The Clue of the Broken Locket

Happy Drews-day and it's time to search for The Clue of the Broken Locket.

This is one of the times when the OT and RT share a title, the main characters, and that's almost all.  Both covers are by Rudy Nappi and though the stories are wildly different, they do both have Nancy discovering the titular broken locket inside an old rowboat.

The OT cover is kind of dreamy with that yellow background, and I read or heard somewhere that the appearance of the man behind Nancy (character Enos Crinkle from the story) is a self-portrait by Nappi.  I can't remember where I heard that so I can't verify, but I like the idea anyway.

For the RT cover, we have a much darker and moodier background so the girls' brightly-colored shirts and hair pop and no power on this earth could make me trudge through a swamp barefoot.  Not sure I could pick a favorite between the two covers, I like them both.  Let's check out the contents.

Case file:
Carson has deep misgivings about handling an adoption case for two actors, Kitty and Johnny Blair, who are adopting 14-month-old twins Jay and Janet as a publicity stunt.  The babies had been found alone in a rowboat the previous year with nothing but their fancy clothes and a broken locket.  Nancy meets the Blairs and doesn't much like them, so she decides to investigate and try to trace the twins' biological parents.  Kitty throws a party at the Blair estate, Jolly Folly, in honor of the children's adoption; Nancy and Bess attend, where they are horrified at the negligent way the twins are treated and the incompetent maid, Colleen, who is supposed to take care of them.  Kitty wants to burn the clothes the twins were found in along with the locket, but Nancy substitutes doll clothes and an old locket of her own so she can preserve any clues in the twins' possessions.  She and Bess smuggle the twins' possessions out hidden under their berets.  The person in the Blair household who seems to have the most interest in the twins' welfare is the chauffeur, Rodney, a WWI veteran who's clearly suffering from PTSD.

Back at the Drew house, they receive a visit from Reverend Dr. Paul Stafford, who tells them an unnamed woman visited him and begged him to contact Carson and tell him not to let the Blairs adopt the twins; Nancy immediately theorizes the woman also sent them a telegram to the same effect, but the papers had already been signed when they received it.  Dr. Stafford is interested in twins and tells the story of the first baptism he performed, which was for twins Rodney and Ruth 30 years ago, and Nancy connects this with the chauffeur Rodney.  The next day, Colleen calls and begs for Nancy and Bess to help her with the twins; as they arrive, the Blairs are leaving for a day of golfing so clearly they're going to be great parents.  Colleen herself is more interested in spending time with her boyfriend Francis than in caring for the twins.  Nancy then meets theatrical producer Edwin McNeery, who has the Blairs under contract for his new show but he's angry that they never show up for rehearsals and says they need to get rid of the kids.  Nancy also finds out that the Blairs spend far beyond their means and owe a lot of money for basic things like food while Kitty has a huge wardrobe of designer dresses and French perfumes.

We have a few sightings of the mystery lady who didn't want the Blairs to adopt the twins, and Nancy figures she must have been a nurse at the Selkirk Home (orphanage) who cared for the babies.  A few days later, Nancy visits the orphanage and finds out the woman's name is Ruth Brown, and that Ruth was the one to find the twins in the boat and she got the job at the orphanage specifically to care for them.  At first Nancy thinks Ruth might be the twins' mother, but she's not, and Nancy next hopes to get the Blairs to hire Ruth as a nurse for the twins since Colleen is so useless.  Ruth, however, does not want anything to do with the Blairs.  Nancy asks her to come back to the Drew home the next day and asks Rodney the chauffeur to come over as well--they are the very same Rodney and Ruth that Dr. Stafford had baptized 30 years ago, and they had lost touch after Rodney fought in World War I so Nancy reunites them.  

While Ruth and Rodney are happily reconnecting, Nancy receives a frantic phone call from Colleen who says the twins have fallen and are injured, so Nancy, Ruth, and Rodney all run over to Jolly Folly to take care of them.  Colleen didn't call the doctor after the twins fell out of their cribs (they had the drop-side cribs that are illegal now); she had been too busy hanging out with her boyfriend and trying on Kitty's fancy clothes to pay attention to the twins, and hasn't even bothered to feed them.  Nancy, Ruth, and Rodney take care of the twins and Colleen storms out, sure that Nancy is going to try to get her fired.  The Blairs and McNeery arrive, arguing loudly, and Colleen takes advantage of the hubbub to steal a diamond locket from Kitty's purse and plant it in Nancy's car.  McNeery complains about the Blairs to Nancy and shows her a picture of his estranged wife Sylvia, who was a great actress but wanted to quit acting to raise a family so she left him.  Meanwhile, Kitty agrees to hire Ruth to take care of the twins, and the next morning Rodney reports that Kitty has fired Colleen.

