As you can see by checking the Book Review page, my daughter and I have a shared appreciation of Nancy Drew books. Growing up, I was lucky enough to have the luxury of access to many books in my home, and the pleasure of weekly visits to the local library. One of the ways books were acquired at home was through mail order book clubs. We received Dr. Seuss, Easy Readers, Happy Hollisters, The Bobbsey Twins, and Nancy Drew. This started my life-long interest in Nancy Drew books.
I still read the classic Nancy Drew books to this day. I’m aging myself by noting that there were 43 books at the time, the last title being The Mystery of the 99 Steps. Thirteen more yellow, hardcover books followed. One of my sisters was actually the lucky recipient of the books, but how I looked forward to her getting one of those yellow-backed books in the mail! Of course, I had to wait for her to finish the book before I could read it, but it was worth it. Then, when I was in the sixth grade, there came the fateful day that our school decided to start a library and my parents generously donated many of our books to it, including our Nancy Drews. As years went by I often regretted their kindhearted decision, but the Nancy Drews were the books I missed the most. The result was, when I got my first full-time job, I would go to the bookstore every week and buy a Nancy Drew book.I would have been satisfied with the collection at that point except, unknown to me, in the interim the publishers had decided that some of the books needed an update. Truth be told, older books did show the historical reality of how some people were unfairly perceived in an unflattering way. There are many books of my childhood that portrayed stereotypical, though usually kind, characters who did need to be revised, but I don’t recall ever judging people by characters in books. I knew the difference between fact and fiction. Revisions of characters only would not have mattered to me, but these were revisions of whole stories, and that set me on the path to find the Nancy Drew stories I remembered.
From 1959 to 1979 the books were revised to update the stories. I originally read the revised edition on books 1 to 3 and have since read the originals. There are differences, although the stories seemed to retain a lot of the original plot. However, for some books the revisions changed the whole plot with glaringly obvious differences. For instance, in book 5, The Secret At Shadow Ranch, (the book that introduces cousins Bess Marvin and George Fayne), Nancy travels to a ranch in Arizona where the cousins’ aunt attempts to keep up a ranch she received as payment of a debt, and uncovers the mystery behind why an old mountain woman is guardian of a beautiful young girl. In the revised edition the title is changed to The Secret of Shadow Ranch, The ranch is in danger of being shut down, and is threatened by a phantom horse that seems to bring destruction with it each time it appears.
For book 11, The Clue of the Broken Locket, the original story centers around two adoptive parents who are unsuitable for the caring of baby twins so Nancy sets out to search for the rightful birth mother with the help of a broken locket. In the revised edition the story centers around two separated cousins (one of which has two twin children that are missing), and a mysterious lodge that seems to harbor many secrets. The stories are completely different.
In book 18, The Mystery at the Moss Covered Mansion, the story changed so much that, as with book 5, they even revised the title to The Mystery of the Moss Covered Mansion, since not much of the investigation takes place at the mansion. In the original story Nancy helps her father with a murder investigation, locating an heiress, exposing an impostor, and finding the cause of strange screams at the mansion. In the revised edition, a friend of Nancy’s father has been charged with sending a truck loaded with explosive oranges into the Space Center at Cape Kennedy. Along with the explosive oranges there are other silly elements to the story such as Nancy nearly dying by falling in a pool of boiling water, and a spy story ending.
These revisions continue through book 34, so you may choose to read both versions of every book as you could be reading two completely different stories. The original versions will have 25 chapters, the revisions have only 20. You may also notice that Nancy is younger and feistier in the original books!
For years now I have haunted antique stores, used bookstores, and library book sales searching for the yellow books of my youth. I managed to find many different editions of the books and have a nice little collection now. In the early 2000s, they re-issued some of the original stories, while I was working at a bookstore, and I was able to purchase a couple of those. Personally, I feel that some of the books that were published in the 1970s had more outlandish plots to them and lost the appeal of the original Nancy Drew books, but that’s just my opinion. If you also remember Nancy Drew with fondness and are interested in distinguishing the differences in book editions, this is a great resource to check out http://www.nancydrewsleuth.com.
I hope all my fellow Nancy Drew fans enjoyed this little bit of Nancy news.
— Denise Runyan
