Happy Drews-day, it's time to search for The Clue in the Diary!
Like last week's Red Gate Farm, this book only has one cover for both the OT and RT, but it does have *some* copies of the OT with a picture cover (so no dust jacket), which made searching for the OT a little more difficult in this case. That is exactly why I have the book in the middle--based on the photos of the drawings on the end papers, I thought it might be an OT so I bought it, but it's still the RT. Still, I like the picture covers without the yellow bar on the top so I'm okay with that.
We have an action-packed cover with Nancy chasing after a man fleeing a house fire, and you can see the titular diary falling in the very bottom left corner. This artwork is by Bill Gillies (I don't have anything with the original Russell Tandy artwork) and I read somewhere that he used his wife as a model for Nancy. Can't remember where I read that though as I've read through so many Nancy Drew-related things in the past few months.
Anyway, the covers are the same and the RT follows the OT pretty closely, let's take a look.
My OT book once belonged to Jean Hoover. (I like seeing other people's names and sometimes dates in my vintage books--it's a piece of history for that particular book.)
Case file:
Nancy, Bess, and George are having a picnic after attending a carnival in Sandy Creek; they talk about a mother/daughter duo they met at the carnival and how they adopted them and paid for them to enjoy the carnival rides. They pack up and continue the drive through the country, and when Nancy points at a particularly large estate, the house promptly explodes in a raging fire. The girls immediately rush over there and honk the horn to attract more attention in case someone is trapped in the house. There's a lot of chaos, Nancy gets separated from the other girls and she sees a man fleeing the scene; she also picks up a diary that was dropped at the back hedge.
Nancy heads back for her car and sees a young man get in and start driving the car off; she wonders if he's trying to steal it but he's just moving it out of the way of flying embers from the fire and that is how she meets Ned Nickerson, her main man for many many more books after this one. Bess and George turn back up and they try to leave, but there's a massive traffic jam and a nervous driver runs into the back of Nancy's car. Ned directs traffic to get the snarl ironed out, and then he gives Nancy directions to a garage in his home town of Mapleton and follows her there to make sure she doesn't break down on the way. They hear a lot of speculation about the cause of the fire and Nancy finds out the house's owner, Felix Raybolt (Foxy Felix), is unpopular to say the least--he made his money by less that scrupulous business dealings and people are ready to believe he burned down his own house to collect the insurance money.
Once back at home, Nancy tries to read the diary but soon realizes most of it is in Swedish and she thinks, "I wish now that I had kept that Swedish maid, She couldn't cook but she might have been able to read this for me." No Nancy, we love Hannah. Ned calls early the next morning and says he poked around the ruins and found a ring, so he brings it over to her that night and meets her dad (who is relieved it's not a diamond ring, ha!). The next day, Nancy, Bess, and George go out to visit Honey and Mrs. Swenson, the two they "adopted" at the carnival; they're pretty much destitute because Mr. Swenson left to find work and they haven't heard from him for a week. Nancy buys them groceries and they make a feast for dinner that night; she happens to see Ned on the way back to the Swenson cottage and just invites him to dinner at someone else's house. Bit presumptuous there, Nancy. She questions Mrs. Swenson and comes to the conclusion that she saw the missing Mr. Swenson fleeing the Raybolt mansion after the explosion as he was one of Foxy Felix's victims.
Carson is unable to locate Foxy Felix, but he does track down Mrs. Raybolt who seems surprised and upset at the news that her husband may have perished in the fire. She's staying at the Maplecroft Inn because it's the closest to the estate, so Nancy, Bess, and George go there to see if they can meet Mrs. Raybolt. They do talk to her and she's convinced that Felix is dead. The girls then go to Mr. Weston's factory in Stanford since he's the nervous driver who damaged Nancy's car; he willingly pays the bill and says he should get himself a chauffeur. Nancy spots Joe Swenson among the factory workers but can't catch him. That night, the girls go to a country club dinner dance and Nancy wishes her new beau Ned was there. A few days go by and the girls buy Honey a new outfit for her birthday and mail it to her.
