nancy drew

Episode Recap: The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, The Mystery of the Fallen Angel

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 6 Comments

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.

This time around I am writing about a Nancy Drew centered episode called The Mystery of the Fallen Angel.

*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!

To me, this was one of the better episodes I’ve seen so far. It was fairly well written, simply put together, and Nancy’s character was less whiney or rude than in other episodes.

We start out at a carnival. George and Nancy are playing a carnival game and they are winning. The man running the game isn’t altogether pleased with them winning and reminds them that the event is for charity.

Nancy lets him know she’s going to give the toys they are winning to the children.

Next, we find Ned in with a fortune teller. She looks at his palm and tells him that’s “too masculine.” (Snicker).

“You’re too dominating of a man for the average girl to handle,” she says.

Ned blushes and scoffs. Laughing nervously he says, “Oh…so that’s my problem.”

The fortune teller suggests that his forcefulness is what causes women to run from his advances.

“Oh. That’s because of my forcefulness?” Ned says with wonder.

The fortune teller says, “Yes, trust me.”

Switching scenes, we see a glass of champagne being poured for Carson Drew, Nancy’s dad. He’s telling a man named Robert that this is the best benefit they’ve had so far.

Robert thanks him and says the benefit is one excuse to “keep the old place” now that all the kids have moved out.

The wife laughs and asks how they could possibly downsize anymore.

“We’re already down to 18 rooms a piece,” she says.

Jocular, rich-people-laughter follows.

Outside we see a young man with long dark hair and a sports jersey sneaking around in the dark. He knocks on the back door and a woman lets him in. Both looked panicked and she says, “We’re going to get caught, Henry. If only you could tell people who you are.”

And – oh! Who is this young man? He looks very, very familiar.

Now I shall confess that I took a photo of the actor while I was watching this the first time and asked my husband who it was. I knew he looked very familiar.

The answer I got back was, “A. Martinez. Longmire.”

Yep. A Martinez was in this one. Maybe one of his first shows? Not sure, but he was very good and it was a sign of good acting to come, in my humble opinion.

Anyhow, without giving us much more information we switch to another scene of a group of bikers pulling up and a woman scolding them for not being there to help run the carnival.

“Where have you guys been? I pay you to work for the carnival, not to go joyriding,” she says in a thick New York accent.

She tells them to all get back to work and tells the one girl to go home. The young girl says she’d prefer to stay there, she’s having fun.

When the woman leaves, the man says they’ve got important work to do later.  He hugs the young girl, squeezes her face and tells her to lighten up but she says, “I’m just not used to all this.”

“There’s a lot you’re not use to, but you better get used to it,” he says. “Tonight’s your first lesson.”

We don’t know what that means but we are certain to find out at some point.

Later Henry is caught leaving the house by the rich wife who asks if she can help him.

He says he got lost and Robert says, “You’re Henry Salazar, aren’t you?”

Henry doesn’t reply but says he has to be going.

When he leaves, Robert tells Carson he’s the kid who used to work in Foster’s drugstore until old man Foster caught him with his hand in the till.

“That was never proven, as I remember,” Carson says.

“Still,” Robert says. “I don’t like him hanging around here.”

Henry sneaks back to say goodbye to Tina and makes her promise she won’t say anything about who he is or who she is. He says she’ll get into big trouble if she says anything and we aren’t sure if that is a threat or a reminder.

Next, we see the young carnival girl looking worried outside, a window opens in the mansion and the other carnival workers are — gasp! Inside the mansion!

The girl blows a whistle at the moment that Nancy, George, and Ned walk by. Ned is telling a joke, and they are laughing but hear the whistle, which I gather is to alert the carnival workers it’s all clear.

Ned, Nancy, and George shrug the whistle off and keep going and then we see all the carnival workers nonchalantly returning to their places at the carnival…somehow no one noticed they were gone. Hmmm…

 Oh well. Back to the mansion where chaos has ensued because the rich lady, Clara, went to put a pin back into her safe and  discovered all of her jewels are gone. She let out a scream like she found a dead body and George, Nancy, Ned, and Carson go running.

Clara and John clarify that the jewels weren’t worth a ton but they were insured for over a million dollars. The sheriff comes rushing in not long afterward and greets Nancy and Carson then asks if anyone touched anything.

“Of course not!” Nancy says, clearly offended.

The sheriff is immediately apologetic. “Sorry. I forgot who I was dealing with for a moment.”

He’s been in similar situations with them before, after all since Nancy can’t keep her nose out of police business.

The sheriff wants to know if they saw anyone suspicious walking around or in the house and — Of course! Snap! Robert and Clara immediately think of Henry. He was in the house. He must have taken the jewels!

Carson backs up the couple by saying that Henry did seem suspicious, which he adds he hates to say since he seems like a good young man who Nancy went to school with.

We don’t know how the sheriff finds Henry but after the commercial break (though they are cut out of the YouTube videos I watch) we see Nancy in a jail cell with Henry, telling him she works as a part time investigator for his attorney, Carson Drew.

Carson is going to take on his case and she wants him to tell her why he was in the mansion.

He refuses. He didn’t steal Mrs. Jordan’s jewelry but he won’t tell Nancy why he was in the house.

She wants to know if had anything to do with seeing Tina.

“Tina who?”

“The Jordan’s maid. I thought you two knew each other.”

(Um…how did she make this connection? I’m not sure but I think I missed a scene where Nancy saw them together in the house.)

Henry says he doesn’t know here and never met her and there is no reason to get an innocent person involved in anything.

(If he doesn’t know her then how does he know she’s innocent. Right? Right?!)

“I do not know her. I did not rob the Jordans,” he tells Nancy.

Nancy tries Tina. She won’t say anything either.

The Jordans are pleased that Carson is going to defend Henry. The sheriff doesn’t know why the man would care about defending a man who might have stolen things from him.

“If he’s guilty, the law will take its course without my direction,” Robert Jordan says. “If he’s innocent, I don’t want to be responsible for destroying anyone’s life.”

The sheriff wants to look into Tina now. Nancy, though, says there were tons of people there the night of the carnival, including the carnival workers.

While leaving with Carson, Nancy says she wants to check into the carnival workers and see if they could have been involved in the theft of the jewels.

Carson is one of the most laid-back dads I’ve ever seen (in the books and the show) and sometimes expresses concern for Nancy’s safety but usually only sends her on her way with a small laugh and a “You be careful now,” like she is playing make believe in the backyard.

This time around, though, Carson actually expresses concern!

“That might not be too safe,” he tells Nancy.

“I’m just going to go ask a few questions,” Nancy assures him.

Carson isn’t buying it. “Nancy, people don’t like having their lives pried into.”

Right?! Yet your daughter is doing it all the time, dude, and usually you don’t seem to care too much, just letting her gallivant around, sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong. (Remember I am joking around in these posts, not actually slamming the show. Just having a little fun.)

“I’m not going to pry,” Nancy insists. “Just observe.”

“Well, you be careful while you’re observing,” Carson says with a nervous laugh.

Nancy’s idea of observing is dressing up in a bikini top under a buttoned down shirt, and pretending she’s a runaway to try to get a job with the carnival.

Ned and George don’t like this at all and warn her against it. In true Nancy fashion, she ignores them and moves forward, but does thank them when they say they’ll be showing up to the carnival later in the day to check on her.

Nancy struts into that carnival with an attitude. Her hair is all feathered, her cleavage is showing, and the mom in me is like “Oh no. No. I don’t like this one little bit.”

But I can’t do anything about it so I just have to watch Nancy try to make herself fit in by  jumping on a motorcyle and taking off when a guy tells her he bets she doesn’t know how to ride it. Then, after the carnival owner hires her, I have to keep watching when these creepy dudes later put her in the cage of a ride and spin her upside down up in the air to try to get her to admit she’s a narc.

I’m telling you these guys are creepy! They are definitely the r-word type and Nancy is truly putting herself at risk. If she was my daughter, I’d be flipping out on her. I don’t care if she is 18 now. I think she’s 18 in the show. I’m not actually sure. She’s still my child and I’d be fuming mad if I saw her doing these things.

So, after these guys try to get her to confess who she is, the young woman we met earlier )who was afraid she was going to blow their mission – whatever it was) says she knows Nancy. Nancy, she claims, is a friend of her sister’s and that she’s there to try to bring her home since she ran away from home.

She’s lying of course. We also learn her name is Anne.

Nancy thanks Anne when they are alone, but the girl tells her to get lost because she is in danger.

“You be gone by tonight or you’re on your own!” she tells Nancy.

This whole episode had me anxious. The creepy guys, Nancy putting herself at risk and being away from friends and family, the young runaway girl.

Boy was I relieved when Ned and George showed up and the three of them joined together to find out if the carnival workers are the real thieves of Mrs. Jordans jewels. They don’t find the jewels, but they do find a van full of stolen televisions and other electronics. These carnival workers might not be jewel thieves, but they are thieves of some kind.

Ned and George also let Nancy know that Henry was let out on bail, but he jumped it. The cops are looking for him. Just lovely!

Nancy tells George and Ned to write down the serial numbers of the electronics before they leave to try to find out if the items are stolen. The three of them then part ways, Nancy back to her ruse and Ned and George to find out if the TVs are stolen.

