While recuperating at home from my surgery, I've had some extra time on my hands...why not go back and read an old childhood series, one I've never covered? Nancy Drew Mystery Stories quickly came to mind, so I read the first three books, originally published in the early 1930s but revised about 30 years later, reportedly changing Nancy's age from 16 to 18 and having her less assertive and rebellious and more compliant and conforming...now always ready to help out with the dishes or housecleaning. There were also black characters in the earlier editions that the author wrote with racial stereotypes common in that era...the revised editions "solved" that by simply eliminating the black characters! And I've read that in some revised editions, the plot was so drastically changed that there was little resemblance to the originals. Still, I thought I'd cross over the gender stereotypes and be a guy reading supposedly "girl" books...heck, I read all of my sister's Trixie Beldon and Donna Parker books when I was a kid. By the way the listed author of the Nancy Drew books is Carolyn Keene, but they were really written by an assortment of writers over the years, starting with Edward Stratemeyer and his kin...
In the first book, The Secret of the Old Clock, a wealthy, recently-deceased benefactor apparently has left his considerable fortune all to one snooty and undeserving family while several different people Nancy befriends claim that he had promised them a share of his inheritance. Now the search is on for the second will that, hopefully, will set things straight. Unfortunately, the book's title as well as the cover picture tend to give away the story...
The second book, The Hidden Staircase, has Nancy investigating a supposedly haunted house that an unscrupulous real estate speculator is inexplicably trying to buy up...Nancy's friend Helen enlists her help as her aunt and great-grandmother live there and are understandably unsettled by the frights. The disappearance of her father, apparently kidnapped, adds urgency to her efforts to find him and solve the mystery. Guess what? The solution involves a hidden staircase...who would have imagined...
In the third book, The Bungalow Mystery, Nancy and her friend Helen find themselves in dire peril after a raging storm sinks their boat in the middle of a lake...only to be rescued by Laura, an orphaned teenager. Her mother only died recently and had arranged for a nearby couple to be her guardians...but when they arrive they only seem interested in locking Laura in her room and trying to take from her the valuable jewelry her mother left behind. Meanwhile, Nancy's lawyer father Carson has enlisted her help in an embezzlement probe...I pretty much had this one figured out early on...
As you would expect children's novels to be, Nancy Drew is written in short, simple sentences with plain language...ah, how refreshing after reading so much "adult" writing that seems to be deliberately designed to be difficult to understand. Still, I think I'll leave Nancy for a while and tackle one of those "big boy" books...
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