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.

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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.