56 Weeks with Nancy Drew - The Clue of the Broken Locket

Week 11, Book 11

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.

Edition pictured: Revised text (20 chapters, 175 pages)

Cover illustrated by: Rudy Nappi

Revised text publication date: 1965

Original text publication date: 1934

My edition printed: approx. 1985

Ghostwriter: Mildred A. Wirt Benson

Editors: Edna Stratemeyer Squier & Harriet Stratemeyer Adams

Revised by: Harriet Stratemeyer Adams & Grace Grote

Setting: River Heights & Misty Lake in Maryland

Originally published in 1934, I will be reviewing the revised text edition of The Clue of the Broken Locket, published in 1965 and pictured above. 

Nancy Drew’s lawyer father, Carson, asks Nancy to go to Misty Lake to give a young woman, Cecily Curtis, the keys to a summer cottage owned by one of his clients. Carson also tasks her with finding out what has frightened Henry Winch, the man who was supposed to hand over the keys (1-2). The next day, Nancy and her friends, Bess and George, are on their way to Maryland. Before they reach Misty Lake, they stop for an early supper and come across a man, who looks strangely familiar, and a red-haired woman having an argument about a law suit and an iron bird (7-8). After supper, Nancy and friends have an unfortunate occurrence with a rickety bridge while looking for a missing earring, which involves the red-haired woman. Although, she assures them she isn’t hurt, the woman seems upset, but before they can find out why, she rushes off (9-11).

When they arrive at Misty Lake the owner of the guest house where they plan to stay tells them all about Henry Winch’s experience of seeing the apparition of a phantom launch, and the history behind the long ago boating accident that drowned everyone on board (14-15).

Once at the cottage, Nancy runs into the red-headed woman from earlier, but strangely, the woman flees. Thinking the woman might be Cecily Curtis, Nancy calls after her to asks. But instead of answering, the frightened woman says, “You can’t stop me from getting the babies!” (19) before disappearing into the woods.

Cecily Curtis still hasn’t shown up to get the key, so the young women decide to stay the night. When Cecily does arrive, she is the same red-haired woman from earlier. But apparently her and the woman in the woods are not the same person, they just look remarkably alike (23-25). 

Finding out that Nancy, Bess, and George had been planning to stay the night before she showed up, she asks them to stay and keep her company. Nancy feels unsettled and gets impression Cecily feels similarly (30). What with mistaking a loon call for a screaming woman and Cecily going out in the middle of the night, and Nancy discovering her unconscious with a large bump on her head, by morning the group is chatting like old friends and Cecily tells them all about an iron bird, a broken locket, and Pudding Stone Lake (36-38). She even talks about being engaged to pop singer, Niko Van Dyke, and the law suit regarding royalties owed him by record company (38-39).

With a strange humming noise that they can’t discover the source of, a first hand sighting of the phantom launch, and neighbours that run hot and cold, but mostly cold, the mysteries around Misty Lake begin to stack up. Good thing Nancy is the queen of multitasking!

In this one, Nancy connects a young woman to her relatives, discovers an ancestral fortune that his been hidden since the American Civil War, and stops a gang who pirate pop records and who make a sideline of kidnapping. 

Nancy still finds time in her schedule to buy groceries, drive into town (many times), hang out at the soda shop, practice first aid, buy a record, call it an early night, let her imagination run away with her, rent a canoe, poke around an old house, get trapped on a roof, tidy the cottage, take the canoe out twice, and nearly go down with the ship the second time (sabotage!), chase a prowler, call the boys, take a hike, go for a swim, drive to Baltimore, visit a record label, go to see the Flying Dutchmen play a show, hang out at a soda shop some more, lounge by the fire with the boys, lug the world’s heaviest flamingo home, get scolded by a police chief, feel crushed, buck up, get commended by the police for her excellent detective work (nice one, Nancy), and receive an apology from the police (sweet justice!), eat 19 meals, and 6 snacks, including two rounds of ice cream, cookies and bottles of soda.

Time of year

No detective work necessary to find out what time of year this one is set. Carson Drew tells us.

    Her father explained that since it was the middle of September, there would probably be few vacationers at the lake. “I can’t imaging why Cecily Curtis want to say there. If you meet her, Nancy perhaps you can find out.” (2)

We don’t get much seasonal description in this one. I would have liked a bit about the leaves starting to change and more about the chill air at night, though we do get a bit of that when Nancy takes an unexpected dim in the lake at night. There is a brief description of the river and garden around the Old Mill restaurant that Nancy, Bess, and George stop at on their drive to Misty Lake.

    There was a profusion of many colors and varieties of chrysanthemums, late-blooming roses, and petunias. A path through the center of the garden led directly to a rustic white-painted bridge over a rushing stream. (6-7) 

 

We also know that Ned, Burt, and Dave are able to go to Baltimore to see Niko’s performance “since their college term had not yet started” (85).

Timeline

The action takes place over 10 days. What typically happens in these books is that one of the last days tends to be unusually long. In this one, it’s the ninth day, which straddles five chapters and is very action packed. 

Reading this book as a child

I feel compelled to explain why the edition of this book that I have photographed looks so tattered. It’s the same copy I had as a child and it was handed down to me from a family friend. As I’m sure you have gathered by now, I really loved my Nancy Drew books, and I loved them hard! A few months ago when I was still toying with the idea of reading the first 56 books in this series in as many weeks, I picked this one up off the shelf to read. A handmade bookmark was tucked inside, coloured by me and my niece. Speaking of colouring and drawing, Nancy Drews made for the perfect colouring board. While I had the presence of mind not to colour over the edges of a page when using the book cover as a hard surface, the endpapers didn’t receive the same level of care, judging from the speckles of pencil crayon inside.

