The Secret of Red Gate Farm

Happy Drews-Day and let's uncover The Secret of Red Gate Farm!

The OT is on the left with a dust jacket (the OT was never produced with a picture cover) and the RT is on the right.  Wonder why they kept the same art for this book (and the next one) when they changed pretty much all of the other ones, sometimes more than once.  Anyway, we have a very 40s-looking Nancy peeking at some fake cult members going into a cave, nice action scene.

Let's have a look at the OT.

Case file:
Nancy, Bess, and George are out for a day of shopping and are heading to the train station when Bess insists on stopping in an Oriental shop to buy perfume.  The shopgirl seems oddly resistant to selling her the scent she wants, but Bess buys it despite an exorbitant price ($3 for a tiny bottle!).  They make it to their train and Nancy takes note of a pale, thin girl sitting across from them.  When gathering all their packages to get off the train, George accidentally spills the perfume all over Nancy, who then notices that the thin girl has fainted.  She goes to get some water for the girl and a mean-looking guy talks to Nancy, apparently because of the scent of the perfume.

The girl is revived and gets off at the River Heights stop with the other three girls.  Nancy insists that the girl, Millie Burd, should come back to her house for a snack before she goes off to interview for a job.  Hannah makes her a hot meal and then they discover that the ad was for a job in Riverside Heights, a nearby town, so Nancy drives Millie there.  She's nervous about the interview since she's spent her whole life working on her grandmother's farm, so Nancy goes in with her.  The man conducting the interview is abrupt and crude; he takes a phone call and writes down a weird string of numbers before taking Millie in for the interview.  Nancy copies down the numbers because she thinks it's a code, and then the man tells them both to leave.

After a few days, Millie still can't find a job (Great Depression and all), so Nancy comes up with a plan for her, Bess, and George to accompany Millie back to Red Gate Farm and become paying boarders at the farm.  Granny got a few other boarders too so things are starting to look up for them.  On the long drive there, Nancy sees three men (including the guy from the train) flashing huge wads of cash at a gas station; she happens to also use a $20 bill to pay for the girls' lunch.

Once at the farm, the girls help Millie and her grandmother get things spruced up for the two boarders who are soon to arrive (Bess took a course in interior design, and for some reason I find that detail funny).  Nancy, Bess, and George have fun doing all the farm things (honestly it sounds kinda like when my kiddo did a week of farm camp and I think I would enjoy it too) and Millie tells them that part of the farm has a cave on it, but it's leased to the Black Snake Colony, a supposed nature cult whose members like to dress up in bed sheets and dance around in the moonlight.  Nancy is intrigued by them and she's also still working without success on the coded message she copied at Millie's interview.

Nancy meets a member of the cult when she's out walking one day, and the woman is extremely insistent that Nancy cannot go anywhere near the cult so of course she plans to do so at the first opportunity.  She goes near the cave one day when she's searching for a wayward cow and a tough-looking guy stops her and tells her she can't be anywhere near the cave.  By now Nancy thinks the nature cult is a front for some kind of shady enterprise.

She decides to take the coded message to a cryptographer in the city, and on the way she stops at the same gas station as before.  The owners of the gas station are talking to Secret Service agents about a counterfeit bill they received, and the woman points to Nancy as the one who gave it to them.  It looks like the agents are going to arrest the girls until Karl Jr., son of one of the boarders, comes in and vouches for the girls.  Nancy tells the agents about the men she saw who had also paid with a $20, and she hands over the coded message and the girls go back to the farm instead of heading for the city.

Nancy buys some white muslin and the four girls make their own costumes, planning to join the cult members next time they have a "ceremonial" in the moonlight.  On the appointed night, they leave Millie as a guard while Nancy, Bess, and George dance around with the cult members and then follow them into the cave.  They soon find out that the cult is a cover for the counterfeiting ring that the Secret Service had been investigating, but the leader of the group discovers the girls before they can sneak out and inform the authorities, and Millie is captured too.  Members of the group include the shopgirl who sold Bess the perfume, the man on the train, the one who interviewed Millie, and the men Nancy saw flashing money around at the gas station.

The leader of the group, Maurice Hale, decides to leave the girls tied up in an isolated shack near the river while they destroy all the evidence and get out of town, leaving them to starve.  They're just leading the girls outside when who shows up but Karl Jr. with the Feds, who arrived at "the psychological moment".  Karl Jr. was driving near the farm when the Secret Service agents asked him how to get to the cave.  All the counterfeiters get arrested and Nancy gets a special thank you for passing along the coded message, which cryptographers finally cracked and it led them to the Black Snake Colony.