Nancy runs into Henry while he’s snooping around the carnival. He tells her that her dad told him she was following the carnival to try to find out if the workers were involved and that he also found the van with the TVs. He tells Nancy that Tina was arrested as his accomplice.  He has to find out who really stole the jewels so she doesn’t have a crime pinned on her that she didn’t commit. He admits he knows Tina but won’t tell Nancy how.

 They part ways and Anne finds Nancy at the game booth she’s working at later and says that Vince, the head bad guy, knows someone was in his van. They found out who the person is and they’re going to find out why they think Vince is guilty of something.

Nancy isn’t sure what that means and then Vince’s creepy henchmen tells her that shes’s taking a ride with them so they can show her how they deal with spies.

Nancy is put on the back of a bike and driven to a rural area where Henry is in the middle of a circle of motorcycles while they taunt him.

Nancy watches this for a while and then she has had enough. She jumps on the bike the other guy (essentially her kidnapper) got off and roars toward the other bikes, somehow knocking them all over (it’s television, people). She gets Henry on the back of her bike ,and they take off toward the carnival, all the bikers soon in pursuit (once they get their bikes back up). This leads to a windy and twisty chase among the carnival booths during which a lot of the bikers crash out.

Eventually the cops show up and stop the highspeed bike chase. Ned and George are with them. Nancy stops her bike and thanks Ned for calling the police. As an aside (yes, I do a lot of these), I noticed that Nancy was a lot nicer to Ned in this episode than previous ones. She even compliments him by saying, “Ned, you are without a doubt the smartest, neatest, most…”

“Most forceful?” Ned asks, harkening back to the fortune teller’s comments at the beginning of the show.

“Most forceful man I know,” Nancy agrees.

Anne, the young woman who tried to help Nancy, says she was forced to help the burglary gang. She’s scared to go with the police, but Nancy says Carson will help her. This poor guy. Nancy is always finding people for him to help, and he rarely gets paid by them, which will actually be commented on at the end of this episode. It does have me wondering how this man has time to make money with all the pro bono work he does.

To wrap things up with the Jordans, Carson and Nancy visit them, and Nancy asks Mrs. Jordan to open the safe in front of them. The Jordans are a bit offended but agree. While working on opening the safe, Mrs. Jordan breaks down and confesses she doesn’t know how to open the safe. She never has. The safe was already open when she came in the room.

Nancy says George and Ned uncovered in their investigations that the Jordans are broke (how did they find this? I have no idea!) and says she believes the couple sold the jewels off and then when they had no more to sell, they pretended the jewels were stolen so they could get the insurance money. The Jordans admit that this is exactly what they did and are ashamed.

Nancy says it was very convenient for the couple that Henry walked into the house that night. She asks if they were willing to let Henry go to jail for their crime of insurance fraud and they said they were sure Carson would find out that Henry didn’t do it and if he didn’t, they were going to confess before Henry’s case went to trial. They even asked Carson to represent him so he would find out that Henry wasn’t guilty, they say. Robert asks Carson to not only forgive them but represent them in their insurance fraud case. He agrees, saying he can’t let their 20-year friendship end over this mistake. (Carson is way too nice.)

Another aside — does George have another job? I mean Ned works for Carson but what does George do? She doesn’t go to school. She doesn’t appear to work anywhere. She runs around with Nancy solving crimes so does Carson pay her too? And if he does, how does he since he keeps taking cases on for free for Nancy? Of course, he does have wealthy clients like the Jordans so maybe that is how.

There is also a final wrap up scene with Henry and Tina. It turns out that Tina is Henry’s sister. She’s in the United States illegally from Mexico and Henry was helping her get her green card and papers so she could stay legally. He didn’t want anyone to know who she was so she wouldn’t be deported.

Carson says he will help her get her papers and make sure she’s not deported. Luckily this is the 70s and not today or Carson might have a pretty hard time keeping Tina from being sent back to Mexico.

As I mentioned above, this was one of the better episodes in my opinion. The story wasn’t too bad, the writing was better than others and Nancy was a lot nicer to Ned all around.

If you want to read other episode recaps you can do a search for Hardy Boys Nancy Drew via the search bar to the right.

Up next, I will be recapping The Hardy Boys episode Wipe Out.

Lisa R. Howeler is a blogger, homeschool mom, and writes cozy mysteries.

You can find her Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.

You can also find her on Instagram and YouTube.

Episode recap: The Hardy Boys The Mystery of the Flying Courier

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 2 Comments

I have been sharing my takes on the episodes from The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries show from the late 70s off and on for the last few months.

The show was, of course, based on the separate series of books from the 1930s and switched off between featuring The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew each week for most of the first season. Eventually the “teen” sleuths would combine their efforts in joint episodes.

*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!

This week’s episode was with The Hardy Boys and was called The Mystery of the Flying Courier.

We start out with Frank (Parker Stevenson) Callie (their dad’s secretary and maybe Frank’s girlfriend), and Chet (the boy’s friend), heading into a bar or restaurant where Joe’s band is playing. Of course Joe (Shaun Cassidy) is singing because that’s what Shaun Cassidy did back then as a teen heartthrob.

And he’s singing “Da Doo Ron Ron,” which is pretty much one of the most annoying songs I have ever heard — apologies to the original performers, The Crystals, who recorded it in 1961.

The song was Cassidy’s biggest hit other than That’s Rock N’ Roll. *spoiler alert* That song is not rock n’ roll.

When it was recorded by The Crystals the person in the song was “Bill” and not “Jill” by the way. I am sure you wanted to know that.

Okay, back to the show. The camera pans away from Frank and the rest walking inside to two official looking men in suites. One says, “She’s in there now,” and the other says, “We’ll wait for her to come out.”

While sitting and listening to Joe “rock out” (eye roll…it was NOT rock, but pop) Frank spots a girl across the bar and says she looks exactly like Susie Wilkins.

Susie dropped out of sight three years ago, he tells Callie. His father was trying to track her down because her parents were worried about her.

All Fenton Hardy’s leads dried out but now she’s sitting in the bar with them. He’s sure of it.

Frank tries his best to focus on his brother’s performance, but he can’t help stealing looks at the girl and at one point when he looks, she’s gone.

She’s followed the DJ back into his office, but Frank doesn’t know this yet. We, the viewers, do.

She’s telling the DJ that she needs the money he promised her and he better get it to her, but the DJ is saying he doesn’t have it. Not only that, he doesn’t even want to do the project with her anymore because two other men were there asking about her.

She tells him to get it done and get her the money or he’s going to “be the one shot down.”

Whatever that means.

When she leaves, Frank confronts her and calls her Susie. She says he’s mistaken and that’s not her name. She rushes out with him and Callie behind her and all three are met in the parking lot by the men in suits.

They tell Frank that her name is Sandy, not Susie, and they are there to arrest her. Frank runs back into the bar and calls Fenton and says he saw Susie. Fenton tells Frank to get to the police station and see if it is her and why she was arrested.

At the police station, the chief tells him they haven’t arrested a woman but asks for the girl’s information.

Frank goes back to retrieve Joe, and they set out to see if they can find Susie and who has taken her.

The next thing we know the kids are at a junkyard where they find Susie’s car, a little red bug, being destroyed while some men look through the car. I am super confused how they found the car or the junkyard, but let’s just go with it.

Frank sneaks off and climbs in the car to find out more infobot while he’s in there a large magnet comes and picks up the car and carries it off to be crushed.

Callie and Joe follow the car and scream for Frank to get out but then watch in horror as the car is crushed under the machine.

Now they are both crushed in a different way, crying in each other’s arms as they think Frank has become a human pancake.

That’s when Frank pops up from behind some cars behind them after he hears Callie comforting Joe.

“Joe?! What about me?” he asks and suddenly he’s been hugged and they’re crying over him, relieved he is still alive.

Fenton is upset that the boys and Callie took the risk, but Frank says he thinks it was worth it because he found a pay stub in Susie Wilkin’s glove compartment that proves she exists and had a job somewhere not long ago.

The next morning, we find Susie looking for her car, but with no explanation on where she’s been. She’s simply wearing the clothes she had on the day before.

A man pulls up and says hello and she asks him if he knows where her car is.

“You’ve brought this on yourself,” he tells her but then invites her to climb in the car.

She totally does. Like a moron.

They drive off and then we are back to Frank and Joe who are going to “go find us a girl.”

In the meantime we are suddenly at a record making factory where the man has brought “Sandy” and is telling her that he’s short on product because she hasn’t delivered the tapes she promised him

“I told you my terms,” she says. “If you don’t like it, you’ll  have to get them yourself.”

What tapes are these? It’s driving me crazy, but not as much as the plot hole where we weren’t told how Frank and Joe knew to go to the junkyard.

So, the man takes Sandy to her crushed car and when she asks why he would do that he says it’s because he gets angry when a friend lies to him.

We find out a few minutes later, these two have been more than friends in the past. Susie, er Sandy, says so.

That’s why she didn’t go to the cops to the tell them about the tapes, she says with a flirtatious smile.

He tells her that she better have the tapes soon because she’ll be in the next car that is crushed. Oooh…

She says she doesn’t have the tapes on her and she just needs a little more time.

Next thing we see is the DJ ripping a house apart, looking for something. He’s interrupted when Frank and Joe pull up. I still don’t know how they’ve gotten here, other than they had her paystub so it must have had her address on it.

