all in good fun. I have fun watching these and the mysteries are often very interesting. Please don’t leave me comments enraged that I am making fun of your favorite show. *wink* I make fun of my favorite shows too!
In this episode, focused on Nancy Drew and titled, The Mystery of the Ghostwriter’s Cruise, we start out with people loading on to a cruise ship.
First, we see the ship with people waving from the decks and then we see a scrapbook with photos featuring an elderly man and the headline under the one photo reads: “Famous Mystery Writer John Addam to Set Sail.”
Underneath the photo there is a handwritten note which reads: “Castling to protect king — two moves to checkmate — this will be your last cruise, Mr. Addams. Your going to . . .” A hand begins writing and finishes the sentence by adding the word “die.”
I should note here that I copied that sentence verbatim from the threatening note in the journal (as you can see by the photo) and really wanted to go back and change “your” to “you’re.”
Imagine the editors not noticing that error before this episode aired. Or maybe they never noticed. Ha!
Immediately after this scene we see an elderly man and a young woman standing next to him and they are being interviewed by a TV reporter. The reporter asks the man, who we can see is Mr. Addams, the mystery writer we saw in the photos in the first scene, what made him decide to retire.
What she actually says is, “What finally decided you to do it?”
Um…huh? I don’t know about the writers of this show sometimes, but anyhow….
Mr. Addams answers that writing is getting boring now. “There isn’t a new twist anywhere.”
She asks him if this means there will never be another book featuring the main characters from his mystery books and he tells her she clearly hasn’t read his books because he killed off one character, retired the other one, and the third has simply gotten too old to do anything.
The camera pans to Nancy and her father, Carson, and friends George Fayne and Ned Nickerson. Ned is carrying all the luggage asking why the girls have so much if they are only going on the cruise for a week.
We switch quickly back to the interview and the author is mellowing a bit as he answers questions. He also refers to his niece Cathy as being his main helper with his books these days.
Nancy and the crew are now listening in the background and soon Mr. Addams ends the interview so he can meet up with them.
It isn’t clear why, but Nancy and George seem to be going on this cruise with Mr. Addams. At first, I thought maybe he is an uncle to one of them but that’s never really made clear, so I believe he is simply a friend of Carson’s.
This is one of the first times I’ve seen Nancy act like she and Ned might be more than friends. As they are saying goodbye Ned expresses concern that she will get herself in trouble and she says she doesn’t plan to and then assures him she will be safe on the cruise, leans up, and gives him a quick peck on the mouth.
Oh. Um. Well then.
Carson tells Mr. Addams to take care of the girls and Mr. Addams answers, “I’ll certainly do that.”
This whole time there is a man with either an amused or creepy smile on his face, we aren’t sure which, watching both the interview and the gathering of Mr. Addams and Nancy and her friends and Dad.
This will start an interesting episode-long tactic of making the viewers question who is suspicious and who isn’t, by the camera focusing on a person frowning, smiling, glaring, or simply looking, well, suspicious while watching Mr. Addams and the girls. This is done a number of times making us guess who was behind the eventual threats against Mr. Addams.
Let’s get back to the story, though.
On their way to find their rooms, the party is stopped by the captain. He tells Mr. Addams what a pleasure it is to have him on board and invites them all to dine with him at his table that night.
After that praise fest it’s on to their rooms but not before we have the suspenseful music and a pause by the captain with him watching the group walk away. Huh…is he also suspicious? And then there is a young woman watching them too. Is she suspicious or just a fan?
They were really dropping the red herrings left and right from the start in this one.
After the captain, the group run into George the activities director. He’s excited to meet George since his name is also George. George and George. Ha. Ha. He clearly thinks George is cute and lets her know he can’t wait to see her later during the cruise. He creepily touches her face, trailing his finger down her cheek, and says “There’s a hidden depth to you….”
Her expression cracks me up. It is a mix of flattered and horrified — pretty much how most viewers probably feel watching that moment. *snort laugh*
Once they finally get to the room there is a man waiting for them and he is not welcoming. He is the man who we saw at the beginning of the episode watching the interview and he says his name is Peter Howard. He has a tape recorder and starts smooth talking Mr. Addams, telling him he wants an interview with him about the memoir he’s planning to write. Mr. Addams says he isn’t going to be writing a memoir and tells the man to get out.
George and Cathy go to explore the ship, leaving Nancy and Mr. Addams in his cabin. Mr. Addams says he’s going to take a nap and settles back in a chair. Before he can fall asleep, though, Nancy finds the scrapbook with the threat written in it. She reads it to him and he sort of shrugs and says, “You don’t go through life like a battering ram without making some enemies.” He doesn’t like the idea someone may be after him but he also thinks it might be a prank so he decides to nap and Nancy decides to go meet up with George and Cathy.
