Happy Drews-day and welcome to The Bungalow Mystery!
The Bill Gillies cover is on the two books on the left side, and I like it because it's the only one where Nancy is actually inside the house watching a criminal steal things from the wall safe, and it feels more high stakes than the other two since she's so close to the action. Nancy's got a nice gold-and-green outfit happening here though I'd rather her top be a different color than her hair. The OT book once belonged to Linda Thomas and was dated Christmas 1964.
On the Applewood cover (Russell Tandy, I think, or maybe he just did the interior illustrations), Nancy is once again wearing a cloche hat so we can't actually see what color her hair is. This is the third Applewood cover in a row where Nancy is wearing blue, I think that was actually a note established in the Stratemeyer Syndicate that blue is Nancy's favorite color.
For the bottom right Nappi cover, Nancy is observing the bungalow from a distance and she's wearing the forest green dress mentioned in the RT, which is a nice detail. Also her hair is definitely red here instead of blonde.
My favorite cover is the Gillies one, I like that it's an action scene. Also if I got to choose, I would have moved the title over to the right a bit on the Nappi cover so it's all against the sky and not somewhat obscured by the tree.
So let's take a look at the OT version.
Case file:
Nancy and Helen Corning are staying at a camp on Moon Lake (just like in The Secret of the Old Clock) and take the camp motorboat out on the lake when a vicious storm rolls in. They accidentally hit a log and sink the boat (I wonder if this is the same boat that gave Nancy such trouble in Old Clock?); Helen is not a good swimmer so Nancy has to help her stay afloat, but they get rescued by 16-year-old Laura Pendleton in a rowboat. They take shelter in a boathouse and Laura tells them that her mother recently died, so she's waiting at the Lakeside Hotel to meet her new guardian, Jacob Aborn.
The next day, Nancy and Helen go to visit Laura at the hotel and meet Mr. Aborn, who says that they are leaving immediately for his bungalow on Melrose Lake. The girls instinctively dislike Mr. Aborn because he seems to want to get Laura away from them immediately and they hear him yell at her. They go back to camp for a few more days and Nancy teaches Helen how to swim. Nancy leaves for River Heights and gets caught in another storm; a pine tree gets struck by lightning and falls right in front of her car, and who shows up then but Laura Pendleton, who has run away from her guardian. Together they move the tree and go to Nancy's house.
Laura tells Nancy that Mr. Aborn is dictatorial and mean. They have no servants at the bungalow (gasp!!), he expects Laura to keep the house and tells her that she's got less than $15,000 in her inheritance when she thought it was closer to $50-60,000 (and that's in 1930s money). He took her fur coat and tried to take her mother's jewels, but Laura has them with her. Nancy asks Laura to write a letter to Aborn saying that she refuses to accept his guardianship, and Nancy goes back to Melrose Lake. She sees Aborn taking a small parcel to a dilapidated bungalow; he sees her trying to look in the window (cover scene) and says he's looking for Laura because she's mentally unbalanced.
Nancy pretends to leave, but follows Aborn back to his house and spies on him. He conveniently talks to himself about what he's doing and calls himself Stumpy. She goes back to the dilapidated bungalow, breaks in through a window and discovers the real Jacob Aborn held prisoner in the cellar, unconscious and ill. Nancy revives him and he tells her how Stumpy took him prisoner, but then Stumpy shows up and pistol-whips Nancy into unconsciousness. She wakes up as he's tying her up; she remembers that a detective once showed her a trick to how to hold her hands when being tied up that will make it possible to slip out of the bonds later so she tries to do that. Stumpy has a villain monologue moment and then leaves Nancy and Jacob to starve in the cellar.
Despite being dizzy from the blow to the head, Nancy eventually manages to get out of her bindings and unlocks Aborn. They get back to Nancy's roadster and check out Aborn's house, but Stumpy is gone. Nancy leaves Aborn there since he's so ill and weak, and she goes to a nearby hotel to call the police and a doctor. She tries to call her house to check on Laura and Hannah but gets no response; the hotel clerk agrees to spread the word to the police and radio stations to be on the lookout for Stumpy.
