1944 Edition
In this page-turner, Nancy is asked by a retired soldier to help him find out why the music written by his son is suddenly turning up on local radio. Phillip March is the perfect Nancy Drew charity case--an older man, a widower, and the sole caretaker of an adorable towheaded granddaughter. Also, despite the fact that he owns a large house, he is too old to continue working and has become quite poor. Not just "sub-par servants" poor. Really poor. In any event, we really want Nancy to help him.
At the same time, Carson Drew asks his daughter to use her high school connection with a spoiled socialite named Diane Dight to investigate whether the girl's father has illegally stolen the formula for a fine silk process from Drew's client. This low-level corporate intrigue would generally be kind of a snooze-fest, but there's another wrinkle: Ned might be interested in the snobby princess Diane Dight!
Whaaaaaaaaa?!!!!
No way, I'm sure you're thinking to yourself. Ned would never be interested in a girl who has to have a new dress made every time she goes out for the day. Well, I thought so too, but in this lurid, US Weekly turn, Ned has not been calling on Nancy--not to mention the fact that he has failed to invite her to the big Emerson Dance! Both Bess and George already have dates (George is going with the irrepressible Buck Rodman, who is apparently not escorting Helen Corning to dances anymore) and Bess has some other date. Um, where the hell are Burt and Dave?
Anyhoo, more on that plot line after we hear all about the Bieber Egg-pocalypse and Kim Kardashian's latest ass-themed selfies!
Oh, er...I mean...the book.
Nancy, always the picture of class, pushes her feelings aside and keeps looking for the missing music at Phillip March's house--mainly in the titular old attic. Yes, this attic is old, but you know what else it is? GINORMOUS. After pages and pages, Nancy seemingly hasn't been able to look at the whole thing. It's like one of those rooms in a cartoon chase scene that just goes on and on and on. The only thing Nancy stumbles across is an old skeleton, which Mr. March laughs off as "something his son kept around."
Um, what? Unless you're a biologist, that isn't exactly the same as having a Sports Illustrated standee.
When Mr. March's granddaughter, Susan, gets the measles, Nancy must bring in reinforcements. Will it be Bess and George? Well, not really. Though they've shown up in almost every book, they haven't exactly been part of the action lately. No, Nancy calls Effie, the over-reactive, flighty and incredibly annoying maid from earlier in the series. And, as predicted, Effie doesn't actually help much, unless you count screaming a lot and calling Nancy incessantly to make her come back. Which I don't.
Meanwhile, she slips away to try and solve the second mystery of the fabric copyright infringement, likely knowing as I do that the two mysteries will somehow become one. You're a smart one, Nancy. You're catching on. The supposed spy who sold Mr. Dight the formula is one Bushy Trott (VILLAIN! VILLAIN!), a dark-eyed cruel-looking man with bushy black hair. Ever notice that ND villains pretty much all have the same features? It must make those mysteries easier to racially profile…er, I mean SOLVE.
When Nancy calls on Diane Dight to get more information, she is heartbroken when she sees a hand-addressed invitation from...duh Duh DUH...Ned Nickerson! Beside herself, Nancy calls on her friends, who basically say "Screw Ned, go to the dance anyway." George tries to convince Nancy to accept the numerous invitations from Horace Lally, but Nancy finds him about as appealing as Mortimer Bartesque. Heh. She even has a series of disturbing nightmares in which she's airborne, trying to fly after an ever-escaping Ned and Horace Lally is a large squawking bird chasing her. Creepy.
Did I mention that Horace Lally is Diane Dight's cousin? Hmmmmm...
Back to the mystery. So, Nancy finally makes it past the numerous black widow spiders in the attic (which, coincidentally, are the same type of spider Bushy Trott uses to spin silk at the Dight Factory) and finds the compartment with the hidden music. Too late. Most of the music has been taken, composed and aired on the radio under a series of obviously false names. D'OH! Well, there's still more of the attic to explore. Somehow. She keeps looking, and finally finds a secret compartment (I should really start counting those too...) and the piano in which the rest of the music is stored. But, just as she grasps the stolen music, Bushy Trott arrives and threatens her with black widow spiders that apparently do his bidding now. Just as Nancy thinks this is it, she's rescued...BY NED!
Apparently, Ned (worried when Nancy wasn't where she said she'd be) finally called on the house and discovered that he had been given false information about Nancy's whereabouts. He had asked her to the dance ages ago via-telegram but received a reply saying she would be out of town. When Diane Dight called and invited herself along, Ned reluctantly agreed and sent her an invitation to the event, not knowing that it was Diane herself that intercepted the telegram meant for Nancy.
Dude. I call bitch.
And so does everyone else, including her own father. When Nancy, Carson, Ned, and all the rest have Bushy Trott arrested, they also go to confront Mr. Dight. He apparently had no idea that the formula was stolen, but it was his brother (Horace Lally's father) who actually participated in both the thefts of the music and the silk process. When he hears about Diane's behavior, he rips her a new one and she runs off in tears.
Haha! Comeuppance!!!
This one was good, although I was mostly bored by the stolen-formula subplot and kind of sad that, for the third book in a row, Bess and George were relegated to "girly" storylines only. This one gets a 4/5 mags.
1970 Edition
This one will be brief. Upon reading the rewrite, I found that the two are almost identical, writing-wise, save for the complete omission of the Emerson Dance subplot and a few of the "quaint racisms."
While I did NOT miss the latter, I found myself missing one of the rare personal storylines outside of the Nancy Drew Files.
I give this one 3 1/2 mags. It has the same issues as the original, and deletes one of the more interesting plots.
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