The funny thing is, I have a second copy of this title that is a little older than this one. But that one looks equally battered. It makes me think that The Clue of the Broken Locket was a popular title. I loved any Nancy Drew I owned and reread them often, but I especially liked the cover of this one. Three friends wading in the water to investigate a wardrobe. They are wearing suitable attire, jeans and blouses, and its looks as though the shoes they are holding could be canvas. But it was the colours of the artwork that really pleased me. I liked that every girl had their own colour. Although, it did bother me that Nancy’s shoes weren’t yellow to match her top when the other girls’ shoes and tops were the same colour.

I was enthralled with secret passages, hidden treasure, and anything that had a disguised compartment to conceal treasures. A locket seemed like a treasure in itself, and it being something that could carry a photo of a loved one or a secret message, gave me a thrill. 

More of the same, only different

The other thing about this book that captured my imagination isn’t specific to this title, but can be found in a lot of Nancy Drew books. This is a mystery revolving around a lake. We saw a trip to the lake in The Secret of the Old Clock, The Bungalow Mystery, Nancy and her friends visit a swimming hole in The Secret at Red Gate Farm, and a river is made heavy use of in The Mystery at Lilac Inn. There is so much scope in a setting like this. In The Clue of the Broken Locket, there are the woods that surround the lake, the mysterious house with the illuminated bull’s-eye window that shines across the water, and of course there is the water that is put to optimum use by Nancy going out in the canoe, finding a rowboat banked in the mud and hidden by reeds, and holds an important clue. Of course, without a body of water, we wouldn’t have the phantom launch. This book hangs on Henry Winch’s sighting of the ghostly vessel and his reaction to it. Nancy wouldn’t have been sent to Misty Lake by her father, and we wouldn’t have this mystery without a watery setting of some sort.

Of course, lakes are by no means the only reoccurring aspect in this series. Another popular one is mistaken identity. In The Mystery at Lilac Inn, it’s Nancy with the doppelgänger, whereas in this book, it is Cecily Curtis and the frightened woman in the woods. The startling similarity between the two women puts Nancy and the reader on guard. 

    The girl from the White Mill restaurant again! But this time she was not wearing the raincoat and scarf. She had on the same outfit they had seen at the restaurant, and was lugging two suitcases.

    "Oh, hello!" she said pleasantly. "Well, this is a nice surprise! Are you vacationing here?" Nancy and George were confounded. Hadn't the newcomer recognized them? And why had she changed her clothes again?

    "Are you Cecily Curtis?" Nancy asked as the girls hastened to help her.

    "Yes, I am. But how did you know?" 

    Nancy, though bewildered, decided to ask no questions, but she did notice the girl was not yet wearing a wedding ring. She introduced herself and George. "Mr. Winch is out of town, so we came here with the key to open the cottage for you." (23-24)

Bess isn’t as tactful as Nancy, which only throws further suspicion on Cecily.

    By this time the three had entered the cottage.

    At once Bess exclaimed, "I'm so glad you got here, Cecily! We were terribly worried. Why didn't you stay the first time you came?"

    Cecily looked at her blankly. "The first time? I haven't been here before."

    It was Bess's turn to look perplexed. "You mean you weren't up in the woods on your way here a few hours ago?"

    Cecily shook her head. "If you thought you saw me, I must have a double in the vicinity." She changed the subject. "I had an awful time getting to this cottage. A bus brought me to Misty Lake village from Baltimore, and I tried to get a taxi to bring me here. Nobody wanted to, but finally one man agreed to drive me as far as the end of the lane. I had to lug these bags and my cat all the rest of the way." (24-25)

Is Cecily’s account of her actions truthful, or was she lurking in the woods by the cottage? What begins by adding confusion to the case is turned on its head when Nancy uses Cecily’s similarity to the other red-headed woman to fool the woman’s suspected kidnappers. 

Suddenly Nancy asked, "Who is that red-haired girl down on the beach? Do you know her?" 

The question had an electrifying effect on the Driscolls. They rushed to the window and looked out over the bluff. Cecily was in plain sight below.

Now she turned as if heading for the misty end of the lake. With a muttered excuse, Karl Driscoll fairly ran into the kitchen. The girls dared not follow, but they heard a door close softly and footsteps pounding down the cellar stairs.

[…]

With difficulty, Nancy kept calm. She was sure her ruse had worked! The other red-haired girl was being held in the house and the Driscolls thought she had escaped!

"Now to hunt for the prisoner!" Nancy thought. (140)

They don’t get the opportunity to search the house right away, but using the similarity between the two red-headed women to advantage Nancy confirms her suspicions that the woman is being held hostage in the house.

Come to think of it, in The Mystery at Lilac Inn Nancy uses the similarity between herself and the woman impersonating her to advantage too. Nancy impersonates the woman, which helps her gain insider access to the woman’s nefarious scheme. Perhaps a more appropriate title for this section would have been, simply, "More of the same"!

Favourite quotation

Since I spent some time earlier in this post reminiscing, I’ve selected a passage that I know I would have gotten a kick out of as a child. And as my sense of humour hasn’t changed much over the years, I still love this snippet of dialogue as in it Nancy uses one of my favourite words in the Nancy Drew lexicon.

    “And now, about that other red-haired girl. I have two completely opposite ideas about her. One is that she is in cahoots with the Driscolls in some underhanded scheme; the other is that she’s their prisoner or is somehow in their power.” (110)

Nancy Drew loves using the word cahoots, and so do I!