They call for her, but she doesn’t answer so they simply walk right in and find the place trashed.

Then they find a 8 track cassette of a song they say would have been pre-released to DJs and they wonder why she had it. A photo of her and the DJ together let the boys know that the two know each other somehow and are pretty cozy. (Just an aside but Susie seems a bit loose to me…if ya’ know what I mean.)

The DJ and the two men posing as cops are meeting in the next scene, and the men tell the DJ that they tried to get Sandy to tell them where the tapes were but she insisted they were in a safe deposit box and she didn’t have the key. They believed her and let her go. They said pretending to be cops to question her was one thing but kidnapping her was a line they wouldn’t cross.

The men suggest that the DJ just give her the money and get the tapes back and it will all be over.

The men leave the DJ at the same time Frank and Joe pull up. They enter the bar and ask the DJ if he knows Sandy.

“Why me?” he asks.

“She said she was a close friend of yours,” Frank answers.

The DJ, at his swarmy best, grins and says, “Well, all the little girls do.”

Ick. Ick. Ick. Shudder. Shudder. Shudder.

The DJ thinks the boys have left, but actually they’re hiding behind the bar when the DJ leaves so they can snoop around.

When Joe accidentally triggers the sound system, which sounds like a bunch of guns going off, Frank dives behind the booth where Sandy had been sitting. Once the sound has been shut off, Frank stands to reveal a small envelope with a key inside it.

Joe scoffs at it. “You mean we found what those guys were looking for?”

Apparently.

Also apparently, Frank has called the cops before they arrived at the bar, hoping they’d have a reason to arrest the DJ. Now the cops are going to find them inside the locked bar. Uh-oh. The boys are in trouble for causing problems…again.

Next scene brings us to the police station where the DJ is being asked if he knows a Sandy Wolford.

He denies it and the chief asks the boys if they were looking for this Sandy in the bar. They admit it and then tell the chief about Sandy’s car being crushed and her house being ransacked.

The DJ is listening in to all of this and when they produce the key, he appears to be very anxious and interested.

We, of course, know why.

The chief recognizes the key from a safe deposit box at a place where he also has a box. He says they have every right to go find that box and open it now that they have the key with a number on it.

But when they open the box, whatever was in there is gone.

The lady at the safe deposit company says the owner came back and removed what was in the box earlier in the day. Hmmm…why didn’t she tell them that when they asked to see the box to open it? I have no idea.

The chief gets a call while he’s there and it’s his office telling him they picked Susie/Sandy up at a movie theater and have brought her into the station.

Susie is all smiles in the station in the next scene, saying she is Susie Wilkins and she’s just fine. She wasn’t arrested by the police but a couple federal “hot dogs” who made a mistake of her identity.

Frank and Joe try to get Susie to tell them what’s really going on but yet again she denies there is anything bad going on.

Frank tells her that they’re just worried about her.

“Yeah, just like your father three years ago,” Susie snaps. “He had me on the run every minute until I established a new identity.”

I still don’t get why, if she established a new identity, she’s still in the same town she grew up in but maybe it’s supposed to be a bigger town than I think it is.

Anyhow, she leaves the station but tells Joe to have his bandmates pick him up there for practice and follows her outside. Wow. Nice brother. Especially since Susie turns him down for a ride and he decides to just start the van and begins to leave without Joe anyhow.

He doesn’t actually leave alone, though, because Susie sees the guy who threatened her in a car and jumps in the van with Frank.

She doesn’t tell him they are being followed right away but Frank figures it out and asks her to be straight with him and tell him what is going on.

So, Susie finally lets some of her guard down and says the man following them deals in records and any other illegal businesses.

A chase ensues.

“I’m the go-between, Frank,” she confesses. “I get the demos for him from the companies.”

She told Miles, the bad guy, that she’s holding back his early copies of the demos unless he gives her more money.

She says something about “splitting for good” after she sells the tapes back to so-and-so (I honestly never caught what she was saying, even with a replay) and makes more money than she did buying them.

She’s selling them back because the tapes were sequenced with different songs and coded in a way that would help the original record company find out which DJ was bootlegging them and releasing them ahead of their release dates.

“Oh, Frank I don’t want to go to jail. I ran away from one at home. Always being told what to do, how to dress, where to be, who to be.”

Frank makes Susie promise she will tell his dad what she told him.

She “agrees,” but when they get stopped in traffic, Susie thanks Frank before telling him, “This isn’t going to work.”

She jumps out of the van and takes off running.

Susie finds a pay phone and calls the DJ and tells him she has the tapes ,and she will sell them back to him that night. He wants the tapes so no one finds out that he was the one releasing them to radio stations ahead of time.

So they are back at the bar where the DJ works but what’s weird is that he knows who the Hardy Boys are and that they are getting to close to finding out who he is, yet still lets Joe and his band play. I guess to keep the cover that he doesn’t know that they are involved in trying to find the tapes before him? I don’t know, but it’s another plot hole for me.

Susie shows up but now the other guy she was going to sell the tapes is there too. How did he find her? I don’t know! How did Frank, Joe and Callie even know to go to that junkyard?! Frank breaks into the DJs office and tells Susie she doesn’t have to do this and that his dad will help her.

“Cops?!” The DJ is freaking out now so Frank grabs Susie’s hand and they start running. That running leads them right to Miles, the other bad guy. How did he find her? Um…I have no idea really. Someone must have tipped him off.

Frank starts grabbing sandbags and throwing them at Miles and before long all craziness breaks loose between the DJ and his men, Miles and his men, and the boys.

Sand is flying everywhere, and Susie is being absolutely useless and just gasping a lot.

Someone in the crowd yells that they are going to call the cops and the cops show up in less than two minutes, which I found to be a very unbelievable response time.

The bad guys are arrested, and Susie is suddenly nice instead of dramatic and rude and thanks Frank for helping her.

So, I thought the DJ owned the bar and that it would be closed after he was arrested, though I’m not sure that he would have spent very much time in jail for bootlegging early copies of songs. During the closing scene, though, everyone, including Fenton, is back at the bar for a wrap up and to see Joe sing yet again. Fenton tells everyone that Susie is going to reunite with her parents, and they are going to improve their relationship.

They all say how wonderful that is and then turn to watch Joe shake it and flip his feathered hair around. Callie invites Fenton to dance and then the dance scene is extended so we can have a mini-Shaun Cassidy concert.

Yay? I guess….

Did you know that Shaun Cassidy is still performing and will start a 50-city tour in the fall?

According to an interview he did with Billboard Magazine in May, he never had time to tour when he was younger because of The Hardy Boys filming schedule and then he went on to have a second career in writing or producing shows such as American Gothic, Cold Case, Cover Me, The Agency, and, most recently, New Amsterdam.

He also hasn’t had a new album since 1980 but says there will be new songs on the tour.

Cassidy, followed in the footsteps of his half-brother David Cassidy, Oscar-winning actress Shirley Jones Tony-winning actor Jack Cassidy. He broke into the pop world in 1976 with the song “That’s Rock ‘n Roll” which you can hear on this episode in all its glory.

He released five studio albums between 1977 and 1980 on Curb/Warner Bros. including the Todd Rundgren-produced Wasp. After Nancy Drew, Cassidy then focused on the stage, appearing in plays on Broadway and London’s West End during the ‘80s and early ’90, before segueing into behind-the-scenes TV work in the mid-‘90s.

“Honestly, the reason I’m really motivated to do this (tour)  is I have such a feeling that if you are in a position in any way to be a catalyst for bringing people together in a room or a concert hall or a church or your kitchen table, in any context, gathering people, getting them to put down their phone for a minute and actually look at each other and connect and have a shared experience is just so important at this at this stage in our world, I think,” he told Billboard.

He isn’t banning cellphones from his concerts, but he is asking audience members to put them down so he can see their faces.

Here is a clip from him singing Da Do Ron Ron from this episode:

I found a clip of him in later years singing with his half-brother, and his voice definitely got better and stronger as he aged. The reproduction is awful, but here it is:

And if you would like to know more about how I feel about the song Da Do Ron Ron, you can read this post about the first episode of the series:

Okay, up next in our episode recap will be an episode featuring Nancy Drew called The Mystery of The Fallen Angels.

Additional resources:

Shaun Cassidy Gets Ready for the Longest Tour of His 45-Year Career: ‘I Felt the Need to Connect with People’

https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/shaun-cassidy-road-to-us-tour-1235982175/

Lisa R. Howeler is a blogger, homeschool mom, and writes cozy mysteries.

You can find her Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.

You can also find her on Instagram and YouTube.

Nancy Drew is 95! History, creation, lasting influence, controversy, and more.

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 15 Comments

Nancy Drew is 95 years old as of April 28, 2025!!

She’s looking pretty good for someone her age, isn’t she?

The first Nancy Drew book, The Secret of the Old Clock, was released on April 28, 1930. Two more books, The Hidden Staircase and The Bungalow Mystery. Since then, there have been millions of books published, TV shows and movies produced, spin-off series launched, and culture impacted.

Who would have imagined that children’s stories about a teenage girl sleuth would launch a worldwide phenomenon? I doubt even Nancy’s creator Edward Stratemeyer would have imagined it.

