Tag: Rick Brant

U Got the Look

This week, The CW debuted a new version of Nancy Drew. I sort of watched it Thursday night, and will probably watch again so I can pay better attention. It’s definitely a reboot, with a lot of changes–Nancy’s mom died much later in her life, for example, and there’s no Bess. The story is also set in Horseshoe Bay rather than River Heights, and Nancy has hung up her sleuthing cap since her mother’s death and is now working as a waitress in a diner. George Fayne isn’t a close friend but now her boss, and they don’t get along–I expect that to change. Ned Nickerson is not white–a change I liked a lot–and prefers to go by Nick. It’s also a bit more in the vein of Riverdale than the classic Nancy Drew stories, but let’s face it–the real Nancy as originally written is kind of insufferable–bit more on that later.

I’m also sure these changes will enrage the Nancy Drew fanbase–anything other than the way she was originally written by a lot of ghostwriters generally sets them off. I am not such a purist–I recognize that changes have to be made for a different medium, for one thing, and for another–as I said earlier, Nancy was a bit insufferable as originally written.

I did enjoy the movie a few years ago with Emma Roberts (it might be the only time I’ve ever actually enjoyed an Emma Roberts performance, frankly); a lot was changed from the books to the series.

Nancy Drew and I go back to my fifth grade year at Eli Whitney Elementary in Chicago. I was already reading as many mysteries as I could get my hands on–those Scholastic Book Fairs were my favorite part of school–and I was checking out as many mysteries from the library as I could. (This was also the period of time when I discovered Phyllis Whitney’s mysteries for children; the first I read was The Secret of the Tiger’s Eye.) My fifth grade teacher had a big table in the back of the room with books for kids on them; we were on the honor system. We could borrow a book but we were supposed to return it when we finished reading it. The first day of school I wandered back there and looked at the books on the table; the first title to jump out at me was The Secret of Red Gate Farm. Above the title was NANCY DREW MYSTERY SERIES, and on the cover was a picture of a girl with wavy blonde hair, wearing a sweater and a long skirt, hiding behind a tree and looking, her mouth wide open in shock, fear or surprise, staring at the entrance to a cave  as some strangely robed figures entered it. I took it back to my desk, and started reading it.

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“That Oriental-looking clerk in the perfume shop certainly acted mysterious, ” Bess Marvin declared, as she and her two friends ended their shopping trip and hurried down the street to the railroad station.

“Yes,” Nancy Drew answered thoughtfully. “I wonder why she didn’t want you to buy that bottle of Blue Jade?”

“The price would have discouraged me,” spoke up Bess’ cousin, dark-haired George Fayne. Her boyish name fitted her slim build and straight-forward, breezy manner. “Twenty dollars an ounce!”

“Oriental-looking.”

Sigh. The great irony is that both the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series were rewritten and revised to remove racist stereotypes and language…

Anyway, The Secret of Red Gate Farm enthralled me, as Nancy and her friends tried to help a young girl and her grandmother save Red Gate Farm from mortgage foreclosure while also trying to expose a ring of counterfeiters. There was a list of intriguing-sounding Nancy Drew titles on the back of the book, and back on the table in my fifth grade classroom there were three more titles: The Mystery at Lilac Inn, The Haunted Showboat, and The Clue of the Leaning Chimney. As I scoped around, there was another series novel, but it wasn’t Nancy Drew; it was the Dana Girls The Secret of the Old Well, allegedly written by the same person: Carolyn Keene.

Nancy Drew introduced me to the world of Grosset & Dunlap series–which were actually all produced, for the most part, by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. I eventually found myself reading–and collecting–many of those series, including the Hardy Boys, Dana Girls, Ken Holt, Rick Brant, Biff Brewster, Chip Hilton, and Judy Bolton, among others–I also wound up collecting Trixie Belden and the Three Investigators, too.

