Happy Drews-day and let's figure out The Password to Larkspur Lane!
I love the OT cover on the left, we have the beautiful larkspur of course and I really like Nancy's outfit, whether it's a color block dress situation or a skirt and blouse combo, it's great (though not for tramping through the woods, which is what Nancy had been doing before this scene happens in the book). Then there's Mrs. Eldridge warning Nancy about the approaching villains. Great cover, love the colors and the action.
The RT is on the right and we have the same scene, though the colors are darker and moodier. Nancy's dress on this one is also great, if not quite as good as the pink-and-navy combo on the RT, but very 60s. I quite like both covers, but I think the brighter colors on the OT make it my favorite of the two.
Let's take a look inside.
Case file:
Nancy and Hannah are gardening when a wounded homing pigeon is struck by a low-flying plane and literally lands in their yard. The message it's carrying is strange and includes the sentence "Blue bells are now singing horses", so of course Nancy senses a mystery. She telegraphs the bird's registration number to the American Pigeon Club (that's a thing?), and then takes the larkspur she had been picking to the Blenheim estate for a flower exhibition (I think the Blenheim estate shows up in the Nancy Drew PC games, but I have never played them). On the way back, she sees her friend Dr. Spires get pulled into another car, perhaps not of his own volition, and driven off in a hurry.
Back at the Drew home, Hannah has fallen in the cellar (she slipped on a potato, which might be the only time in history that a potato was evil) and hurt her back, so Nancy rushes her to Dr. Spires' office as he's a noted bone specialist. The doctor hasn't returned from wherever he was going earlier, so they settle down to wait and Nancy takes an odd phone message for the doctor. When he arrives, he praises Nancy's first aid skills for the bandage she put on Hannah, and tells Hannah she hasn't broken anything but she needs to rest. Nancy gives Spires the odd message: "If you say blue bells, you will get into trouble" so naturally she thinks this is connected to the mystery bird.
Spires asks Nancy and Carson to come to his office later that evening so he can tell them a strange story. He was called out to that country road to see a patient of his, but then got yanked into the car, blindfolded, and driven for an hour. Upon arriving at a large estate with a gate guard and giving a password (blue bells), he sees a patient who's practically comatose from a heart attack and has a dislocated shoulder; they're not allowed to speak to each other so he slips a bracelet off her arm and takes it because he thinks she's being held against her will. Then he gets blindfolded again and taken back to his car. Nancy and Carson volunteer to report the incident to the police, and Nancy notices a car following them. After talking to Inspector Mulligan, Nancy and Carson get back in the car and are followed again until Nancy turns the tables on their pursuer and Carson recognizes Adam Thorne, a disbarred lawyer who had embezzled money from an estate for which he was the executor. Thorne's car is the same one that Dr. Spires was abducted in earlier.
The next morning, Nancy goes to pick up Hannah's niece Effie, who is going to help out while Hannah is recuperating; Effie is obsessed with movies and boys, kind of flighty, but she does a good job making lunch. Nancy is visited by Mr. Jordan from the American Pigeon Club, who says that homing pigeons are sometimes used by crooks to communicate because they're harder to trace than phone calls or mail. Nancy asks to keep the bird so she can follow it back to its home coop when it's ready to fly again. The next day, she goes to the jewelers Argent, Cutter, and Stone to ask about the bracelet Dr. Spires gave her; it has a coat of arms on it so she hopes to trace the design. As soon as she leaves the shop, a woman steals her purse, so Nancy chases her into a department store and manages to get the purse and bracelet back, though the woman gets away.
Helen Corning, newly returned from a trip to Europe, sees Nancy and invites her to her parents' cottage on Sylvan Lake. The girls go for a three-hour drive to look for the estate where the woman is being held, but no luck. Later that day, she and Carson discuss the case and Nancy figures out that the code message has to do with flowers and that singing horses means larkspur, and perhaps the place she's looking for has a lot of those flowers. Someone (most likely Adam Thorne) comes to the door to give them a threatening message, so Carson has the police put a watchman on the house.