The concept for Nancy Drew was created in the 1920s by Stratemeyer who also created the  idea of The Hardy Boys. Well, if it wasn’t Stratemeyer alone who created her, it was a combination of him and those who worked with him at The Stratemeyer Syndicate.

The Syndicate was Stratemeyer’s brainchild, created after  he’d already found success writing stories for children, starting when he was a child himself.

According to a 2018 article in The New Yorker, Stratemeyer was born in 1862 in New Jersey. He was the youngest of six children. As a child he spent a lot of time reading the popular rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger and William T. Adams (a.k.a. Oliver Optic). In his teens he bought his own printing press and created his own stories. At the age of 26 he sold his first story, “Victor Horton’s Idea” to Golden Days, a popular boys magazine at the time. He was paid $75 for the story and his father, who previously had seen his writing as a waste of time, suggested he write more.

He did write more, under a variety of pen names. Then he became an editor at Good News, another child magazine. Eventually he became a ghost writer for various children’s book authors, wrote many of his own, and turned out ideas for other authors to create characters. Many said he wasn’t a great writer, but he was great at ideas.

As his ideas began to sell books, he decided to form a syndicate or a publishing company which would produce books in an assembly line style. By 1910 his syndicate was producing ten or more juvenile titles with about a dozen different writers. By 1920 tens of millions of books produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate were circulating with surveys showing that in 1926, ninety-eight percent of children listed at least one Stratemeyer produced book as their favorite.

According to the article in The New Yorker, this is how it worked:

“Stratemeyer would come up with a three-page plot for each book, describing locale, characters, time frame, and a basic story outline. He mailed this to a writer, who, for a fee ranging from fifty dollars to two hundred and fifty dollars, would write the thing up and—slam-bang!—send it back within a month. Stratemeyer checked the manuscripts for discrepancies, made sure that each book had exactly fifty jokes, and cut or expanded as needed. (Each series had a uniform length; the standard was twenty-five chapters.) He replaced the verb “said” with “exclaimed,” “cried,” “chorused,” and so forth, and made sure that cliffhangers punctuated the end of each chapter—usually framed as a question or an exclamation. Each series was published under a pseudonym that Stratemeyer owned. As Fortune later noted, it was good business for children to become attached to a name, but it would be bad business for that name to leave the syndicate with the ghostwriter.”

And this, eventually, would be where the name Carolyn Keene, the “author” of Nancy Drew came from. In reality, there was no Carolyn Keene. There were only a large number of writers who wrote the books the way Edward Stratemeyer, and later his daughter, Harriet, wanted, just like they had all the other titles and series.

Series produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate included Tom Swift, Bobbsey Twins, Rover Boys, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew Mysteries, Motor Boys and some 50 others.

Nancy Drew’s first book came out April 28, 1930. Twelve days later, Edward Stratemeyer, who had already published millions of books was dead of pneumonia at the age of 67.

His two daughters were left with the question of what to do with the company. Should they continue it? Sell it?

Eventually, the daughters would take over the business, but Harriet would become the driving force behind the company, including helping to make Nancy Drew a worldwide phenomenon.

Grossett and Dunlap produced the books produced by Stratemeyer and they greenlighted the Nancy Drew series after receiving this memo from him:

“These suggestions are for a new series for girls verging on novels. 224 pages, to retail at fifty cents. I have called this line the “Stella Strong Stories,” but they might also be called “Diana Drew Stories,” “Diana Dare Stories,” “Nan Nelson Stories,” “Nan Drew Stories” or “Helen Hale Stories.” […] Stella Strong, a girl of sixteen, is the daughter of a District Attorney of many years standing. He is a widower and often talks over his affairs with Stella and the girl was present during many interviews her father had with noted detectives and at the solving of many intricate mysteries. Then, quite unexpectedly, Stella plunged into some mysteries of her own and found herself wound up in a series of exciting situations. An up-to-date American girl at her best, bright, clever, resourceful and full of energy.”

One of the first writers of the series was Mildred Wirt Benson (just Mildred Wirt when she wrote the series). In fact, Stratemeyer had her in mind when he conceptualized the series.

She wrote twenty-three out of the first thirty books in the Nancy Drew series.

This would become a source of controversy in 1980 when Harriet tried to claim she had written all of the Nancy Drew books herself under the Carolyn Keene pseudonym. A court case involving Grosset & Dunlap and Simon & Schuster about who owned the rights to produce Nancy Drew books drew Mildred out of the woodwork and made Harriet admit she’d helped to write the books, and at one point rewrite them, but she was not the primary writer for most of the books.

When Harriet rewrote the Nancy Drew books in the 1950s she changed the sleuth’s personality from Benson’s original vision of her being more spunky and assertive than Benson had made her.

Mildred had been working for the Syndicate since 1926 when she had answered an ad at the age of 21. The ad had stated that the publishing house was looking for young writers who could come up with new ideas for juvenile books.

She wrote for other Stratemeyer series, but it was Nancy that would become the breakout success. Not that Mildred told a lot of people about her role in the books, partially because she was not supposed to as part of her agreement with the syndicate, who she worked with the syndicate until the early 1950s when management changes changed her role.

Mildred wrote the first Nancy Drew book at the age of 24.

In an interview with WTGE Public Media in Toledo, Ohio, the city where Mildred eventually settled down, she said she didn’t know when she was writing those first books that Nancy would become as big as she did.

“In fact, I don’t think anyone ever anticipated the success such as Nancy Drew has had,” she said. “But I did know that I was creating something that was an unusual book. I knew from the way I felt as I wrote that I was writing something that would be popular.”

While Harriet took the opportunity in 1973, after her sister’s death, to claim she helped her father create Nancy Drew, the 1980 court case blew that out of the water and Benson was subsequently credited with helping to create Nancy. Harriet was, however, a contributor to changes to the books Mildred wrote (taming Nancy Drew down readers say) and the promotion of them, as well as helping ghost writers write later editions.

Later Benson would name the second book in the original series, The Hidden Staircase, as her favorite book to write. Over the years she agreed to sign Nancy Drew books, but only those she had actually written.

Other titles Benson worked on for the syndicate included Kay Tracey and Dana Girls mysteries. After leaving the syndicate she wrote the Penny Park mystery series, which was about the daughter of a newspaper editor who was trying to become a newspaper reporter herself. She called Penny the favorite character she’d ever created, even over Nancy Drew, because she considered Penny “a better Nancy Drew than Nancy is.”

In 1944 Benson began writing for the Toledo Blade and continued to work there for 58 years, focusing mainly on journalism for the rest of her life.  It’s why the Toledo Public Library held a Nancy Drew Convention on Friday to celebrate her 95 years.

Benson was a true Nancy Drew and you can read more about her in my separate post here.

Though Nancy Drew was written during the Great Depression, her books didn’t focus on the struggles of everyday citizens. Instead, Nancy was jetting off on trips, driving nice cars, taking flying lessons, learning new skills, being bold. She loved fashion but she also wasn’t afraid of getting her hands dirty.

She could wear pearls and a dress one evening and wear jeans and sneakers the next.

Nancy Drew books never focused on the macabre. Very few books discussed murders. There was very little description of violence. There was absolutely no sex show or even discussed. Nancy had a boyfriend (Ned Nickerson) but they didn’t even kiss.

In other words, Nancy didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and didn’t go out with boys who did.

Nancy’s image was very important to Harriet, who wanted Nancy to be someone young women could look up to and strive to be like.

Cara Strickland wrote in a 2018 article for JTSOR Daily, that Nancy’s books were “intended to be safe for children, but also functioned as an escape from the heavy realities of their cultural moment.”

The mysteries in a Nancy Drew book were simple, yet also featured complex elements, such as red herrings and miscommunications.

They were fast-moving, full of minimal descriptions, and void of deep exchanges among the characters. They didn’t make you think much beyond what mystery was unfolding and how it was being solved.

The goal of the books wasn’t to address current events or push agendas. Their goal was simply to show the book’s heroes prevailing over evil and setting the world right again.

Young readers loved this, and now, many adults do as well.

The lack of mention of current events also made sure the books remained timeless.

Yes, the books, especially the earlier ones, are certainly dated. There are aspects that some in today’s world might see as culturally insensitive, old-fashioned, or out of touch.

They still, however, show us a young woman who is brave, curious, driven, and determined to solve mysteries to help other people.

From that first book in 1930 came 600 different titles, including spinoffs and updates. Later came movies (the first appearing in 1938), TV Shows, video games, comic books, podcasts, and, of course, merchandise of all kinds (lunch boxes, t-shirts, bookmarks, socks, etc. etc.).

Nancy Drew was originally published by Grosset & Dunlap, but during the lawsuit filed in 1980, as mentioned above, Simon & Schuster won the rights to publish Nancy Drew books after the first 56 because in 1979, the Syndicate had switched to Simon & Schuster. Grosset & Dunlap retained the publishing rights to the first 56 books and eventually Simon & Schuster purchased the Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1984.

The Nancy Drew Mysteries (original series) ran from 1930 to 2003 and produced 175 different titles. Nancy Drew Girl Detective ran from 2004 to 2012. The Nancy Drew Diaries started in 2013 and continue through today. Many fans of the original, more sanitized versions of Nancy, haven’t appreciated the more modernized version of Nancy. So much so that some of the series were discontinued.