They finally return to Stanford and find Joe Swenson during his lunch break. Nancy speaks to him alone and is quickly convinced that Joe had nothing to do with the explosion and Foxy Felix's subsequent disappearance despite having a motive. He tells her that if he had his diary (and money for a lawyer), he could prove his case in court that Felix cheated him, but Nancy doesn't tell him she has it yet, though she does offer Carson's services pro bono. Nancy, Bess, and George meet Joe at the factory at the end of the workday but so do a couple of detectives, who arrest Joe for arson and take the girls in for questioning as well. The four of them face a tribunal (that seems extreme) and they're starting to convince the tribunal of Joe's innocence when Mrs. Raybolt sweeps in and points the finger at Joe as being the last person Felix talked to even though Nancy can tell from her facial expression that she'd never seen Joe before and she was making up the accusations. So Foxy Felix isn't the only shady member of the Raybolt family and Joe has to stay in jail.
The following night, Nancy decides to stake out the ruins of the Raybolt mansion with Bess and George, thinking Felix might return there. Bess and George get tired and fall asleep, but Nancy keeps watch and confronts Felix when he shows up. She screams to alert Bess and George, and Carson and Ned charge up the driveway at "the psychological moment" to nab Felix. Our heroes take Felix to the Maplecroft Inn since it's so late at night, and the next day force him to go to the jail to exonerate Joe Swenson for arson (and murder, since Felix was presumed dead in the explosion but they never say murder). Felix admits that the fire started because there was a gas leak in the house and he lit a cigar, but since that was an accident and there's no hard proof that Felix cheated all those people out of vast sums of money, he's not under arrest. Nancy tells Carson that she has the diary, and other people start coming out of the woodwork saying that Felix had swindled them too. Nancy goes back to the Maplecroft Inn to confront Felix and tells him that now she *does* have proof of his unscrupulous business dealings and she convinces him to repay everyone or else they'd bring a court case against him. He writes out all the checks while his wife shrieks in the background; they move to a tiny house in California, can't make any friends, and are never heard from again.
Meanwhile, Nancy holds a "creditors party" at her house and passes out all the checks to the people Felix had swindled. Joe Swenson not only retained his job at Mr. Weston's factory, he got a big promotion. The Swensons gift Nancy, Bess, and George with new purses and Ned gets a new wallet; Nancy also gets the signet ring that Ned had found.
Notes:
So at the very beginning of the book, Nancy witnesses Joe Swenson literally fleeing from the scene of a possible crime but decides from a split-second look at his face that he's not guilty. Two minutes later, she sees Ned hopping in her car and immediately thinks he's stealing it despite how nice he looks. Come on, Nancy, if you're going to make snap judgments at least be consistent! Ned is described as 18 or 19 (remember, in the OTs Nancy is 16), with dark slightly curly hair and "whimsical and friendly" eyes. I remember liking Ned as a kid, so I'm interested to see what I think of him on this read-through. He keeps turning up wherever Nancy is in this book which could edge into stalker behavior, but this is a kids' book. Nancy likes him even if she doesn't want to show it; when Ned comes over the first time to give her the ring he found, she wheedles Hannah into serving cake and ice cream and asks her to put on a pretty apron and cap. Bess, George, and even Carson tease Nancy about her new beau which is kinda cute.
Nancy had planned to ask a Swedish baker, Oscar Peterson, to translate the diary, but that never happens in this book. Joe himself tells her what he had written down, and she uses the diary as leverage against Foxy Felix at the end of the book. Nancy decides not to give the diary to the police because she thinks they're high-handed and that she can do the investigation better than they can; she even tries to get Joe away from the detectives when she knows they're out to arrest him, so she could have been arrested for obstruction. Nancy does crime but never gets in trouble for it. Also they have to face a tribunal right after Joe is arrested?? I know this is well before Miranda rights but Nancy knows that they can refuse to speak until they have a lawyer present AND the girls are all underage, they should not even be questioned without a parent there!
Near the end of the book, when the Raybolts are both staying at the inn, they're in suite 305. That's the same number of the office that was mentioned over and over in The Secret of Red Gate Farm. I'm on the lookout for more 305 references.