The next day, Bess and George accompany Nancy back to the jewelers' and learn that the crest belongs to the Eldridge family. Nancy puts the bracelet into Carson's safe at the house, and then Bess and George leave to go on vacation. Meanwhile, Effie had put the box with the pigeon in it out in the yard so it can get some sun, but neighbor kid Tommy lets the bird out and then we get an amusing slow-speed car chase of Nancy driving while Effie chatters incessantly and watches the bird until they see where it lands 20 miles away. When they get near the place, Effie gets nervous about who they might meet, so Nancy has her hide in the rumble seat, then drives up to a huge mansion with a bunch of outbuildings. A man comes out of one of the buildings cracking a whip and he is super creepy. Nancy says she wants to buy a breeding pair of homing pigeons and he behaves in a predatory manner, then tries to reach in and grab her car keys. Luckily Effie distracts him by doing a weird-sounding laugh from the rumble seat and he's startled enough that Nancy is able to get the heck outta Dodge. She drives five miles away to West Granby to make sure they're not being followed before she lets Effie out, and they stop at a hotel for lunch, where Nancy learns from the proprietor that the mansion is owned by a man named Tooker and the other people in town don't like his noisy airplane.
Once back at home, Hannah is feeling better so Nancy takes her to Dr. Spires for a checkup and uses the opportunity to ask if the Tooker estate could be where he was taken, but he's not as observant as Nancy and there were no flowers there. Nancy theorizes that the people she's after have another hideout that would be to the northwest of River Heights since the Tooker estate is to the southeast and she keeps seeing this plane. Effie calls Nancy at the doctor's office to report that a man tried to get in the Drew house, so Nancy tells her to barricade the door. When Nancy and Hannah return, there is a man trying to get in, but it's Carson, who tells them he has to go on a business trip and he doesn't want Nancy staying at the house with just Hannah and Effie, so Nancy volunteers to go to Sylvan Lake with Helen. Carson surprises Nancy with a new car, asks his law office's building superintendent Jim Durkin to watch the house, and they plan a fake-out to get away in Nancy's new car and hopefully trick whoever is watching the Drew house.
Nancy and Helen relax at Sylvan Lake and Nancy gets involved in an impromptu diving competition which of course she wins. Ned canoes over with two other guys; he is conveniently working as a summer camp counselor elsewhere on the lake. A five-year-old girl bumps into Nancy and then falls off the diving platform into the water, right in the path of a speedboat, so Nancy dives in to save her (hey look, a boating accident was averted this time!) and finds out that the girls name is Marie Eldridge, so she asks Marie's mom about the bracelet, which she says belongs to her husband's aunt Mary, who has been missing for several months and also has a necklace to match the bracelet (which you can see on both of the cover illustrations).
Nancy thinks Mrs. Eldridge is being held at a place that's pretending to be a sanatorium, so she and Helen continue looking for the place in Nancy's car and finally find a tiny path labeled L.S. Lane. They get out of the car to look around and see a huge house surrounded by larkspur, and there's a guard shack and a gate, so this must be the place where Dr. Spires was taken. It's getting late so Helen insists they leave, and they go back to her parents' house and go to a yacht club dance with Ned and Buck Rodman (who was Helen's date in the OT Nancy's Mysterious Letter).
The next day, Nancy and Helen go back out to Larkspur Lane to do some recon; the place is surrounded by an electrified fence and there's a Great Dane keeping watch at the guard house. Helen hurts her ankle while they're hiking through the woods, so Nancy gives her a full medical exam and snaps a wayward tendon back into place so Helen can walk again. They see some old ladies in wheelchairs, and Nancy recognizes the nurse as the woman who tried to steal her purse. Luckily Mrs. Eldridge is close enough to the fence that Nancy is able to talk to her before a man named Dr. Bull appears and tries to get Mrs. Eldridge to sign paperwork giving him a lot more money, but she refuses.