The original Nancy Drew series, without the more modern social aspects the more modern series might have, remains the perfect escape from a world growing increasingly chaotic and frightening. Now, though, it isn’t only younger readers craving that escape. People, mainly women, of all ages, are losing themselves in Nancy Drew mystery books. Whether they are revisiting them from when they were young girls or finding them for the first time, they are filling a void that other books can’t for them.

I am one of those women.

Avery, host of True Drew: A Podcast Of All Things Nancy Drew is another one of those women.

“I guess I would say that I’m a fan of the Nancy Drew book series because it is a comfort to me,” Avery wrote to me this weekend. “Reading the books now as an adult instantly transports me back to a simpler time, when I was a girl, and Nancy was a constant companion to me, whether at school, on a road trip, or just laying on a blanket in the backyard on a sunny day and reading one of her mysteries. Nancy Drew showed me from a young age that women can be capable, skilled and smart. She modeled all of the best qualities: how to be a good friend, a good daughter and a good detective! And it always struck me as really cool that my mother and grandmother, who got me into the series, read the books before I did and it was something we could share and talk about together.”

On her website, Avery shares: “In Nancy, I saw a young woman who was not only capable, smart and resourceful when she solved mysteries, but a character that shared my strawberry blonde or “titian” hair color. Back in April 2023, my dad and I happened to go to an estate sale where I bought 70+ Nancy Drew books I had never read or seen before–later paperbacks from the 1990’s–and the idea for @TrueDrewPodcast was born!”

Laura Puckett, a reader and mom, also started reading Nancy when she was young.

“My memories of Nancy Drew started when I was quite young,” she writes. “Right after piano lessons my mother would take me to the library, and I would take the direct path to the sgelf with all the yellow book spines. Finding the next mystery that I hadn’t read, I would barely contain my excitement while looking at the cover to see which adventure I’d get to go along with Nancy on. These books accompanied me on road trips, in my hammock, in my bed before sleep, and so many other places. They are a pleasant part of my childhood and helped me fall in love with reading.”

Mystery author Trixie Silvertale started reading Nancy Drew books when she was five or six years old.

“It was very meaningful to read about a female main character. The fact that she was intelligent and broke a few rules, but did the right thing in the end, was a really great role model… Even though I didn’t realize it at the time! I always think of those books fondly.”

Are the stories in a Nancy Drew Mystery earth-shattering or life-changing? Not usually.

Are they hard-hitting and full of globally impactful wisdom? Nope.

Are they full of gritty stories and swoony romantic scenes? Not at all.

And all those reasons are why so many readers still find themselves reaching for them at libraries, bookstores, and thrift shops today.  95 years after they were first introduced.

Additional resources:

Tell Me More About: Mildred “Millie” Wirt Benson (The original Carolyn Keene)

https://www.truedrewpodcast.com/

https://daily.jstor.org/the-secret-syndicate-behind-nancy-drew/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/11/08/nancy-drews-father

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_Keene

https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2002/05/30/nancy-drew-s-author-dies-at-96/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildred_Benson

https://www.lib.uiowa.edu/iwa/mildred/

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nancy-Drew

https://barrewithjustine.ca/2024/05/17/the-history-and-enduring-appeal-of-the-nancy-drew-stories/

https://crimereads.com/a-cultural-history-of-nancy-drew/

https://www.encyclopedia.com/children/academic-and-educational-journals/nancy-drew

Lisa R. Howeler is a blogger, homeschool mom, and writes cozy mysteries. 

You can find her Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.

You can also find her on Instagram and YouTube.

Recapping and reviewing the 1977 Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries episode The Secret of the Whispering Walls

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 3 Comments

Here we are to another 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.

This week we have another Nancy Drew episode, The Secret of the Whispering Walls.

I knew part way into this one that it was based on at least one Nancy Drew book — The Secret of Red Gate Farm, but learned on the Nancy Drew Wiki site that it also combined the story of The Hidden Staircase. I didn’t recognize some of the elements from that book until I read that and then I began to see what parts they pulled from it. I did find it interesting that there is a book with this title from the same era as the Nancy Drew books and ironically it is written by Mildred Benson, who wrote about 30 of the original Nancy Drews under the pseudoym Carolyn Keene.

The book was part of the Penny Parker Mysteries series and I thought it was interesting what was written in the description of the book on Amazon.

“Penny Parker starred in a series of 17 books written by Mildred A. Wirt Benson and published from 1939 through 1947. Penny was a high school sleuth who also occasionally moonlighted as a reporter for her father’s newspaper. Benson favored Penny Parker over all the other books she wrote, including Nancy Drew. “I always thought Penny Parker was a better Nancy Drew than Nancy is,” Mrs. Benson said in 1993.”

You know I’m going to have to get a copy of this one so I can compare.

On to the episode:

We open to someone breaking into a house.

Then we have Ned Nickerson, the assistant of Nancy’s father, attorney Carson Drew for the purpose of the show, pull up outside a house. Nancy’s friend George Fayne hops out of the back seat and says “Super evening, Ned! Thanks for the movie!” She gives a little wave and hops toward the house, which I assumed was hers because Nancy stays in the car.

We see George go into the house and we see the hands of the person rifling through drawers and that person stops as George closes the front door. So, it must be George’s house, right?

But, no, Nancy then follows a few minutes later, walking into the same house. She’s walking toward the stairs when she hears something fall in her father’s office.

My question is — why didn’t she come into the house with George?

In other episodes it has appeared that Ned was just a friend, unlike in the books where he is her boyfriend. Could Nancy have been staying behind for a goodnight kiss? Hmmmm….

I’m guessing maybe so because after George goes in the house we see someone opening the office door enough to peer out and watch her go up the stairs. Then we switch back to Nancy smiling at Ned and Ned smiling back. Nancy gets out of the car and then Ned looks pretty proud of himself about something or maybe it’s more delighted, as he leans back and shifts the car into gear.

Maybe this was a deleted scene to keep the show clear of kissing sessions. *wink* Again I say hmmmmmm.

Whatever the reason, let us move on to the plot.

Nancy catches someone in her father’s office, but the man pushes her down and takes off back into the office and smashes a chair through the window to escape. I’m not sure why he didn’t just rush past her and through the front door, but I guess he has a flare for the dramatics.

Nancy and George are, of course, alarmed and when they hear someone else coming back to the office from the outside, they arm themselves. George is wielding an umbrella that she brings down on what she thinks is the head of the intruder returning, but it is actually the head of Mr. Drew.

Oops. *cue goofy music here*

The next morning Carson Drew is looking through the papers in office to see if anything was taken by the burglar. He thinks things are mostly in order, but then, wait a minute —  the papers for the sale of the property and farm owned by Carson’s eccentric aunts are missing. The sale was supposed to be finalized the next day.

This means Carson will need to go to the state capital and obtain new copies of the deeds so he can transfer the property to the aunt’s neighbor. He asks Nancy and George to go to the home of the aunts to explain to them what has happened while he heads to the capital.

He’ll be there in time for the signing of the papers, he assures Nancy.

On the way to the farm, Nancy tells George about the neighbor of the aunts, a grumpy and mean old farmer who used to try to scare Nancy as a child with his tractor. No sooner has she said this than a tractor barrels across the dirt road and forces her car off the road.

It’s the grumpy farmer, Mr. Warner, who tells her to watch where she is going. There is a back and forth about it being the land of Nancy’s great aunts and the farmer saying it will soon be his land and him ignoring Nancy’s requests to pull her car out of the ditch.

Nancy and George have to walk to the farm of the eccentric aunts and when they get there the farmer roars by and says, “I warned those two young women! Just remember, if anything happens to them in this old house, it’s on your conscious, not mine!”

“Oh, it’s just his way of scaring people off with wild stories.”

“Not so wild!” says the one aunt, pointing at the girls menacingly. “I have heard those demons, and I have seen them!”

“Yeah pink elephants, purple spiders, and usually after one of her ‘cough spellings,’” snaps the other aunt.

This comment starts the reoccurring humorous theme of Aunt Lela’s clearly being a functioning alcoholic. She kept taking a “tonic for her heart” but viewers are given the  impression that drink in the little cup is a bit stronger than a “tonic”.

What Aunt Lila means by “demons” are voices inside her walls. This was a plot point in the Hidden Staircase when the aunt of Nancy’s friend Helen Corning (who later disappears completely from the series) says there are ghosts in her house.

Inside the house later, the aunts tell Nancy and George that they are excited to move and are going to Las Vegas. The declaration of their planned destination is declared by the aunt who is a drinker.

They also make this announcement in front of a couple who have recently arrived at the farm to help the two aunts run it.  To say the couple seems a bit off is an understatement. When Nancy asks the man some questions and then says she gets the impression he cares for her aunts very much, he abruptly stops talking and walks away in a very bad acting moment meant to let us know that there are some secrets brewing at this place and he  may know what they are.

Ned and Carson are supposed to be heading out to the farm with paperwork for the aunt’s to sign but they are knocked off the road by a mysterious truck. Carson ends up in the hospital but doesn’t want Nancy to know so she won’t get worried.

It takes a couple of days for Ned to get to Nancy since he’s with Carson and by then Nancy has already discovered that there is a tunnel behind the walls at the aunt’s house that leads to a well on the property of the cranky farmer who wants to buy the land. The well is one of those huge old-fashioned ones that you can crawl out of. One of those you only ever see in the movies or televi— oh, right.