Nancy's Knockout Tally, OT Edition:
Nancy stays conscious for the whole book, so the cumulative tally remains:
Blunt force trauma: 2
Near suffocation: 1
Nancy Drew, Fashion Model:
Nancy is wearing a "sports frock" when the mansion explodes, so I am imagining a tennis skirt but that's probably not right for 1932. Back at home, she wears a dressing robe and dainty black and gold slippers that she kicks off in glee after talking to Ned on the phone for the first time (aww cute). When Ned comes over to the house the first time, she puts on a flowered crepe gown and heels so clearly she wants to look extra pretty. While she's running around town, she wears a beret, and for the country club dance she dons a flame-colored chiffon gown with black slippers. When it's rainy, she wears a red slicker and a "knock-about" hat and I need to look up what that means.
Cooking with Hannah:
Hannah packed the picnic that the girls eat at the beginning of the book but we don't get to find out specifics of what she made. Hannah makes a cake at Nancy's request for cake and ice cream when Ned comes over. Nancy spends a lot of time driving back and forth between River Heights, Mapleton, Sandy Creek (where the Swensons live), and Stanford so she eats at a lot of tearooms and inns instead of home cooking by Hannah.
The book on the left was given to Maxine by her parents, and sometime later came into the possession of Brenda and now it's mine. The other one only has my name in it.
Case file/Notes:
Like Red Gate Farm, this RT follows the OT pretty closely, with some things a bit condensed and one subplot added. At the start, Nancy speculates that Mrs. Swenson's letters from her husband might have been stolen, particularly if he was sending her money orders and he's been gone for a month. Later, instead of going to a country club dance with Bess and George, she attends a dinner party with Ned and meets his fraternity brother Phil Roberts, whose father happens to be the Stanford postmaster. She goes to talk to the postmaster the next day and devises a sting operation to see if a money order actually goes out or if it's stolen. Sure enough, the money order clerk was stealing and had accomplices cashing the money orders in other towns.
In the RT, Carson has a client who was swindled by Foxy Felix, so he has a more vested interest in finding Felix so his client can sue. When Ned brings Nancy the ring he found, it has a D in it, which they later learn is for Dahl, which was Joe's mother's maiden name (and also Mrs. Swenson's maiden name, which seems like a really weird detail to include and makes me think of a Gilmore Girls episode). Joe is working at Mr. Weston's factory under the last name Dahl. In this version, Nancy recognizes the language in the diary as Swedish because she had a Swedish schoolmate. Hannah is the one who reminds Nancy of Oscar Peterson the Swedish baker, and in this version Nancy does have him translate the diary for her (after he infodumps about famous people who kept diaries in the past). The clue in the diary is that Joe wrote about how Foxy Felix had a secret hiding place in his house, and that's why Nancy thinks Felix going to return to the ruins of the mansion.
Happily for Felix, the hiding place was in the cellar and thus not destroyed in the explosion, so when he returns to the mansion late at night he's able to open the safe and starts to burn papers until Nancy stops him. She later hands those papers over to the police and in this version they do press charges against Felix. The Raybolts in this book are in collusion to commit insurance fraud (OT Mrs. Raybolt thought Felix was actually dead, he was going to tell her later; RT Mrs. Raybolt was in on it from the jump) and Felix had intentionally rigged the explosion but had to detonate it sooner than he intended when Joe showed up for their appointment early.
Nancy's Knockout Tally, RT Edition:
She managed to stay conscious for two books in a row (way to go, Nancy!) so we're still at 3
Nancy's Skills:
In the OT, she practices piano and sews while she's waiting for the weather to clear so she can go back to Stanford to look for Joe. In the RT, she's the one who devises the scheme to catch the thieves at the post office.
Nancy Drew, Fashion Model:
She still has her dressing robe and dainty black and gold slippers. Nancy wears a flowered dress with high heels, and for the dinner party with Ned she dons a pale green chiffon dress with gold evening shoes and a white wrap. The OT actually has more outfits described than this one, which I think is a first.
Cooking with Hannah:
Hannah makes blueberry muffins, and later makes tea that Nancy is too distracted to drink.
Nancy's Mysterious Souvenir:
Nancy, Bess, and George all get purses, Ned gets a wallet, and Nancy gets the signet ring.
Rating:
Three and a half stars for both. It's fine, just not my favorite, though now that Ned has arrived the main gang is all together.