The next day, Nancy, Bess, and George drive back out to Selkirk to ask more about how the twins were found.  Nancy tracks down Enos Crinkle, who still has the wrecked boat in which the twins were found, and she finds the missing half of the locket in the boat, and this half is engraved with the initials SMN.  As the girls are having a picnic lunch, Colleen and her boyfriend Francis show up; the girls eavesdrop on Colleen until George accidentally falls in the river, but they hear Colleen say the police are about to get Nancy for something.  Once back in River Heights, Kitty calls Nancy and Carson to come to her house and accuses Nancy of stealing the locket; she has hired the unscrupulous lawyer Abe Jacobs to sue Nancy, but Carson is ready to do battle in the courtroom, though worried that Abe is going to drag Nancy's reputation through the mud.

The newspapers have picked up the salacious story from Kitty Blair and Abe Jacobs, so Nancy leaves town with Bess and George to try to work more on tracing the twins' mother.  Abe and Francis follow them and when Nancy's car gets a flat tire, they accuse Nancy of fleeing with the diamond locket; Francis knows exactly where it is in the car.  Nancy calls a mechanic and gets his help in getting away from Francis and Abe, and the mechanic tells Nancy about how he had helped a lady the previous year when she was struck by lightning near the river.  Nancy gets directions to the woman's cottage, and it's Sylvia McNeery, who Nancy has figured out is the mother of the twins.

Nancy takes Sylvia back to River Heights and calls Ruth, who brings the twins over and they are reunited with their mother, but there's still the question of the adoption.  Carson and Edwin McNeery arrive and McNeery is overjoyed to be reunited with Sylvia; he didn't know about the lightning strike and he wants her back *and* the twins (the same ones he told the Blairs to return to the orphanage, yeah those ones).  Then the Blairs arrive but won't talk until McNeery leaves; he's fired them for breach of contract since they kept missing rehearsals.  Kitty is hysterical that her career is in a shambles due to her own actions and the Blairs sign paperwork relinquishing their rights to the twins without a thought, and Kitty tells Nancy that she figured out that Nancy didn't take the locket because Colleen and Francis eloped with it.  The Blairs run out of town to avoid their many creditors; the reunited McNeerys buy a huge house and hire Ruth and Rodney as their new chauffeur and nurse for the babies.  And all of the newspapers print retractions on the stories that Nancy was a thief, so her good reputation is restored.

Notes:
So Nancy has pretty much wandered into a reality TV show!  This book is different from the previous installments in that the first third of it is just Nancy and Bess working on the case; George comes into it later.  Nancy makes a lot of snap judgments about the Blairs and all their friends (or frenemies, more like) but she turns out to be right about them.  Hannah is not very sympathetic either, she spends a lot of the book worried that Nancy is going to bring the twins home for her to take care of since obviously no one is taking care of them at Jolly Folly.  I like it better when Hannah is more caring.

Nancy' Knockout Tally, OT Edition:
Nancy stays conscious for the entire book, that's two in a row!  Cumulative tally stands at:
Blunt force trauma:  2
Near suffocation:  1
Drugs:  1

Nancy Drew, Fashion Model:
Nancy and Bess are conveniently wearing berets when they attend the party at the Blairs' estate, Jolly Folly, and these berets are big enough to hide the baby clothes.  Other than that we don't have any outfit specifics.

Cooking with Hannah:
Hannah makes hotcakes for breakfast and is aggrieved that Carson is too involved in brooding about the adoption case to do them justice, and she makes creamed chicken for luncheon.  On the day that Nancy invites Ruth and Rodney over in the afternoon, Hannah makes a soufflé for lunch as well as fancy cakes, but Nancy is too distracted to eat them (Hannah, call me, my family will appreciate your efforts far more than Nancy and Carson do).  Nancy tells Hannah she can serve the cakes at teatime, and Hannah decides to make hot chocolate because people like that better than tea to which I say Hannah, you have pressed an incorrect key (as I drink my second cuppa today).  Hannah packs a picnic lunch for Nancy, Bess, and George when they go to investigate the boat.

Now let's take a look at the RT.

Case file:
Carson asks Nancy to take a trip to Misty Lake, Maryland, and find out why the caretaker of a friend's cabin is too scared to do his job, and to hand over the keys to the cabin to renter Cecily Curtis.  Nancy grabs her besties Bess and George for a road trip, and on the way there, they meet a redheaded girl arguing with her fiance.  Once they arrive at Misty Lake, Nancy finds out that a ghostly boat recently began appearing on the lake, supposedly the specter of a boat that sank at the turn of the century (the 20th century, not the turn of the millennium).  The locals are terrified but of course Nancy is not.  They go down to the cottage and see what appears to be the same girl from the restaurant, who yells that they can't stop her from getting the babies and then she runs away.

Late in the evening, they finally meet Cecily, who is the girl from the restaurant but NOT the girl who was looking for the babies, so Cecily has a doppelganger.  Cecily invites the girls to stay with her at the cottage, and in the middle of the night, Nancy wakes up to find Cecily gone.  She goes outside to look for her and finds Cecily unconscious on the path to a large stone house nearby.  The next day, Cecily tells them that she is staying at Misty Lake to try to solve a family mystery:  her great-great-grandfather hid the family fortune during the Civil War and the only clue she has is part of a broken locket with a note that says directions to the fortune are in an iron bird.  Cecily's research has led her to Misty Lake as her family owned the large house called Pudding Stone Lodge; she's hoping to find the family fortune so she can marry her fiance, pop star Niko Van Dyke, who is embroiled in a lawsuit with his record company over his royalty earnings.