Nancy wants to find out where the voices were coming from since she didn’t find the source when she went through the tunnel. She know she’ll have to go through again to figure it out.

This plot point is different than in The Secret of Red Gate Farm where Nancy discovers a “cult” but that is something you will have to read if you want to know more about that craziness. People in white sheets. Ahem. That’s all I’ll say about that. It is not what you think it is, however.

Warning! I am going to share some spoilers in these next couple of paragraphs. You’ve been warned.

Are your ready?

If you don’t want spoilers you might want to skip this part.

I’m warning you.

Okay. You’ve been warned.

In The Secret of Red Gate Farm the “cult” on the hill is actually a group of people trying to cover up a counterfeit money ring and it is the same in this episode except the strange couple who came to help out the aunts are running the ring and are trying to get them not to sell so they can keep doing it. They have set up their operation in a room under ground at the end of one of the tunnels that leads from the aunt’s house to the neighbor’s well.

The aunts know about the tunnels by the way, but they thought they were all sealed up. They used to be used for smuggling goods in the 1890s the drinker aunt says as she sniffs her “tonic.”

Nancy discovers what the couple is doing through a series of steps, including finding burnt counterfeit money after the couple has burned the trash further up the proptery, a trap door in the barn, and then spying on the couple as they go into the barn. She also decides to take George with her into the tunnels when she hears voices in the walls after the couple has driven a van into the barn.

At the same time Nancy and George head down the cranky neighbor also hears the voices from his well and decides he’s going to find out what is going on. He is certain that Nancy and her dad are trying to find a way to keep him from buying the aunt’s property.

Eventually, the bad guys (the couple) capture the neighbor and tie him up, which Nancy and George see because they are spying from the end of one of the tunnels. They overhear the couple planning to get as much of the fake money out as they can and then blow the tunnel to bury all the evidence. They’re going to bury the neighbor too.

Nancy sneaks in while they are sneaking out and unties the neighbor so they can all get out before the explosion.

Going back a bit here for a funny scene recap — at one point Nancy sends George for help but George gets lost and can’t find the ladder back to the house. She thinks she hears Aunt Lila and the camera cuts to the woman sitting on the couch by the fire drinking her tonic. George yells out to her and the woman thinks that the spirits are yelling at her from the fire. She freaks out and tosses her little cup of booze at the fire around the same time Ned bursts in and hears George yelling, “Call the police!”

Ned doesn’t know where George is but yells back that Mr. Drew already had him call the police. I’m not sure why he had Ned call the police, but help is on the way.

The police end up waiting for the couple in the cranky farmer’s field when they crawl out of the well. Nancy, George, and the neighbor pile out soon after and Nancy tells the police what the couple is doing. They deny any involvement until the dynamite explodes and counterfeit money blows up out of the well and rains down on everyone.

In the end, the neighbor’s wife marches him over to the aunt’s house and he confesses he wanted the property because a big development was going to move in and he wanted all of the proceeds. He tells the aunts that because Nancy and George saved his life he’s not going to buy their property but instead let them sell it the development company and make even more.

The aunts are thrilled because now they will have all the money they need to move to Las Vegas. Aunt Lila is so overcome with excitement that she requests a bit of her tonic. Everyone laughs at the alcoholic old lady as the show draws to a close.

In my opinion, putting aside the weird alcoholic aunt, this episode was well done. There seemed to be a lot more focus on unique camera angles and the acting was better than previous episodes. The  camera angles from above and below and around columns made us wonder if someone was following Nancy or not, keeping us on our toes.

I also felt like Pamela Sue Martin toned it down a ton for this episode. She wasn’t quite as abrupt or bossy as she was in the first two episodes. She seemed to soften her portrayal of Nancy down to where it should be if we are going to compare it to the books.

Nancy was bossy and sometimes a bit rude in the books, but not to the point of Pamela’s portrayal in The Mystery of The Diamond Triangle. For this episode the writers added some moments where she appeared more aloof and clueless, but in a humorous way.

For example, at one point George is afraid to sleep in her room because of all the whispering sounds in the walls and instead curls up in the hallway with a blanket. Instead of telling George to come in with her to be safer, Nancy simply tells George that she’s solved one of the mysteries and then says cheerfully, “Well, goodnight, George,” before leaving her in the hallway alone, huddled under the blanket. It was a funny moment showcasing how fixated Nancy can get on a case.

Next up in our feature of discussing episodes from The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries I will be offering my impressions of the Hardy Boys episode entitled The Flickering Torch Mystery. I actually watched this episode ahead of what was next up, but I’ll go back to The Disappearing Floor for a later post.

You can read some of my other Nancy Drew/Hardy Boy posts here:

The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries Recap: The Mystery of the Diamond Triangle (with spoilers)

Discussing The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries Show episode, The Mystery of the Haunted House.

The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries Season 1 Episode 2 The Mystery of Pirate’s Cove

Coloring in illustrations in Nancy Drew books

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 10 Comments

I’ve been enjoying coloring in the black and white illustrations in “old” Nancy Drew books.

These are not original Nancy Drew books from the 1930s and 1940s, but instead are reprints of those books.

For those who don’t know who Nancy Drew is (like those from other countries), she is an amateur sleuth created in the 1930s by Edward Stratemeyer for Stratemeyer Syndicates. He also created several other books for children, including The Hardy Boys.

Nancy was a teenager who solved mysteries along with her friends, Bess and George, and “boyfriend” Ned Nickerson. The original books didn’t push the idea of Ned being Nancy’s boyfriend too hard but it was mentioned.

Nancy’s father, Carson Drew, was a lawyer and her mother had passed away when she was young. I’m not sure if we are ever told how her mother died, but she and her father have a housekeeper named Hannah Gruen who acts as a mother figure.

Incidentally, the first Nancy Drew book was released on April 28, 1930 so Nancy will be 95 years old in a couple of more weeks!

A podcaster (www.truedrewpodcast.com) who talks about Nancy Drew and collects her books and who I follow shared on her Instagram a few months ago that she had decided to color in some Nancy Drew illustrations. Around the same time I saw this, I had recently picked up a few of the reprints of the old books and decided it would be fun to do the same, so I started it and haven’t stopped.

I have two original Nancy Drew books that I will not be coloring in simply because they are collectors.

I don’t plan to ever sell them (I don’t think they are worth anything anyhow) but I still like the idea of having them in their original condition.

I use colored pencils to color in the illustrations and I don’t always take my time, but it’s a relaxing activity that I do when my mind is racing too much.

The world and life can be heavy at times so coloring or drawing can be a nice distraction.

The illustrations in the original Nancy Drew books were drawn by Russell H. Tandy.

Tandy was a friend of Stratemeyer, according to information online.

Much like the many authors of the books, who all wrote under the name Carolyn Keene, the illustrators also changed throughout the years.

Some of those illustrators include Bill Gillies, Rudy Nappi, Ruth Sanderson, and Paul Frame.

Over the years the illustrations were updated so I am not sure if the ones I am coloring are Russell H. Tandy or not. The reprinted books I have, which were reprinted in 1993, do not list the names of the illustrators.

Here are some of the illustrations I have colored in so far:

The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries Recap: The Mystery of the Diamond Triangle (with spoilers)

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 4 Comments

A few months ago, I wrote about the first Nancy Drew centered episode of the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys show from the 1970s. For the first season of the show, the episodes switched off each week between the two mystery solvers — with one week featuring The Hardy Boys and the next week featuring Nancy Drew.

Then last week I wrote about the first episode of the series, which featured The Hardy Boys.

This week I will be focusing on the episode, The Mystery of the Diamond Triangle.

In season one, Nancy Drew is portrayed by Pamela Sue Martin (not to be confused with the chestier Pamela Anderson). Part way through season two she left the show because she felt that Nancy Drew was receiving less and less screen time and was replaced by Janet Louise Johnson.

For now, though, we will be discussing episodes where Pamela was portraying Nancy.

We start the episode with Nancy and George flying over scenery in a small plane and George about to throw up from air sickness. She tells Nancy that she was conned into coming up into the plan and Nancy admits she tricked her friend because she needed a witness in the plane in order for her to get her Diamond Triangle Certification (whatever that is).

All I want to know is why Nancy doesn’t have a certified trainer with her as the witness, but…okay…details schmetails. Let’s just go with it.

It also feels a little mean for her to do this to George.

“Yeah, you get a diamond triangle, and I get a nervous breakdown,” George says.

Sounds like most of her adventures with Nancy. If I was her, I’d get a new friend. Nancy is pretty bossy and likes to tell people what to do in the show. I think she likes having George be her little lacky and witness all her exploits.

George is quite whiny in this first season. She’s a mix of Bess and George from the books since there is no Bess in the show. In the books Bess is afraid of everything, and George is more adventurous like Nancy.

While they are in the air, a storm breaks out and Nancy has to find a way to get out in front of it. This takes her off course and while George is worried about them being caught in a storm, Nancy is more upset that she won’t get her Diamond Triangle Award.

While going off course, Nancy notices a car on a dirt road below them swerving around and then crashing. She has her friend Ned Nickerson, who was following them in a truck on the road, call the police for them. This gets Ned in trouble later when the police chief shows up and accuses Ned of filing a false police report. The chief says there was no accident because the road they are talking about has been barricaded for three years when the bridge was washed out.

