Week 6, Book 6
Welcome to the 56 Weeks with Nancy Drew series! If you are new here, welcome. You can find my introductory post to this series here. Please note I will be including plot spoilers in this review series. I explain my reasoning at the start of this post. I should add that my discussion of The Secret of Red Gate Farm is a two-parter. Once Part Two goes live, you will be able to find a link to it here.
Edition pictured: Revised text (20 chapters, 178 pages)
Cover illustrated by: Bill Gillies
Revised text publication date: 1961
Original text publication date: 1931
My edition printed: approx. 1973
Ghostwriter: Mildred A. Wirt Benson
Editors: Edna Stratemeyer Squier & Harriet Stratemeyer Adams
Revised by: Lynn Ealer
Setting: River Heights, Riverside Heights (a few miles away from River Heights) & Red Gate Farm (about 10 miles from Round Valley)
Originally published in 1931 and written by Mildred Wirt, I will be reviewing the revised text edition of The Secret of Red Gate Farm, published in 1961 and pictured above.
This one opens with Nancy Drew and her friends, Bess Marvin and George Fayne, rushing to catch their train after a day of shopping. On the way, they discuss how the clerk in the perfume shop seemed reluctant to sell a bottle of Blue Jade perfume to Bess (1). Always on the lookout for a new mystery to solve, Nancy suspects the woman deliberately raised the price of the perfume (2). Bess, eager to smell her new perfume, opens the bottle, accidentally dousing Nancy in the stuff. Then one of their fellow passengers faints (6) and while Nancy gets the woman some water, a man approaches her. “Any word from the Chief?” Seeing Nancy’s bewildered expression he apologizes, “But that perfume — Well, never mind!” (8)
The fainting woman, whose name is Jo, is on the way to the city to find a job. Her grandmother is about to lose her farm if they can’t come up with some money (12). Being the kind person she is, Nancy drives Jo to her job interview. At the office building, Nancy overhears a suspicious phone call. The man explains he was just getting stock market quotations (18). One peek at the note the man was making, is enough to tell Nancy he was lying. She copies down the note and the mystery takes off from there (19).
This one takes Nancy, Bess, and George with their new friend Jo into the countryside to uncover the mystery at Red Gate Farm. Nancy cracks a code, goes undercover with a nature cult, and solves one of the “most baffling cases […] the United States Government has ever had” (174) and that coming from an agent of the Secret Service. Not bad, Nancy! She still has time to get caught in a storm, get her car stuck, get it unstuck, do a grocery run, whip up some costumes, learn to milk a cow, offer first aid to three people, hunt down a runaway cow, catch some rays down at the local swimming hole, get accused of using counterfeit money, get rescued not once, but twice, eat seventeen meals, a snack, one chocolate nut sundae topped with whipped cream, and use the word “phony” at least four times (64, 88, 106, 117). Which, by the way, is four times too many. Unless you are in fact reading The Catcher in the Rye aloud.
Interesting physical characteristics
I noticed something interesting about the edition that I have, which differs from most of the other revised text editions I own. On the copyright page, opposite the table of contents page, is this notice.
This new story for today’s readers is based on the original of the same title.
I assume they stopped printing this sometime in 1973, because I have two copies of The Hidden Staircase, which have The Double Jinx Mystery followed by The Nancy Drew Cookbook listed on the back cover, both of which were first published in 1973, one copy has the above notice on the same page, the other copy does not. Incidentally, the one that has the notice is different from my other Nancy Drew books in that it has brick red ink on the top page edges, while all the rest are either a midnight blue or have no ink mark at all. Now, I am so happy that I kept both, despite my husband’s suggestion that I only keep one copy of each of the 56 titles. Not that I would ever accept such bad advice!
The other thing that is special about this book is that it is the first one I have shared with cover art by Bill Gillies. Growing up, I only had the Rudy Nappi covers, so while the Bill Gillies depiction is not the face of Nancy as I imagine her, I do think his covers have a certain something. When I look at the Bill Gillies cover I think Nancy has an old Hollywood glamour about her and a certain sophistication that the slightly more pared down version of Nancy lacks. I love the loser curled hair and her clothes have a more feminine, if less practical look about them.
One cover in particular, The Ringmaster’s Secret, reminds me of Grace Kelly. Surprisingly, this artwork was done by Rudy Nappi and dates from the 1953 hardbacks with wraparound dust wrappers. The pictorial hardcover with this artwork was in print from 1962, though my edition likely dates from 1973, the last year this cover was in print. In others, like this one, I think Nancy has a whisper of Marilyn Monroe about her. Again, this is not how I imagine Nancy to look, but it is fun to see how different artists have imagined her for the various titles and for the time in which the cover was made.
Time of year
We have Bess to thank for letting us know what time of year it is. At the start of the book when the friends rush to the train station after their shopping trip, she exclaims,
“And this would be one of July’s hottest days!” (2)
Funny how Nancy’s eighteenth year seems to have so many summers. I guess, summers do seem longer and more frequent when you’re that age, don’t they?
Timeline
Jokes aside, the timeline in this book differs from the other titles thus far in this series. This one is set over a summer. In The Secret at Shadow Ranch, Nancy and her friends were supposed to be visiting Shadow Ranch for the summer and they may have done, but the mystery is set during the first eight days of that trip. With this book we get seven consecutive days, then an indeterminate amount of time passes, followed by another eight days, then another week goes by and the conclusion comes the week after that when Nancy’s father comes to visit.
There are still some days when way too many events to be believable are crammed in, specifically near the climax. But overall, I think this book does a better job at maintaining a believable timeline. There is one day when Nancy stays home and works on the code and there are other days when the girls don’t do much more than watch the hillside for cult members who fail to make an appearance. That said, this book still manages to feel pacy with Nancy gathering clues throughout the book instead of having all of the big reveals at the end, which was one of the problems I had with The Mystery at Lilac Inn.
I remember this one!
I’ve been getting the most lovely comments on my #56WeekswithNancyDrew Instagram posts. A few people have mentioned their fond memories of first picking up such and such a title. These comments warm my heart. They also have made me feel a bit jealous! All of the books I have read so far for this project have been rereads, but not one of them could I remember reading for the first time. I wondered if it was because these books feel so much a part of me. I read and reread the same titles over and over again to the point that I thought I had obliterated any memory of my first impressions.
My experience with The Secret of Red Gate Farm has been different. At one point I teared up because the memory of my having read a certain passage for the first time was so vivid it was as though I could reach through the layers of time and grab ahold of it. It was very odd. And now, such as memories are, I cannot capture that same experience again. When I think back, I am only recreating the memory and that feeling of sitting in my childhood bedroom with the sun coming through the windows and solving the mystery alongside Nancy and her friends is slipping beyond my grasp.
In part two, I will (mostly) be putting nostalgia aside while attempting to answer the question: What is it that makes this book different from the others? I hope you will join me tomorrow!
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