textual analysis
As part of our ongoing effort to rid ourselves of useless crap, Mer is selling used books on Amazon.
To come up with a list of what we wanted to sell, we had to go through absolutely everything. We found several boxes (ones we'd locked away and forgotten about in a storage locker) stuffed to the gills with Mer's old Nancy Drew mysteries that she'd read as a girl.
(Yep. I had a bunch of Hardy Boys books in my early reading collection too -- I remember graduating to Conan Doyle, S. S. Van Dine (who my dad read as a kid), and book after book of Isaac Asimov.)
We'll have to go looking through the Nancy Drew books again; the first Salon article mentions that collectors will pay upwards of $300 for first editions. We did a little digging -- apparently there's gold in them thar cheesy books. The weird part is that first editions seem to be a dime a dozen on Ebay and Amazon; rare booksellers will list them for anywhere between $50 and maybe $250. This is curiouser and curiouser.
My interest, however, is more than financial -- although it's like shooting fish in a barrel, a lot of the stuff in these books is unintentionally hilarious.
There's the brazen shilling (from The Crooked Banister):
She could hardly wait for the next day to come. Now that the Drews were directly involved in the mystery, Nancy was eager to start work.
Although only eighteen, she had earned a reputation as an amateur detective by solving several cases, among them The Secret of the Old Clock, The Hidden Staircase, and most recently The Mysterious Mannequin.
There are the weird Freudian plot devices (Crooked Banister, p. 42):
Nancy swung open the door to the kitchen and then stepped back, shocked. The electrician lay on the floor unconscious! Not far from him stood the robot, its head back on.
"Oh, Mr. Glassboro!" Nancy cried out.
She ran to assist him. As she was about to bend down, a whirring sound started inside the mechanical man and she turned to face him. The next moment the figure raised his two arms and clasped them tightly about Nancy. He began to squeeze her hard.
"Help!" Nancy screamed. "Help!" Then she blacked out.
Upstairs Bess and George heard the cry. "Nancy's in trouble!" Bess exclaimed.
The two girls scurried down the crooked stairway and into the kitchen. Their friend was draped over one arm of the robot.
The tourism for the lazy (The Secret of Mirror Bay):
Nancy, slim and attractive-looking with reddish blond hair, said, "There's a mystery, of course. Aunt Eloise heard that early on misty mornings a woman is seen gliding over the water."
"In what?" George queried.
"Oh, she's walking," Nancy replied.
"How could she?" George asked skeptically.
"That's one thing I want to find out," Nancy answered. "The lake, of which the bay is a part, is a hundred and sixty-seven feet deep in the middle."
"Wow!" Bess exclaimed. "Dangerous spot to fall overboard with heavy shoes on."
Nancy said the water was shallow near shore and gradually became deeper. Bess and George, who were cousins, asked where the lake was.
"In New York State," Nancy told them. "The Indians called the lake Otesaga and there's a lovely hotel named after it. Later James Fenimore Cooper wrote stories about settlers and Indians in the area. He found the water so much like a mirror that he called it Glimmerglass. Now the official name is Otsego Lake."
Nancy explained that at the southern end of the lake was the famous village of Cooperstown.
George's eyes lighted up. "That's where the Baseball Hall of Fame is."
"Right," Nancy replied, "and there are also many interesting museums in and around Cooperstown."
"Sounds great to me," Bess remarked. "When would we go?"
Or how would you like a bit of racism with your sexism (The Clue in the Crossword Cipher)?
In broken English the stranger told her he was a Peruvian. "You are beautiful girl from North America," he said. "I like you. We make date maybe?"
In her own mind Bess decided that he was the last person in the world with whom she wanted to make a date. She did not answer but repeated her question. "Have you seen a man who is thin and dark and has shifty eyes?"
The young man began to laugh. "You forget about that one. Tonight we make date?"
Bess was furious. She turned away and began to climb the steps. The Peruvian laughed. "Oh, you afraid of me? You are American girl they say is choosy?"
Hee. That last sentence is my new comeon to Mer.