(Ned Nickerson was Nancy’s boyfriend in the books, by the way. In the show he’s her attorney dad’s lacky and her want-to-be boyfriend.)

The bizarre thing is that Nancy’s dad, attorney Carson Drew, tells Ned he will have to go with the police for questioning, even though Nancy saw the accident and told Ned to call. The chief is all like, “Yep. Let’s go.”

Really? In this day and age, people don’t get arrested for actual crimes or if they do, they are released again but this kid is getting called in for something Nancy actually did?

She’s a serious troublemaker.

Nancy isn’t pleased that the chief has doubted her and tells George they are going out to investigate what happened on their own.

Here is another example where I really don’t like Nancy from the show. When they get to the site of the bridge that is out, she snarks at George, “Don’t worry George, you won’t have to close your eyes this time. We’re on the ground now.”

Hello? Snotty much? Your friend is always risking her life for you, and you repay her by talking down to her? Like I said above, George really needs a new friend.

I suppose the makers of the show were trying to make her tough and bold and that’s all fine and good but why do women on TV have to be snotty to show they are bold and tough?

I think the makers of the show could have made Nancy be strong and brave without making her overbearing and rude. Her outfits are cute at least.

Nancy’s investigation leads her to call the local antique car club to ask them if they know anyone who owns an antique car like the one that went off the road. They only know of two people so Nancy heads to the first name, a young man named Morgan Poole.

Morgan says his car is in the storage barn and is always parked there.

Nancy asks to see it. Of course,it isn’t there so Nancy says Morgan better get a lawyer, which her dad luckily is.

What does he need a lawyer for? I have no idea…it’s not a crime for a car to crash, but it is a crime for the car to be stolen so Morgan should have been calling the police.

He needs a lawyer, it turns out, because his insurance company says they aren’t going to pay for the car since Morgan didn’t prove he fixed up the car before it was stolen.

How did Nancy know this would happen? Who even knows, but luckily Daddy Drew was there to help.


Carson Drew tries to argue with the insurance guy that Morgan should get his money back for the stolen car and it should be paid for because Morgan upgraded the car. The insurance man says, “Nope…he never brought me in the proof of the appraisal that the car had been improved.”

The insurance guy says he might pay out but only if Morgan can prove he improved the car and that will require receipts. Morgan traded other car collectors for the part and doesn’t have receipts, which makes the insurance guy pull Mr. Drew over for a somber “side bar” during which he suggests that the young man may be trying to commit insurance fraud.

Dun-dun-dun-dun!

The car is found later that day, and it requires about 50 police officers and a few photographers to retrieve it because it has been set on fire and pushed into a ravine. There was no one inside so I’m not sure why there were so many police on scene. The budget for those extras was most likely why they didn’t have a budget for actual writers.

Carson, Nancy, George and Ned all go to look at the car in the ravine and Ned declares this means the misdemeanor charge of “crank calls” against him can be dropped. I’m sorry??? This moron chief charged the kid with crank calls when Nancy said she saw it? Guy sounds like a real Barney Fife.

But now, with the appearance of the car, Carson Drew says poor Morgan clearly committed insurance fraud by getting a higher binder on the car when he called to say it had been upgraded and then burning the car. Nancy refuses to believe Morgan would do that because he loved the car and worked so hard to refurbish it.

She grabs a rope and begins to climb into the pit where the car is while the chief and her father look on, and don’t even try to stop her. Yeah…okay…believable.

During this we hear an awkward football metaphor from Nacy that ends with an awkward come on line from Ned that Nancy can play in his backfield anytime.

WHAT? Just….no.

Anyhow, the police actually arrest this kid for felony insurance fraud. Like put him in actual jail.

Let me pause for a well drawn out facepalm.

Nancy still wants to help Morgan, so she visits him in jail like she owns the place and tells him she wants to help him. He doesn’t want her help because he knows he’s been framed but no one will believe him.

“Well, I’m going to find out anyhow,” Nancy declares. “I don’t like being made a fool of!”

And off she marches to find out what really happens.

She is in another stunner of an outfit with a shiny pink shirt and a really cute skirt in this scene, incidentally. No sarcasm on my part here. Her outfits are very nice.

Ned and Nancy take off in a plane again with Ned not wearing his glasses for some reason and Nancy pointing that out. She bosses him and scolds him in the same way she does George. “Keep it steady! Use the controls. Take some speed off! Go down! Lift up! I said keep it steady, Ned!”

She gets a bit of a taste of her own medicine when she starts to feel sick to her stomach from Ned’s flying.

She sees a man below her in the bushes and tells Ned.

“Where?” he asks.

“Never mind. Just keep your bearing!” she snaps.

Then we switch to some bad looking men reporting to each other that there is a plane flying low over them.

Back to Nancy and Ned and they are flying too low, about to crash. More yelling from Nancy who is a few seconds short of calling him a “blithering idiot” and then she takes over and has to land the plane in a nearby field.

Uht-oh…this means the bad guys have seen them, but, luckily, they end up leaving them alone because Ned and Nancy are “just a bunch of kids.”

Later Nancy wants to explore more but Ned puts his foot down and says, “Nancy, you can’t go out there alone and if you want my help you will need to do it on my terms!”

This pisses off the feminist Nancy and she tells she and George should go out there alone and find out what the real story is.

Oh my gosh…my husband had a huge crush on this actress, but she is really not a good actress. She’s always yelling or snapping but she barely has any inflection in her tone.

So, George and Nancy go snooping and find out that cars are being stolen and smuggled across the broken bridge to a warehouse. Also, while snooping they are walking through the woods and there are weird bird sounds that George says are from an an owl. Um..no. Those bird sounds are from an Amazon rainforest, which neither of these girls are in.

They discover a ‘villain lair’ but really don’t know if they are villains or what they are doing. They try to sneak off, but the men hear them walking away and go to look for them.

Back in Carson’s office, he’s got Morgan out on bail and is telling Morgan he thinks he’s guilty of the crime and the little snot better fess up. During all this I keep wondering where in the world are Morgan’s parents or family? Do they not care about their family member possibly going to jail for a crime he didn’t commit?

A member of the police department is brought into the meeting with lawyer and client and all three begin to brainstorm what might really be going on. They decide it might be a car stealing racket where someone is stealing the cars buyers are looking for, giving them a new paint job, and then passing them on to the buyers. Huh. Odd they didn’t think of this before but instead decided to rush forward to attempt to prosecute a teenager for a felony.

Anyhow, now we are back to Nancy and George who have uncovered the very plot Carson and the police offer suggested in in a warehouse somewhere out in the jungle — I mean woods in some American state. They are outside looking in at an essential chop shop when they are caught by the two scary bad guys they saw in a tiny shed earlier.

Meanwhile, Ned has somehow used a computer program to pinpoint where all the cars are being taken from and finds out they were all insured by the same insurance company.

Ned decides to go back to where the broken bridge is to see if that is where Nancy went. I found it interesting that he’s also using a CB radio to try to contact Mr. Drew to tell him what is going on. Of course Mr. Drew walks in the house just as Ned is trying to contact him.

Ned tells him where he is going and Mr. Drew, who still has the police officer with him, tells him he’ll meet him there.

Ned tries to rescue the girls before Mr. Drew arrives though and is discovered which results in all three of them being chased around the warehouse by the bad guys. When Ned hears the police sirens he opens the door to the warehouse, letting the police come in and nab the bad guys.

As for the burned out car — Ned says the bad guys did that to try to throw the police off the scent while they moved their operations elsewhere.

Unfortunately, Morgan is now out a car and all the parts he paid for ,but Nancy and George say they want to find a way to make the police give him a reward for helping them break up the car stealing ring. Ah, if only small municipal police departments had that kind of money to throw around.

Anyhow, this concludes another review/recollection of a Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries episode. Have you seen this crazy ride of an episode before?

If you want to listen to a podcast about this episode and all things Nancy Drew, check out the True Drew Podcast hosted by Avery: https://www.truedrewpodcast.com/

Here is the episode about this … ummmm… episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/true-drew/id1712601901?i=1000685173400

I am not associated with the podcast. I simply enjoy listening to it.

Next up I will write about the episode The Hardy Boys: The Mystery of Witches’ Hollow.

Sunday Bookends: The Get Rid of Hiccups Trick, what I thought of the Miss Marple Short Stories, and a Paris movie marathon being planned

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 13 Comments

It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, what the rest of the family and I have been reading and watching, and what I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.

Throughout my childhood and teenage years my family and I would visit my mom’s side of the family in Jacksonville, N.C. for Christmas at my grandmother and aunt’s house.

One day when I was about 18 or so, my parents told me we were going to drive a couple hours west to see my mom’s aunt and uncle and cousins in a little town called Farmville.

I had  never met this part of the family before so I didn’t know what to think of them. The house was full of chatter as soon as we arrived. Chatter and offers of food.

“Y’all come on in here and get yourself some food,” Cousin Joyce said from the kitchen.

Conversations began to take the path they usually do in Mom’s family — several of them being held at once all at the same time, back and forth between each other. I did my best to keep track. The conversations were mainly between my grandmother, mom, aunt Dianne, Cousin Joyce, Cousin Janet and Aunt Mattie.

