Such a promising story, but it could have been solved so easily if Ned wasn’t a nitwit. I struggled with where to place this one. This is not a mystery, it’s five mysteries in a trench coat, and I think they forgot to solve one of them… 42. Also Nancy pretends to be Japanese for zero reason. Not the weakest note for Nancy to go out on, but certainly not the strongest. If they had dropped the bridge on the dude creeping on Nancy, I’d rank this higher. A lot got crammed into the last five or so chapters. I think they spent too much time faffing about in Amish country and not enough time building up the mystery.

Mysteries aren’t supposed to put you to sleep. If you want tips on how to ski or start a mink farm, this is the book for you. How do you make a tour of the Hawaiian islands this boring? By using it as padding in your weak, weak mystery. Nancy, stop kidnapping children and go get the cops already. The Strange Message in the Parchment (#54) This one’s dull enough that it gets distracted by Ned’s football game three quarters of the way through. Sloppy sleuthing and sloppy editing combine into one mess of a mystery. And since I’ve had Nancy Drew books on the brain lately, I decided that I would read my way through the entire collection and tell you nice readers all about them.Īnd so, without further ado (a-Drew?), I present to you the complete and indisputable ranking of all 56 original Nancy Drew adventures, from worst to best.ĥ2. Recently, while cleaning out the attic, I spotted 56 bright yellow spines, still in good condition, glowing on a dusty shelf. I owned them all, but I don’t remember how many I actually read. I must confess: the PC games were a bigger part of my childhood than the Nancy Drew books. New Nancy Drew books were published after 1979, including multiple spin-off series, but they had different publishers, creating a dividing line between the first 56 and all the rest. Fifty-six books, to be exact, published from 1930 to 1979 by Grosset & Dunlap and written by many authors under the pen name Carolyn Keene. Nancy Drew has starred in movies, TV shows, computer games, and comics-but it all started with Nancy Drew books.

Nancy drew the secret in the old attic