Nancy and Helen leave and Nancy hatches a plan to infiltrate the estate: she has Helen dress up as a nurse, while she dresses up as an old lady as they know a new patient is supposed to arrive that evening. They give the password at the gate and successfully enter the grounds, so Nancy leaves Helen with the car and sneaks in to get Mrs. Eldridge out. She tells Helen to get Mrs. Eldridge off the grounds, but Nancy's staying to try to save all the other ladies. Of course she gets caught, and the bad guys lock her in an underground cistern, but Nancy wastes no time in climbing right back out of it. She uses the pigeons to send an SOS message, sabotages two cars, and then wonders how to sabotage the plane, and just twists a pipe that looks important.
Three men run up and try to start the plane, but it conveniently catches on fire and explodes. Once again all the baddies are searching for Nancy, but another plane lands and it's Ned, Carson, and the police coming to the rescue. Ned was waiting at the Tooker estate for her message to fly to the fake sanatorium with the police. Back at the Corning house, Mrs. Eldridge has been reunited with her family and she explains how Dr. Bull and Adam Thorne were in cahoots with Adolf von Hopwitz, a.k.a. Tooker, to cheat wealthy old women out of their money, keeping them at the fake sanatorium and drugging them to keep them compliant. Mrs. Corning gives Nancy a silver loving cup, which was her prize for winning the flower show.
Notes:
This is quite an exciting case and deals with elder abuse, which we haven't seen before in a Nancy Drew mystery. I do wonder how widely homing pigeons were actually used, even back in the late 1930s/early 40s when this was written, because it seems like such a silly plot device now but maybe it didn't used to be that way. We do have a funny part where Tommy is looking at the pigeon and Carson tells him the story of Icarus, so Tommy thinks the bird's name is Ike Harris, which made me giggle. Also, Effie is bananas and I love her, she's very entertaining while she's vexing Nancy.
Still no mention of Chief McGinnis in the OTs; this time we get Inspector Mulligan, who is a stereotypical Irish cop complete with brogue. He's not interested in the bracelet that Nancy thinks is such a good clue, and at the end of the mystery she's glad it's the State Police who will get credit for breaking up the gang rather than Mulligan.
When Nancy goes to the jewelry store (Argent, Cutter, and Stone is such a clever joke name for a jewelry store, I like it), they talk about how the motto "Esse quom videre" is on the crest, which I had to look up and it means "to be, rather than to seem" and is the state motto of North Carolina. I learned something. Also, the expert that Mr. Stone sends a picture of the crest to is named Abelard de Gotha which is just a fantastic name.
It's interesting to me that Nancy gets involved in a diving competition with Helen's friends, because this book was NOT written by Mildred Wirt Benson, who was an avid swimmer and diver. This one as well as the previous two were written by Walter Karig; I think Nancy's Mysterious Letter was a dud but I quite like The Sign of the Twisted Candles and this one.
It's nice to have Helen back as Nancy's ride or die, though she gets sycophantic about praising Nancy for being so smart and brave working on this mystery, to a point that it's weird. Also, when Nancy first arrives at Sylvan Lake, she unpacks and the girls spend time admiring each other's dainty lingerie and I can say for a fact that I have never once admired a friend's lingerie, dainty or otherwise. Helen gets scared and blubbery when Nancy tells her to leave with Mrs. Eldridge so Nancy kisses her, it doesn't say whether it's on the cheek or what, but there does seem to be some queer subtext in this book. I'm just saying.
Nancy's Knockout Tally, OT Edition:
Nancy stays conscious for the entire book, so her tally stands at:
Blunt force trauma: 2
Near suffocation: 1
Drugs: 1
Nancy's Skills:
Nancy is a skilled gardener and wins the flower show with her larkspur. She is also basically an EMT, bandaging up Hannah at the start and then fixing Helen's ankle in the woods.