Meanwhile back in River Heights, Laura is worried about Nancy, so when Carson gets home she tells him what's happened and they hop in his car to go find Nancy. They happen to meet up with Nancy on the road and she says she's trying to figure out where Stumpy went. They choose the road leading to the town of Hamilton and catch up to his racing car and there's a protracted car chase. Carson even fires his revolver trying to get Stumpy to stop, but at a sharp curve Stumpy's car goes over a cliff. Carson, Nancy, and Laura climb down to rescue the unconscious Stumpy, and Nancy grabs his suitcase with Laura's bank securities just before the car explodes.
Carson and Laura take Stumpy to the hospital in Carson's car (a brown sedan), while Nancy follows in her blue roadster with the suitcase. They talk to the Hamilton police chief who says that Stumpy is in emergency surgery. Nancy insists that they take Laura back to Melrose Lake immediately so she can meet the real Jacob Aborn. Once there, they open the suitcase and find Laura's fortune, which is over $100,000 in bank securities. They go to visit Laura again a few days later; she and the real Jacob are very happy together and Stumpy is recovering in jail, where he belongs. Laura gives Nancy "a beautiful pendant of precious stones" as a thank you.
Notes:
I wrote down this quote: "To think was to act with Nancy Drew" and yep, true. I've noticed that the author (hi Mildred) frequently calls Nancy by her full name. It's mentioned that Carson smokes cigars, and I don't think I've come across anyone smoking in the RTs yet. Like in the previous two OTs, this version features guns--Stumpy beats Nancy over the head with his gun, and Carson shoots at Stumpy's car during the car chase, which surprised me since I grew up with the gun-free RTs.
Nancy's Knockout Tally, OT Edition: 2
Cooking with Hannah:
She makes waffles for Nancy and Laura.
Nancy's Mysterious Souvenir:
A pendant of precious stones that belonged to Laura's mother.
Revised case file:
Nancy and Helen are tooling around Twin Lakes on a motorboat when a wicked storm blows up and their boat sinks; they get rescued by a girl named Laura Pendleton, and the trio immediately break into a ramshackle bungalow to take shelter until the storm passes. Laura becomes insta-buddies with Nancy and Helen, and she confides that her mother recently died and she's supposed to meet her new guardians the next day at a hotel. Nancy and Helen go to Laura's hotel the next afternoon to see how she's getting on and meet her new guardians, the Aborns, but get a weird vibe off them. Helen splits off with her Aunt June to go work on wedding stuff and she's gone for the rest of the book.
When she finds out that Hannah has sprained her ankle, Nancy leaves Twin Lakes and has to take a detour road towards Melrose Lake when she gets caught in another storm. A tree falls down, but soon thereafter teenagers Jim and Cathy Donnell drive up and help her move the tree; it turns out they know the Aborns and are looking forward to making friends with Laura. When Nancy gets home, Hannah tells her that Carson wants her help on an embezzlement case in which it's suspected that some bank employees have been stealing securities from several branches of the bank. Carson asks Nancy to interview four people whose bearer bonds were stolen and suss out if they could have been complicit in the theft. She goes out to interview people and runs into Don Cameron, who had been her prom date in high school, and he invites her to a barbecue.
Nancy returns home and finds Laura there; she's run away from the Aborns because they keep asking her for her mother's jewels and they lock her in her room. Laura grabbed the jewels and ran to Nancy's house; she shows Nancy and Hannah the jewelry collection before they lock it in Carson's safe. Nancy goes back to sleuth around Melrose Lake; she checks into a hotel so she can sneak around after dark. She climbs a rose trellis into Laura's bedroom and spies on the Aborns, who empty a safe of a whole lot of bank notes and stock certificates. Nancy goes to the dilapidated bungalow and breaks in through a window; she finds the real Jacob Aborn like in the OT.
Nancy and Jacob spend too much time talking and he says the fake Aborn's name is really Stumpy Dowd; a Stephen Dowd had been on the list of people Nancy was supposed to interview but he wasn't home. She now realizes that her mystery is related to Carson's embezzlement case. Stumpy shows up and this time whacks Nancy over the head with a cane because no one has guns in the revised versions. Meanwhile, Carson is concerned about Nancy when he finds out she went back to the Aborn house, so he, Laura, and Don Cameron pile in the car and go to find her (Nancy had pawned Laura off on Don for the barbecue while she went sleuthing).
