Blue-Footed Musings

I read a few Nancy Drew books earlier this year. One was The Mystery of the Brass-Bound Trunk (#17). I bought it at an antique store in Vermont for $3. It’s not a perfect copy. The cover’s a little stained, and there are marks on the inside covers from past owners, one of whom was a girl named Faye. Faye liked to practice writing her name in cursive, and she owned a red marker with which she added a dash of color to the world. I don’t mind those kinds of marks in books–they simply speak of the book’s history–and I hope Faye has done (or did) well in life.

The basic plot: Nancy is getting ready for a cruise to Buenos Aires with a school group, when suddenly a wealthy but unpleasant woman shows up at Nancy’s house demanding that Nancy withdraw from the tour. The woman claims that she doesn’t want the notorious sleuth associating with her well-bred daughter, and she has the clout to make trouble for the schoolmistress if Nancy goes on the trip. So Nancy makes a compromise. She agrees not to travel with the group, but she and her friends George and Bess still go to Buenos Aires, and they voyage on the same ship. Someone else on the ship has a brass-bound trunk marked with the initials N.D., just like Nancy’s, and this leads to some confusion. Later, in Buenos Aires, Nancy’s trunk gets stolen, and she sets to work tracking it down. The nogoodniks who nicked her stuff had better watch out!

It wasn’t a very good story (I only give it a B grade), but I love reading Nancy Drew mysteries. They’re exciting, and they hearken to simpler times. But, when reading them as an adult, you can’t help but see them through the lens of modern times. Nancy throws herself into harm’s way, and she brazenly makes demands of authority figures that, by anyone else, would be laughed off or criticized, but she gets away with it all, thanks to her good looks, money, and connections. It would be cringe-worthy were it not part of the charm. Nancy can do anything, have anything, go anywhere. She’s smart, happy, successful, and surrounded by supportive people who do everything she asks. Who wouldn’t want to be Nancy Drew?

Nancy Drew books don’t have print dates on them, so it’s hard to tell exactly how old they are. This book has the original copyright date (1940), so I know it’s not one of the later rewrites, and it has that delicious old-book smell. It has the matte yellow cover that means it was printed between 1962 and 1986. Given its general appearance and copyright date, I’d say it’s from the 1960s.

I wondered if it were possible to approximate the print date more closely. Since Wikipedia lists the publication date for each book of the series, I theorized that you could guesstimate the age of a Nancy Drew book using the list of “Books by Carolyn Keene” at the beginning of the book. That seemed reasonable, until I realized that yellow-covered printings have BBCK lists on their back covers, and those lists don’t match the ones inside the books. They have a few more titles on them, suggesting that the inner lists lagged by a few years. So I guess the cover lists are better to use. Anyway, using that method, my copy of The Mystery of the Brass-Bound Trunk can be pegged to 1967 or thereabout.

P.S. When I set out to write this post, I was only going to talk about the story, but I got sucked into the “mystery” of the publication date. That’s what comes from reading Nancy Drew books. They’re like a gateway drug for sleuthing. Next thing you know, you’re looking looking for mysteries and digging up clues all over the place!

My reading pace has been slow, but I finished four books recently. Two of them (Tom’s Midnight Garden and A Bear Called Paddington) are on the BBC’s Top 100 Children’s Books list, bringing my total for that list to 52/100.

Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, A-: Tom is sent to his aunt and uncle’s place because his brother has measles. There’s nowhere for him to play there, and he thinks he’ll be stuck inside the entire time, miserably bored. But then, late at night, the old grandfather clock in the lobby of the apartment building strikes the impossible hour of thirteen while Tom is awake and unable to sleep. He creeps downstairs, where he discovers that the paved area behind the building has been transformed into a large, beautiful garden, which he then explores each night during his stay. I struggled to get into this book. Maybe it was the character of Tom, who was annoying at times, or maybe it was the garden, which didn’t seem particularly exciting (Tom’s means of access to the garden is magical, but the garden itself is not). It got better as it went along, though, and I enjoyed the ending, however predictable. There are many books that are like this: difficult to get into but sad to leave at the end. The older I get, the less willing I am to stick with a book that I’m not enjoying. But one benefit of reading classics is that most of them are classics for good reason, so you know that your patience is likely to be rewarded.

A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond, A+: Mr. and Mrs. Brown are at the train station to pick up their daughter. While there, they find a polite little bear who is alone and has nowhere to go, so they take him home with them and make him part of their family. Paddington, whom they named after the train station, is always getting into trouble, but he’s so sweet and polite that they love him anyway. I had access to the Paddington series as a child and probably read at least some of them, but I didn’t remember any details beyond Paddington’s fondness for marmalade. I’m so glad I read this book now. It’s such a charmer! Recommended.

Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands (Book 2 of the Emily Wilde Series) by Heather Fawcett, A: Emily Wilde is a professor of “dryadology” (the study of fairies and such). In this second book of the series, she travels to an alpine region looking for a “nexus,” a fairy door that goes to multiple places, something which other scholars think is a myth. If anyone can find the nexus, she can, and she has more than scholarship driving her to find it, because the life of her suitor and fellow scholar, Wendell Bambleby, is in danger. A fun mix of fantasy and romance, this book is every bit as enjoyable as the book that preceded it. To give you a hint of the book’s character, here’s how it begins:

The foot would not fit in my briefcase, so I wrapped it in cloth and wrestled it into an old knapsack I sometimes carry with me on expeditions. Surprisingly–or perhaps unsurprisingly, as it is a faerie foot–it is neither dirty nor foul-smelling. It is, of course, long mummified and would probably be mistaken for a goat’s foot by a casual observer, perhaps an unlikely offering excavated from the tomb of some ancient pharaoh. . . .

I gazed at my now-bulging knapsack, feeling entirely ridiculous. Trust me when I say that I would rather not cart a foot around campus with me. But faerie remains, mummified or not, have been known to slip away as the fancy takes them, and I can only assume that feet are particularly inclined to such wanderlust…

Constellation Route by Matthew Olzmann: The poems in this collection are framed as letters, with the post office as a uniting theme. They are intellectual, questioning, not always easily absorbed, but good. I think I would enjoy them more if I could have additional time with them, but the book is borrowed, and I must return it. Here are links to some of the poems that I liked and that are currently available online:

• Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now
• Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America
• Letter to a Bridge Made of Rope