Mr. Addams asks her to leave one light on in the cabin because he doesn’t like to wake up in pure darkness and when she goes to turn a lamp on, a huge spark flies out, knocking her down.
There is a fade out as the show goes to commercial break and when we “return” (there are no commercials where I watched this on a YouTube channel where someone uploaded all the episodes), George and Cathy are back and Nancy is sitting on the couch with a glass of water.
Everyone is concerned about Nancy and the captain steps in because he’s probably concerned about his ship’s reputation with the light in a celebrity’s cabin almost zapping the life out of someone. A ship electrician has arrived and says the lamp was definitely rewired to it would zap someone on purpose.
Mr. Addams points out how bad the situation is but how it could have been even worse if he had touched the lamp since he is an old man with a heart condition.
The electrician is a fan of Mr. Addam’s and lets him know how the fact someone targeted him is like a scene from one of his books. Wow. I bet Mr. Addams had no idea the attack was similar to one of his books. Good thing that electrician was there to tell him.
Viewers are left feeling that there is something not quite right about this electrician but can’t put their finger on it. He goes on the list of suspects too at this point.
As if we don’t have enough suspense, we will soon find out that the captain is worried about what could be deadly fog settling around the ship. He tells the crew to keep him abreast of the situation and then heads to dinner.
Throughout the episode we keep being shown a person in a long trench coat moving around the ship. We see them again as Nancy is on her way to dinner. They are cutting some wires and putting what looks like a bomb somewhere in the bottom of the ship. Eek. This episode is intense and I’m not kidding.
As in any Nancy Drew episode of the series, we have another moment where an older man seems to be flirting with her. This time she’s dancing with Mr. Howard who wants to know how well she knows Mr. Addams. What’s a little icky about this scene is that it’s like Nancy is flirting back with the man. He’s old enough to be her father! *gag sound*
“I’m not a stepping stone to him, you know, Mr. Howard,” she says coyly.
I’m sure that’s not how the writers meant it, though, really, so I’m just teasing.
Anyhow, they chat a bit about how she knows him and she says she knows his niece Cathy more, which is something I’m just learning about because for this whole episode I’m assuming Mr. Addams is friends with Carson.
Anyhow, Mr. Howard says he’ll get what he wants from Mr. Addams, mainly by intimidation. He’s smiling but…hmmm….is he the mystery note writer?
Nancy escapes Mr. Howard by bumping into the electrician or crew member, whose name is Tony by the way, and asking him for a dance before questioning him if there could be a stowaway on the ship. The man says there couldn’t be and the two continue to dance while Cathy looks on sadly. Her uncle encourages her to go out and dance but she simply looks sad and declines.
A girl named Adrienne approaches Cathy and Mr. Addams at their table and tells Cathy she went to school with her brother.
Cathy invites Adrienne to sit with them, and a chat ensues.
On the dance floor, the Georges are dancing together and the male George says the female George (yes, this does sound like the start of a joke…), “You know George, you’re very attractive.” And the female George responds, “You are too, George. In your own way.”
Ouch.
We flip to a scene with Mr. Addams out on the deck of the ship for a smoke. Suddenly a voice starts speaking over the loudspeaker, telling him that this is his last cruise, etc. The voice is echoing and s female voice. The voice taunts him in reminding him of what happened to his victims in his books. He is looking freaked out as the voice tells him he is going to die.
He runs into Nancy and asks her if she can hear the voice. She can and they start to look for the source of it and find a cassette recorder broadcasting through the loudspeaker.
Nancy points out that the recorder looks like the one Peter Howard had and suggests that he was hoping to sneak up behind Mr. Addams when Mr. Addams was looking for the source of the voice.
Cathy is out on deck next and says she heard the voice too.
“Whoever did it made a very big mistake,” Nancy says and stares at Cathy pointedly. Cathy stares back. Also pointedly. Dun-dun-duuuuuuuun.
Nancy and Mr. Addams rush to the captain’s office to play him the tape but when they hit play, the recording is gone.
Now they both feel stupid and leave with their heads hanging down. The captain watches them leave with a little smirk.
There are a lot of smirking people in this episode.
To speed this recap up a bit I’ll skip ahead a bit. After discussing that this all sounds a lot like a book Mr. Addams wrote called The Mystery of the Ghostwriter’s Cruise (gasp! The episode title!), Nancy goes to look for the book in the ship library because, yeah, sure, a ship is going to have an extensive library with just the book she needs. She can’t find it and we see the person with the gloves and the trench coat throw the book overboard.