Nancy uses the same detective trick from the OT to get out of her bonds; she unlocks Jacob and they go to her car, but Stumpy has sabotaged it so it won't run. They go to the Aborn house and the Donnells show up because they're friends with the real Aborns and Mrs. Aborn had called them when she couldn't reach Jacob. They call the police and then Carson, Nancy, and Don go to the ramshackle bungalow that Nancy, Helen, and Laura broke into at the start of the book because that's where the rest of Stumpy's gang has been hiding out. This time Carson gets knocked on the head and passes out for a while, but once he's revived they still chase after Stumpy and his gang, there's a car accident, and Nancy grabs the suitcases full of cash just before the car explodes. Laura is glad to be with her real guardians who are much nicer than the impostors, and she gives Nancy an aquamarine ring that had belonged to her mother as a thank you.
Notes:
This one is somewhere in between The Secret of the Old Clock and The Hidden Staircase in regards to how much of the plot is changed between the versions, and this time the RT is much more convoluted even though it's five chapters shorter. There are a lot more characters too. In the OT, it's just Stumpy by himself; in the RT, we get Stumpy, his wife, and their two co-conspirators, plus Don Cameron, the Donnell family, and the people that Nancy interviews on Carson's behalf, and also Jacob Aborn's wife even though she only shows up at the end of the book. They do a good job of connecting the bank embezzlement case to Laura's case though--her mother had put all their money in the bank that the criminals were stealing from. It's a bit less clear which bungalow is the titular one, since there's the one the girls break into at the start, the Aborn house is a bungalow, and the place where the real Aborn was held prisoner is also a bungalow. I remember as a kid wondering what the heck a bungalow was as this was the first place I'd ever read the word.
I admit, when I read this a couple of months ago I wondered why on earth a 16-year-old was staying in a hotel by herself for days on end waiting for her guardians to show up because that seems very negligent on someone's part, but it does specifically say at the end of the book that the Dowds had arranged for Laura to leave her boarding school early so they could get to her. They do spell out a lot of complicated stuff with how the embezzlement scheme worked, how the criminals found out about Laura and her fortune, etc.
When Laura goes to the Drew home, Nancy shows her the Crowley clock from her first case and a silver urn, but until I read the OT Hidden Staircase I didn't know where the urn came from because it's not mentioned in the RT.
I'm listening to a couple of Nancy Drew podcasts; the host of one of them says there are an awful lot of boating accidents in the Drew-niverse and she's not wrong. Nancy and Helen sink their motorboat in both versions of this book; Laura's dad perished in a boating accident in the RT. I'm going to be on the lookout for future boating accidents.
Near the end, when Carson and Nancy are discussing the connections between the embezzlement case and Laura's fake guardians, Carson talks about his old friend Chief McGinnis. He hasn't shown up yet in the OTs so I'm watching for that; he was just name-dropped in The Hidden Staircase RT and this book. Also Carson's secretary, Miss Hanson, gets a mention in the RT for the first time.
Nancy's Knockout Tally, RT Edition: 2
Carson's Knockout Tally, RT Edition: 1
Nancy's Skills:
Nancy is an excellent swimmer and saves Helen in both versions; in the OT she then teaches Helen how to swim but that was cut out of the RT. Also she has some talents at breaking and entering, which she does at the first bungalow, the Aborn house, and the prison bungalow. Such a criminal, Nancy.
Nancy Drew, Fashion Model:
When interviewing people for Carson, Nancy wears what is described as a two-piece navy blue dress (um, I think that would be classified as a skirt and top, not a dress) that makes her look older, along with low-heeled pumps and tiny pearl earrings. She wears a forest green cotton dress and flat-heeled shoes to go to Melrose Lake, which is pictured on the last cover. She puts on a simple black cotton dress and pumps for dinner at the hotel, and then changes into a sweater, skirt, and walking shoes to go tramping through the woods. Where are your jeans, Nancy?!
Cooking with Hannah: The Drews have a "modern pink-and-white kitchen" which I find pretty funny for some reason. After injuring herself, Hannah refuses to stay off her feet and makes pancakes and sausages with fresh orange juice for breakfast and a fresh fruit salad and rolls for lunch. She makes tea and toast when Laura is distraught, and at the end when Laura comes over to get her jewels, she makes iced tea and open-faced sandwiches.
Nancy's Mysterious Souvenir:
An aquamarine ring that matches Nancy's eyes and used to belong to Laura's mother.
Rating: Five stars for the OT, four for the RT because they made things so much more complicated.
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