Nancy Drew, Fashion Model:
When packing to go to Sylvan Lake, Nancy packs "neatly folded sports clothes, afternoon dresses, and two dainty evening frocks". Really, the word "dainty" is used a LOT in this book. Nancy wears a blue and white bathing suit at Sylvan Lake, while brunette Helen wears red. After admiring each other's dainty lingerie (still weird), Nancy puts on a powder blue evening gown while Helen wears a rose-colored dress with lace. Nancy has worn pale blue evening gowns on several occasions, so I wonder if she just has one that she likes a lot or if she's got a closet full of different ones (I'm betting on the latter). Nancy later wears orthopedic shoes, a veiled hat, and a huge black coat when masquerading as an old lady to get into the fake sanatorium.
Nancy's Mysterious Souvenir:
She gets a silver loving cup for her larkspur winning the flower show.
Let's look at the RT:
Case file:
This book follows the OT fairly closely for the main mystery, with a connected mystery added. The (fictional?) group Nancy contacts about the injured bird is now American Homing Pigeon Fanciers, and Dr. Spires is changed to Dr. Spire (why?). This time, when Dr. Spire is tending to Mrs. Eldridge, she has more agency and intentionally passes her bracelet to him. The jewelry store that Nancy goes to in this edition is Butler & Stone's, so not quite as jokey as the OT name, though I kinda wish it was the same jewelry store from the RT Nancy's Mysterious Letter. Nancy wins the flower show with her larkspur in the first third of the book, and the bad guys sic a Great Dane on her at the flower show, which was new.
For the other mystery, the now-married Helen Corning Archer invites Nancy to her grandparents' house on Sylvan Lake to investigate a strange circle of blue fire every evening, coming closer to their house. It seems to have something to do with the Cornings' houseman, Morgan, who disappears that evening after they see the ring of fire. The Cornings ask Nancy to stay and investigate, and she even brings Bess and George along, but Helen should stay with her husband (what?!). This time, Ned is working as a camp counselor at nearby Camp Hiawatha with Burt and Dave, and the diving competition is moved to after Nancy saves Marie Eldridge and it's with the boys at camp.
Nancy finds bits of burned paper near the Cornings' house from the ring of fire, and Ned the chemistry expert tells her it's from fireworks. Morgan returns to the Cornings' but doesn't want to talk to Nancy; he passes out when a package is delivered for him containing a stalk of larkspur, which makes Nancy think the two cases are linked. From the Cornings' tale, Nancy knows that Morgan started acting differently after Thorne broke out of prison, and she theorizes that Thorne wants to rob the Cornings' house because they own a large collection of French crystal pieces set with precious jewels.
Nancy, Bess, and George go to a bonfire at Camp Hiawatha and Bess gets pushed, falling down a hill and nearly landing in the fire; the bad guys mistook her for Nancy because they were wearing the boys' coats. They pretend that it was Nancy who was pushed and that she's hurt and out of commission for a few days. Nancy hatches a plan to catch the thieves at the Corning house and finds Morgan in the crystal room; he tells her that Thorne is forcing him to rob the Cornings but then he runs out and yells that he won't steal. Morgan gets in a fight with two men while Nancy gets knocked out.
In this version, Nancy finds the estate at Larkspur Lane with Bess and George, and it's George who injures her ankle but RT Nancy isn't a medical expert and so George stays injured. Bess masquerades as the nurse and driver of the car to infiltrate the fake sanatorium, and she gets Mrs. Eldridge out with far less blubbering than OT Helen did. While Nancy is running about the house and grounds, she finds Morgan in the attic before getting caught by the bad guys, who this time are led by Dr. Bell, not Dr. Bull (more of the henchmen are given names, too). Nancy escapes the cistern and sends pigeon SOS notes as in the OT.