Uncle Ray — full name Ashley Ray Waignwright (isn’t the quentissintial Southern name?!), a short man with very little hair, wearing a pair of small, wire-rimmed glasses, and looking a bit somber, was sitting in a little rocking chair. He was participating in some of the conversations but not much. Mainly he was observing.

 At some point I developed the  hiccups. They were painful and wouldn’t stop.

Mom suggested I drink some water. Aunt Dianne said a spoonful of sugar. Someone else suggested holding my breath.

Uncle Ray narrowed his eyes.

“Heard what you been saying about me, girl.”

I was startled. Was he looking at me? I looked behind me. There was no one there. It had to be me he was talking to.

“I—I’m sorry?”

He frowned. “You. I heard what you been saying about me.”

“I-I – know I haven’t said anything.”

Mom hadn’t mentioned her uncle Ray was going senile but this conversation was getting weirder by the moment.

“You sure did,” he said. “You know it and I know it so you just need to apologize.”

“I—I .. but…”

His grim expression didn’t crack. “Where those hiccups gone?”

“What? What do you mean?”

A small smile tipped the corner of his mouth upward. “Your hiccups. They’re gone, aren’t they?”

I dragged in a ragged breath and let it out again.

The rest of the conversations had stopped during this exchange and I heard my mom laugh.

It was beginning to hit me now.

“He got you, didn’t he?” Mom asked.

Uncle Ray was smiling more now. Yes, he’d got me, and the panic I’d felt at thinking he thought I’d said something awful about him had been enough to stop the hiccups

I am juggling a few books right now – I know that sounds weird, but I do that because I read one during the day and one at night sometimes.  

I prefer to read my mysteries during the day and more relaxing or light books before bed. I’ve found if I read mysteries before bed, I dream about people dying or chasing me. Even with cozier mysteries. Not always, but sometimes. If the mystery is too good, I still read it at night and just put up with the weird dreams.

Anyhow, I just finished The Tuesday Night Club (Miss Marple short stories) by Agatha Christie and ended up liking it more as I continued it. It is a series of short stories involving several familiar characters from Miss Marple books all gathered together discussing mysterious cases they’d heard of or investigated and asking if everyone listening could figure out what really happened.

There was a lot of subtle humor in the book that ended up making the repetitiveness of how almost each story ended with Miss Marple solving the case presented by each person and then that person, who previously said they didn’t know the solution, or someone else in the room, saying that they suddenly had remembered she was right and they had heard what had really happened.  It was a bit tedious but not every story ended that way, luckily. I mean, Miss Marple did solve it every time, but there wasn’t always a sudden realization from someone else in the room knew what really happened.

I will finish Every Living Thing by James Herriot this week, as far as I know anyhow.

I’ve already started The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman and I’m not sure what I think so far. POV’s keep changing and there is a lot more detail about a lot of characters than I think is needed so….we will see if I can make it through or not. I’ve heard good things about it, so I’m sure I will end up liking it.

I will need a slightly lighter read for nights later this week so I will be picking up Little Men again or finishing up Nancy Drew: The Sign of the Twisted Candles.

Little Miss and I have almost finished Sign of the Beaver for history.

The Boy and I are still pushing through Frankenstein. I don’t want to talk about it. I just can’t wait to graduate him this year. We are starting Romeo and Juliet in March. Lord, be with us.

He’s also listening to No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

The Husband is reading Hot Property by Mike Lupica.

This week I watched Murder She Wrote, Victorian Farm, All Creatures Great and Small, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 with the kids (let’s be honest. I didn’t pay much attention to it.), my farmer on YouTube (Just a Few Acres), and Sinbad the Sailor.

Upcoming in April: Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs, and I are planning on a Paris themed movie marathon. We will keep you updated.

I’ll be starting book four in the Gladwynn Grant series soon and have decided I’ll probably only write six books in this series and, yes, I will wrap up that “love triangle” in book four or five. Probably book four. It’s boring even for me at this point.

On the blog I wrote:

I am listening to Frankenstein on Audible and hope to continue it this week

Now It’s Your Turn!

What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.

This post is linked up with The Sunday Post at  Kimba at Caffeinated Reviewer, The Sunday Salon with Deb at Readerbuzz, and Book Date: It’s Monday! What are you reading hosted by Kathyrn at The Book Date.

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In addition to my blog, I write fiction, and you can learn more about my books here: https://lisahoweler.com/my-books-2/


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Book Review/Recommendation: The Mystery At Lilac Inn

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 6 Comments

(*note: I honestly thought I had already posted this review on my blog months ago, but I couldn’t find it so I am posting it for the first or second time. One or the other.)

The Mystery at Lilac Inn by Carolyn Keene is the fourth book in the Nancy Drew series, which debuted in the 1930s.

For this book, Nancy becomes wrapped up at a mystery at an inn recently purchased by a friend, but she is also caught off guard when her own house is ransacked and her credit plate stolen. She later learns someone is impersonating her and running up her credit or stealing from people.

When diamonds disappear from her friend’s inn she decides she needs to find out who stole the diamonds as well as who is impersonating her. Are the two cases connected? She hopes to find out.

As usual, there is some ridiculous developments and tactics used to solve the mystery (such as her being sent off with her father’s blessing to explore a lake with a man they barely know and then go after known criminals on her own without any back up), but it wouldn’t be a Nancy Drew book if there wasn’t. These books were written in a different time and for young kids so they were full of non-stop action, no matter how giggle inducing that non-stop action was.

This book was later rewritten to remove some of the more derogatory connotations toward certain races. It was released again in 1961 after those changes were made under Keene’s name, which is, of course, a pseudonym. The Nancy Drew books, like The Hardy Boys books were written by several different authors over the years.

Normally I don’t like the idea of old books being changed because someone is offended but in this case it was needed, even if the stereotypes weren’t as bad as some classic books.

I did not like this book as much as the first book in the series, The Secret of the Old Clock. The plot was okay but does not hold us as well as others in the series, in my opinion.

Have you read this one? What did you think?

Book review/recommendation: The Secret of the Wooden Lady, A Nancy Drew Mystery

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 2 Comments

The Secret of the Wooden Lady is the 27th book in the original Nancy Drew series written by – uh, “Carolyn Keene.” Of course, most readers of Nancy Drew know there were a number of people who wrote Nancy Drew, including Mildred Benson and about 27 other authors.

This is the eighth book of the original series I have read and at first, I wasn’t sure I liked it as much as a couple others.

It seemed a little discombobulated and was a little slow in the middle of the book after starting off with a bang (not a literal bang this time).

Most of the book took place on an old clipper that an elderly sea captain wants to buy, but can’t because the original title can’t be found. In addition to the deed being lost, the captain has been experiencing some weird events involving thefts on the ship as well as seeing what he fears might be ghostly figures.

Nancy knows about what Captain Easterly is dealing with because he knows her father, Attorney Carson Drew, — described in the book as tall and handsome — and Captain Easterly has written him a letter.

Carson wants to help the old man find out what is going on and invites Nancy to go with him to Boston and look for the title and find out if someone is prowling around on the clipper at night.

Nancy is excited about having another mystery to solve and while she waits for the next day when she and her dad will leave, she gets a call from her friend Bess. While she and Bess are on the phone, Bess says she hears someone in the house. Her parents aren’t home and she’s nervous. Suddenly the line goes dead and Nancy, appropriately, freaks out and runs to her car to go see what’s happened to Bess.

She tried to call the police before she left, but the lines were busy. This was the 1930s so I suppose that is a plausible situation.

I was freaking out for Bess when I read this part. It was late at night and I was brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed and when I read the part about the phone going dead I was like, “Oh my gosh! What happened to Bess!”

My daughter was very confused until I explained to her it was a character in the book I was reading.

You will have to read the book to find out what happened to Bess, but it is a bit of a spoiler to say that Bess and her cousin, and Nancy’s other friend, George, are invited up to Boston by Carson Drew when he has to leave the city to find out more information about the title and doesn’t want to leave Nancy alone. That’s pretty nice of him since he usually he doesn’t seem too worried about his daughter investigating things alone.

It doesn’t take too long for the girls to learn that what happened to Bess and her family might be related to what is happening aboard the clipper – The Bonny Scot.

Before Nancy had left for Boston she went to a dance with Ned Nickerson, by the way. Ned is her “boyfriend” but he’s not necessarily called that. He is the young man who clearly cares for her but she’s always too busy solving crimes. Ned is sad she’s running off to Boston because he was hoping to take her out again before he has to go off to his summer camp job.

Luckily, it turns out that Ned’s camp isn’t too far from Boston, so we end up with Ned and two of his friends – apparent love interests of Bess and George that might have been mentioned in previous books I haven’t read yet – arriving to help out with the mystery as well.

Like I said above, the middle of this book was a little slow but then things picked back up again and the girls were thrown into more dangerous situations than the characters on a CW show, which is saying a lot.

As always, the book is simply written with more “telling” paragraphs that move the reader along at a fairly fast and furious pace, but these books were originally written for younger readers so that is understandable.

While I liked this one, The Case of the Whistling Bagpipes remains my favorite of the ones I’ve read so far.

You can read reviews of three of the other books I’ve read here:

Book review/recommendation: Nancy Drew Mystery, The Secret at Red Gate Farm

Book Recommendation/Review: The Secret of Shadow Ranch

The Case of the Whistling Bagpipes