Nancy Drew:  The Lost Volumes


Teen detective Nancy Drew has been retooled by her publishers several times in her long career.  In their attempts to keep Nancy relevant for her young audience, they constantly seek fresh, exciting plots and new situations for the heroine and her chums; once in a while, they reissue an older story with some of the more embarassing ethnic stereotypes edited out.  Still, many promising episodes do not meet the uncompromisingly high standards of the Nancy Drew publishing machine.  Herewith, some titles that didn't make the cut:
 
 

The Stolen Torah Mystery


Nancy goes undercover in New York's close-knit Hasidic Jewish community to search for a stolen religious artifact.  While eating a bowl of matzohball soup, Bess discovers an antique dreidel inscribed with a clue.  The thrilling denouement occurs in a crowded synagogue where Nancy, disguised as a Hasidic rabbi, exposes a jewel-thief among the congregation.
 
 

The Secret of the Burning Cross

A pleasure trip to Alabama is interrupted by death threats against Carson Drew's friend, a state prosecutor with a record number of death-penalty convictions.  Abducted during a late-night coon-hunt, Nancy escapes from her captors by disguising herself in a white sheet and mask during one of their eerie torchlit ceremonies.  After solving the mystery, Nancy and Ned perform an amusing vaudeville routine in blackface at the Spring Cotillion.
 
 

The Clue in the Carcass

Nancy and her friends take a working vacation on board one of Japan's largest commercial whaling ships.  They learn the skills and history behind this ancient occupation, while simultaneously searching for a shipment of radioactive waste lost at sea.  Humor abounds as Bess encounters whale blubber in the ship's mess and George mistakenly harpoons a Greenpeace protestor.  Nancy surprises her chums by displaying the flensing skills she acquired at a community workshop in River Heights.
 
 

The Quest for the Missing Roadmap

The world of interstate trucking comes alive for Nancy and her friends as they roll out the big rigs to search for a missing will.  Upon graduation from the Ace Truck Driving School in River Heights, Nancy, with Bess and George in tow, sets out to deliver a load of swine flu vaccine to a hospital in Oregon.  On their way, they search for the will of a fellow student's grandfather, which was written on the back of a road atlas.  After restoring her friend's inheritance, Nancy (who earns the C.B. "handle""Supersleuth"), leads a convoy of milk trucks to the local orphanage.
 

The Message in the Sourcecode

When an insidious e-mail virus crashes Carson Drew's computer hard drive, Nancy sets out on the trail of the culprit. On the "superhighway" to the virus creator, Nancy fends off would-be Romeos in chat rooms, learns to weed out junk results on search engines, and is menaced by Microsoft thugs who lock her into a "clean" room at a microchip production facility.  The ingenious sleuth escapes by converting a message for help into a string of ones and zeroes that can only be understood by the nerdy cyberfriends she has made on AOL.   Meanwhile, Bess finds love on-line, and George's name and boyish slang lead to an amusing romantic mis-adventure via email.  After the villain is caught, everyone has a good laugh as Ned and Nancy discover that they've been e-chatting with each other anonymously for weeks

Other fine selections await your pleasure on the Toad a la Mode archive.