Millie and her grandmother are now once again worried about paying off the mortgage on the farm, but Nancy has a plan:  they market the counterfeiters' cave as a tourist attraction and advertise Red Gate Farm as a healthful place to rest and recuperate.  Carson has to drive down to Red Gate Farm himself because Nancy is having so much fun she doesn't want to leave.

Notes:
There are a few things I don't like about this book:  George is quite cruel to Bess on multiple occasions and the fat shaming is intense, and Nancy and the girls have to be rescued by Karl Jr. not once but twice.  But at least now we have Hannah back with the Drews, with zero explanation of what happened to the other lady Nancy hired in The Mystery at Lilac Inn (OT) when Hannah had to go take care of her ill sister.

Also the stuff with the perfume makes less and less sense the more you think about it.  Is the counterfeiting group using the perfume as an identifier for members?  What's wrong with facial recognition?  Then why did they even have it in the store where someone not in the group might buy it, however much the sales clerk might protest and jack up the price?  It's just such a weird plot element.

Third, I think this is the first book which mentions the number 305 (which is the office number where Millie has her interview), but I've noticed that it crops up in a couple of other books too, so I'm going to keep an eye out for it.  I don't know if it was someone's lucky number or what, but now it's a game to see where else it gets mentioned.

Nancy's Knockout Tally, OT Edition:
She stays conscious for the entire book, so the cumulative tally still stands at:
Blunt force trauma:  2
Near Suffocation:  1

Case file:
The revised version is very similar to the OT, with a few things added and several of the names changed.  Millie is now Joanne Byrd; their hired farmhand changes from Reuben Snodgrass to Reuben Ames; Karl Jr. and his dad's last name is changed from Auerbacher to Abbott; even the cow changes from Bossy to Primrose.

After getting off the train, Nancy sees the man who spoke to her on the train drive by George's house, and George receives a threatening phone call later warning them to stop snooping.  Another man comes to Red Gate Farm and offers to buy it for a very low price, which is what makes Joanne want to hurry back to the farm so she can convince her grandmother not to sell.  He comes back a second time and is very insistent and rude, but Granny refuses to sell.

Nancy works on the code and manages to crack it herself; she calls Chief McGinnis to tell him about the code and the suspicious characters she has observed, and he passes her information along to the Secret Service.  At the farm, Nancy gets a note supposedly from Carson instructing her to go back home, but she figures out that it's a fake when she goes into town and calls him the next morning (the phone line at the farm had been cut).  That's when she meets the Secret Service agents at the gas station, but this time it *was* Nancy's money that was counterfeit.  Carson had given it to her to use on her vacation and once again, she almost gets arrested until Karl Jr. intervenes for her and they name-drop Carson Drew, because no way would a famous attorney be mixed up in counterfeiting.

During the day before they join the cult dancing in the moonlight, Nancy, Bess, and George go swimming in a creek and George gets bitten by a snake when she climbs on some rocks (the snake wriggling away actually gives Nancy the inspiration to crack the second half of the code).  When the Feds bust up the gang at the very end, Karl Jr. is once again leading them, but this time it's because Mrs. Byrd had gotten worried about the girls and called him, and he then called the Secret Service agents.  The agents are extremely impressed with Nancy because they had thought the code was unbreakable.

Notes: 
I am still disappointed that Nancy required a man to come save her twice in this book, but at least in the RT she cracks the code by herself instead of just handing it off to the Feds.  I think the whole cult idea and them dancing around in the moonlight is very Scooby-Doo; it seems a bit counterproductive to me that they would put on such a show dancing in the moonlight if they're trying to keep their counterfeiting operations a secret.  It does give them a reason for living near the cave, but it also excites the curiosity (and sometimes animosity) of all the neighbors.  George is still extremely mean to Bess about her weight and George's mama should have taught her better manners.  That is the one trope that I wish wasn't a thing in the Nancy Drew books.

Nancy's Knockout Tally, RT Edition:
She stays conscious the whole time for this book, so we're still at 3

Nancy's Skills:
She's a cryptographer now and breaks a code that the government, which presumably has people trained in cryptanalysis, didn't crack.  She also hand-sews her costume for the cult ceremony, and performs minor surgery on George to treat the snake bite.

Nancy Drew, Fashion Model:
Unusually, none of Nancy's outfits are mentioned in any detail in this book aside from the disguise to infiltrate the cult, perhaps because the RT so closely follows the OT and fashion isn't usually described much in those.

Cooking with Hannah:
Hannah makes soup and sandwiches for Joanne at the beginning of the book.

Rating:
Three stars for both, because of George fat-shaming Bess and Karl Jr. having to rescue the girls twice.  I'd rather see Nancy figure out a way out on her own or with her friends.