Moving ahead again, Nancy bumps into Tony, literally, and he looks at her with “come hither eyes” and says, “I heard the captain say you think someone wired that lamp on purpose.” She says she does and he … yes, you guessed it…smirks.
“Who would do a thing like that?” he asks, suggesting she’s just some silly girl.
He tells her he will help all he can but to please be careful “in case there is some nut running around the ship.”
Are you the nut, Tony? Be honest now…you did think it was important to tell Mr. Addams you read all his books
Adrienne has somehow wiggled her way into the show and is now playing chess with Mr. Addams. She seems a bit miffed when the old man wins.
Nancy looks at the scrapbook with the threat in it again to see if she can figure out who might be making the threats and finds an article about a Martin Carroll who sued Mr. Addams for stealing his idea for a book.
When Nancy asks, Mr. Addams says Martin Carroll would be about 50 now. He also says he didn’t steal the man’s idea. They were working on the book together and Martin Carroll simply flaked out and walked away. There was also never enough evidence for the lawsuit to go forward.
Nancy begins to suspect that Martin Carroll is actually Peter Howard.
She somehow uses a CB radio to contact her dad and ask for more information about Martin Carroll. The captain is listening in and looks very concerned about her conversation.
Nancy soon gets a telegram for her dad telling her that Martin Carroll died six months earlier. He also tells her he will be meeting her on the first island the cruise ship is stopping at.
Nancy then finds someone leaving Mr. Addams room. She chases the person into the belly of the ship and is knocked off a metal ladder and is about to fall to her death when Tony shows up to rescue her.
Tony tells her she needs to be careful (he’s the new Ned, I guess) and then we are in the bridge and the captain sees on the monitors that they are about to hit a tidal wave. He wants the crew to tell the passengers what is going on without alarming them.
In between all this, George (the female one) is asked to sing by George (the male one). We listen to a subdued 70’s style song but they are interrupted by crew members telling everyone to get their lifejackets on.
Nancy smells a hoax though. She runs to tell the captain that she thinks the tidal wave is a hoax and that it isn’t going to hit. While she tries to convince him, we get cut away shots of Mr. Howard smirking while he drinks some kind of alcohol and Cathy looking creepy.
Turns out Nancy is right and someone has hacked the radar. But why?
Nancy has to find out.
She asks Tony if he knows anything about the Carroll case since he was such a huge fan of Mr. Addams. He says yes and that Martin Carroll did write one book and it was called The Mystery of the Haunted Cruise.
Nancy rushes to the ship library again and — it’s a miracle — the book is there! She reads the ending of the book and finds out that the character in the book is backed against a railing before being killed. She flips to the front of the book and sees a dedication that reads, “To my wife Celeste and my daughter …. ADRIENNE??!!!”
Nancy rushes out of the library and then we are sent to the deck where George and George are talking but that isn’t important — what is important is that Nancy runs out looking for Mr. Addams.
George tells her that he’s walking on deck with Adrienne.
“She’s the one who has been doing all this!” Nancy cries. “Get the captain right away.”
Suddenly we are on the deck where Adrienne shoves Mr. Addams toward the ship railing and declares he killed her father.
“He was a broken man, Mr. Addams in health and spirit,” Adrienne tells him. “I’ve lived under your shadow for years. Your name was all I ever heard in our house. My father was obsessed with you. You ruined his life. You robbed him of the success that might have changed his life.”
“And you wanted me to relive the events of that book?” Mr. Addams asks.
Adrienne says, “That’s right. Everything the way it was.”
Mr. Addams suggests that she couldn’t kill him, though, not really. Adrienne disagrees and is about to shove him over the railing when Nancy stops her at the same time the captain and his first mate are walking up to the scene.
“I don’t think she would have gone through with it,” Mr. Addams says, an optimist, despite being a grump through much of the episode.
All is well now, but Nancy and George decide they’re going to get off the ship on the island where Ned and Mr. Drew are meeting them.
Mr. Addams is going to finish his cruise, and he decides not to press charges against Adrienne, instead asking that she get mental help.
He even grants an interview with Mr. Howard.
And with that the episode is over.
As I said, this was one of the more intense and exciting ones.
Up next for a recap is Episode 13 of the series with The Hardy Boys and entitled The Secret of the Jade Kwan Yin.
If you want to read some of my recaps of other episodes of this show, you can find them by doing a search for Hardy Boys Nancy Drew in the search bar on the right sidebar.
Lisa R. Howeler is a blogger, homeschool mom, and writes cozy mysteries.
You can find her Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.