I always wanted to write a series like these when I was a kid; I even came up with a list of about forty titles I could use. I wrote one, actually, when I was in the fifth grade–called The Secret of the Haunted Mansion–which, to the best of my recollection, might be the first fiction I ever wrote; alas, it is lost in the mists of time. Periodically, I come back to the thought of writing such a series, but I don’t know that there’s a market for them anymore. Most of the series have gone out of print, with only Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, as far as I know, still available; Trixie Belden might be but I’m not sure. I still collect the books–it really pleases my OCD to have the series completed. I’m still missing a few from some of the harder to find series–like Biff Brewster and Ken Holt, and I do think I am missing a couple of Judy Boltons and Dana Girls as well–but I’ve stopped scouring eBay over the last few years because, well, money.

But at some point, I imagine I will go back and try to complete the series.

I do credit these series with a lot of my devotion to the world of crime and crime writing; while I always loved mysteries, it’s entirely possible I would have moved on to something else had I not discovered, and become addicted, to these series. These series led me eventually to Agatha Christie, Mary Stewart, Charlotte Armstrong, and Ellery Queen; and those authors eventually led me to others…and wanting to write crime fiction of my own.

So, thank you, Nancy Drew. It’s kind of your fault.

I’ll Be There

Thursday–the last full day of work for me this week; Fridays I only work half-days. The weekend looms on the horizon, and in theory, my life should be settling down into a normal routine next week at the day job after weeks of never being completely certain what I would be working the next day. For someone who is an utter control freak about time and scheduling, this has been torturous for me. For some reason I crave structure; I have to be at the office at this time, I can go to the grocery store here and then I can come home and spend this time writing and this time cleaning and this time watching television, relaxing.

And yet I also don’t like being caught in a routine, a rut, if you will.

I am nothing if not a writhing mass of contradictions.

But, like with audiobooks, an old dog can learn a new trick every now and then.

I am currently rereading Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?, which I originally read in the 1970’s. The 1970’s was, for some reason–probably all the upheaval of that decade and attempts to recover from the social unrest of the previous decade–a decade of weird conspiracy theory and even more peculiar science; the Bermuda Triangle, UFO’s, Area 54, ancient aliens, etc. I used to read a lot of these books, mainly because they were interesting, even though there were frequently enormous gaps and huge leaps of logic required to follow the authorial reasoning to the points they were trying to make in those days; and even as a teenager I often spotted these logistical flaws. But the concept behind Chariots of the Gods? was one that I was interested in, and while von Däniken’s writing style (in fairness, the book was written in German and translated) left something to be desired, one thing I took away from the book in the first place was the realization that exclamation points used in non-fiction usually means most of the reasoning is bullshit.

(I also loved the movie Stargate, which can probably be directly traced back to reading Chariots of the Gods?)

I kind of love these theories, though, even as I recognized they are problematic. A lot of human history isn’t recorded, and so we are left, for the most part, to wonder about the origins and rise of Egyptian civilization, or what life was like in Ur, or how the idea for written communication began or where it came from, and so forth. I also remember one of the reasons I was partly drawn into the whole Chariots of the Gods? things in the first place was because one of the “sites” he tried to explain away as being designed for ancient astronauts were the strange lines on the plan of Nazca, in Peru–which I had read about in the forty-fourth Nancy Drew mystery, The Clue in the Crossword Cipher. (In retrospect, I am also horribly disappointed neither Nancy or the Hardy Boys–in the original series–never went to Egypt; both Rick Brant and Biff Brewster did, in The Egyptian Cat Mystery and Egyptian Scarab Mystery, respectively.)

But, as I said, even I, a relatively uneducated and unformed preteen, could spot fallacies in logic and reasoning in the book. It was made into a TV special, In Search of Ancient Astronauts, and then a feature film with the same name as the book. Von Däniken wrote several more books–turning it into a virtual cottage industry–but I never read beyond the first.

I was reminded of this recently when I came across an article on Von Däniken’s racism, and that his theories were based in racism (you can read it here), and as I read through the piece, nodding, I was also amazed at how it never occurred to me that essentially, Von Däniken’s theories were predicated on racism and asserting white supremacy by erasing the historical accomplishments of ancient, non-white civilizations. So, I checked the book out of the library to reread it and look for the racial coding–plus, to see if there are as many irrational and illogical leaps made as I remember.

And I also can’t stop thinking about the Bermuda Triangle and other conspiracy theories that were huge in the 1970’s…and wondering why the 1970’s was such a fertile ground for pseudoscience.

And now, back to the spice mines.

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