The girls find out that Pudding Stone Lodge is currently being rented by the Driscoll brothers, but belongs to the Wayne family of Baltimore (sadly none of them are named Bruce that we know of).  Vince Driscoll is quite rude to the girls and tells them to go away, but Karl Driscoll says that they can look around the grounds for the iron bird.  That night, the girls see the phantom launch but of course Nancy believes it's not a ghost boat and sets out to investigate the next morning.  She doesn't find anything but she's suspicious of the happenings at Pudding Stone Lodge.  The girls listen to Niko's new record and Nancy deduces from the poor sound quality that the record she purchased is a pirated copy.

The Driscolls tell Cecily that they've found the iron bird, but when they go to see it, Nancy is sure that it's one they just purchased from a souvenir shop in town.  Nancy asks to go out on the roof to see if there's a bird cornice up there, and she gets locked out on the roof for a while.  Nancy suspects that the Driscolls locked her out on the roof on purpose, perhaps to hide something (or someone) they don't want her to find; she also meets the Driscolls' adopted 3-year-old twins.  Nancy thinks that the Driscolls are keeping Cecily's double prisoner for some reason.  Once back at their cabin, the girls find it ransacked and a lot of the furniture broken.  Nancy goes out hiking around the lake and finds an old rowboat near where the phantom launch appears, and she finds a broken locket inside that matches the broken locket owned by Cecily.  She also notices an odd humming noise coming from near Pudding Stone Lodge on several occasions.  Nancy reports to the local police chief, but he's not much help.

Niko comes to visit Cecily at the cabin and they make up their fight.  The girls all go to Baltimore where Cecily tries to contact the Wayne family to ask about Pudding Stone Lodge; they find out from a neighbor that Susan Wayne closely resembles Cecily, and Nancy is convinced that Susan and Cecily are cousins.  Ned, Burt, and Dave arrive in Baltimore to attend Niko's show with Nancy, Bess, George, and Cecily; after the show, Niko and Nancy get in a car and are nearly kidnapped but Nancy figures out what's happening and they escape.  The next day, they all return to Misty Lake and Nancy finds an iron flamingo near Pudding Stone Lodge; inside its foot, they find a note from Cecily's ancestors about where the family fortune is hidden.

Nancy is sure the Driscolls are holding Susan Wayne prisoner, but she calls the police and they find nothing.  Nancy and all her friends keep watch on Pudding Stone Lodge, and she has the boys follow a truck which contains pirated records, and the State Police arrest the truck drivers.  Meanwhile, Nancy and Cecily sneak into the cellar of Pudding Stone Lodge and find Susan tied up.  Susan thought Nancy and her friends were helping the Driscolls, so anytime she escaped from them she was too scared to ask them for help.  Susan is the mother of the twins.  The Driscoll brothers catch Nancy, Cecily, and Susan and tie them up, but their other friends immediately rescue them and call the police.  The Driscolls are already in trouble for the record piracy, but now they get charged with kidnapping Susan.  A year ago, Susan and her husband were out camping when they were struck by a hit and run driver; Susan's husband was killed and she was taken to a hospital, but somehow whoever found Susan didn't find the twins because the Driscolls found them unattended, so they just decided to keep them.  After Susan recovered from her injuries, she tracked down the twins, but the Driscolls took her prisoner after she found out about the record piracy.  Once the Driscolls are arrested, Nancy follows the directions they found in the flamingo and find Cecily's half of the family treasure.  Cecily and Susan plan to have the broken locket repaired so they can give it to Nancy as a memento.

Notes:
This adventure was pretty wild and I'm not sure that my synopsis makes sense, there's so much going on in this one and I think the different plot elements are rather disjointed. I do find it interesting what elements from the OT were used in the RT since the stories are so different:
- Nancy finds part of the broken locket in a rowboat
- George falls in the river in the OT, and tumbles down an embankment towards the lake and hits her head in the RT
- Twin children are adopted by performers who treat them poorly; in the RT, the Driscolls had an acrobatic act and they wanted to teach the children to be a part of that, and they claim they just found the children and "informally adopted them"
- There's a mysterious woman who is interested in the welfare of adopted twins

I wonder if they got the identical cousin idea from the Patty Duke Show, I used to watch that on Nick at Nite when I was a kid.

Nancy's Knockout Tally, RT Edition:
Nancy stays conscious for the entire book, so the cumulative tally remains:
Blunt force trauma:  4
Drugs:  2

Nancy Drew, Fashion Model:
Nothing!  There was zero detail in this book about what Nancy wore.  We were too busy with identical cousins and record piracy and kidnapping to talk about clothes.

Nancy's Mysterious Souvenir:
Cecily and Susan have the two halves of the locket put back together and give it to Nancy in thanks for reuniting the cousins.

Rating:  Three stars for both.  I think they're middle-of-the-road Nancy Drew mysteries, not super fantastic but not terrible either.