Nancy Drew Mystery Stories: The Secret of the Old Clock

March 29, 2022

In 1930, a publishing company called the Stratemeyer Syndicate, working with Grosset & Dunlap, published a mystery novel featuring Nancy Drew, a teenage girl detective, as its protagonist. Now a best-selling work of children's literature, it is titled The Secret of the Old Clock, and is the first of dozens of novels featuring Nancy, her family, and her friends that make up the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories. While many of the Nancy Drew novels, including The Secret of the Old Clock were re-written and re-released between 1959 and 1975, Special Collections & Archives holds a copy of the 1930 edition of the first book in the series.

The book's title page names Carolyn Keene as its author, but the Stratemeyer Syndicate hired several writers to author the Nancy Drew books, paying them a flat fee. In addition, authors were required to sign a contract in which they gave up any rights to the work, and maintained the fiction that the popular novels were written by a single person named Carolyn Keene. Today we know the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories were written and later revised by over a dozen men and women. We also know Mildred Wirt Benson authored or contributed to 23 of the original 30 Nancy Drew mysteries, including The Secret of the Old Clock.

Modern readers of the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories are most likely to have read the rewritten versions of the novels. In them, Nancy resides in River Heights. She investigates mysteries with her best friends Bess Marvin and George Fayne. At home, she lives with her father Carson Drew, an attorney, and their grandmotherly live-in housekeeper, Hannah Gruen.

The characters and plot of the 1930 edition of The Secret of the Old Clock may be unfamiliar. In the original novel Nancy wants to help relatives of the recently-deceased Josiah Crowley by finding his will, which she believes will give them a claim to his estate. She is partly motivated by altruism, and partly by her dislike of the presumptive heirs who she sees as snobbish and nouveau-riche social climbers. With help along the way from her friend Helen Corning, Nancy learns the will is hidden in an old family clock. She is eventually imprisoned by burglars who stole the clock from the family home, unaware the will is hidden inside. She breaks free and retrieves the clock while the burglars become drunk, an especially egregious offense in the era of prohibition. In this version of the story, Nancy is strong-willed, but also competitive. She behaves charitably toward the impoverished heirs she helps, but is motivated by class and status, taking pleasure in the loss of status visited on the presumptive heirs by her actions.

In 1959 Harriet Adams re-wrote the story. She made several changes to the plot and characters, some because she felt they improved the pace and tone of the story, and others at the publisher's request, including the removal of racial and ethnic stereotypes. The 1959 version of Nancy is more sedate and refined than the previous iteration of the character. She has an extensive wardrobe and drives a convertible. Helen Corning is an older character who disappears from the series entirely a few books later, when Bess and George are introduced. Nancy's home life with her father Carson and housekeeper Hannah is more robustly described.

In this version, a few members of the still-living Josiah Crowley's family have imprisoned the elderly man, not letting him see anyone. When he dies, the only will that can be found leaves everything to his former keepers. His other family members reach out to Nancy for assistance. Nancy is tipped off that Crowley's true will is concealed in a clock, which had been stolen from the house. She ultimately retrieves Crowley's true will, disinherits those who had kept him imprisoned, and rewards his more deserving kin.

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