This time, she finds two cars and Morgan is bound and gagged in one of them; Morgan tells her that Thorne said he's going to "finish him off" and that Tooker has given the signal to clear out, so Nancy flattens all the car tires. Morgan tells her how to turn on the lights for the landing field, which she does, and then she goes to the plane and drains the fuel so they can't escape. Nancy is about to be caught again by the bad guys when two sailplanes land, carrying the State Police, Carson, Ned, Burt, Dave, and Lt. Mulligan, and all the bad guys are arrested and the little old ladies are safe. Tooker, Bell, and Thorne argue about whose fault it is that they all got caught.
Back at the Corning house, Mrs. Eldridge has been reunited with her family and says that the bad guys had cooked up a racket wherein they promised rich little old ladies an elixir that would make them feel young again, lured them to the fake sanatorium, and then kept them drugged and forced them to sign legal documents handing over all their money. This time the code started out as "blue bells" because the fake Dr. Bell is conceited and wanted his name in the code, which is a fun addition and valid reason to change his name. Mrs. Eldridge gives Nancy the bracelet with the family crest on it, and Mrs. Corning plans to have French crystal earrings made for Nancy, Bess, and George in the form of tiny larkspurs.
Notes:
We have a few name changes, some of which I already mentioned, but Tommy in this one becomes Johnny and is apparently not the same child that helped Nancy in Nancy's Mysterious Letter. Effie is still in this one and she's still hilarious; her dealings with Nancy stay the same as in the OT. Inspector Mulligan is now a lieutenant and isn't written with an Irish brogue this time; Jim Durkin from the OT is renamed to Henry Durkin, probably to differentiate him from Helen's husband Jim Archer. I think they made Mrs. Eldridge a bit more spunky in the RT, which I like; she intentionally passes her bracelet off to Dr. Spire and helps with her own escape as much as she can.
In neither version to they explain why the bad guys had not one, but TWO giant estates; this old lady racket must pay very well and they might have gotten away with it if they hadn't gotten so greedy about getting Mrs. Eldridge's money too. In the RT, Mrs. Eldridge explains that the fake sanatorium scheme was Tooker's (a.k.a. Von Hofwitz) idea; Thorne was still in prison when they started and he invested in the scheme. Thorne was the one who wanted to use Morgan to steal the crystal collection from the Cornings, that was all his idea and Bell complains that Thorne kept bogarting his henchmen to deal with Nancy or Morgan.
Random question: how is a houseman different from a butler? Also, how many different jobs does Ned have? Inquiring minds want to know.
Nancy's Knockout Tally, RT Edition:
Blunt force trauma: 4
Drugs: 2
Nancy's Skills:
This time, Nancy is familiar enough with small aircraft that she's able to intentionally drain all the fuel out instead of randomly pulling on pipes that look important.
Nancy Drew, Fashion Model:
Nancy wears a lime green dress with a matching sweater when Helen first takes her to her grandparents' house to hear about their mystery. Nancy wears a turquoise swimsuit at Sylvan Lake, while Bess is in butter yellow and George wears sea green. For the yacht club dance, Nancy wears a rose-colored formal with her hair piled high and accented with a gardenia. Thankfully the dainty lingerie disappeared from this version.
Cooking with Hannah:
Hannah is planning to make hot biscuits and chicken at the beginning of the book, and she's going to the cellar for a jar of sweet pickles for Carson when she has her accident. Sadly that's all the cooking with Hannah that we get since she gets injured and then Nancy goes out to Sylvan Lake for the remainder of the book.
Nancy's Mysterious Souvenir:
Mrs. Eldridge gives Nancy the bracelet with the coat of arms charm, and Mrs. Corning plans to have French crystal earrings made for the three girls.
Rating:
Four and a half stars for both. I think the mystery is solid, Nancy does some good detective work, and they're both quite enjoyable. This one and The Sign of the Twisted Candles are both so good that it makes me wonder why Walter Karig's first Nancy Drew book, Nancy's Mysterious Letter, was such a dud.
