I spent my childhood reading Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden and Sally Baxter Mysteries. I wanted to be a courageous-horse-riding-journalist-sleuth who went camping and ate crabapples. Unfortunately I grew up, was only adventurous when it came to the action I read in novels and tasted a crabapple - which is really sour and face-puckering. So went my childish enthusiasm for my career - but not my reading. I retained my love for sleuth's - especially Nancy Drew, my all-time favourite heroine. I began collecting the unrevised novels of the 30s, 40s and 50s - they are so much better than the revised (as in take out all the non-politically-correct stuff). It's fascinating.
I recently bought The Secret in the Old Attic at an auction and I read it whilst I read its revised issue from 1970. They took out ALL the good and interesting bits. They were so worried we'd stub our toes on previous culturalisms that they wrapped us up in wool and stuck us in a display cabinet with a plastic coated novel - no sharp edges and no fun at all!
I love these old novels. They have so many interesting aspects of the time they were written in. The old crank cars and how tyres went flat easily; how hard it was to get rubber and petrol and other car parts during World War 2; how much a sandwich in a diner cost and what people generally ate; the design of very old houses with their historical slave quarters and hidden passages; the kind of jobs women were allowed or expected to do and how they were expected to behave; that it was illegal to have a tattoo removed because police considered it an easily identifying mark - which tells you about the kind of people who had tattoo's back then; that most people still cooked with wood fires unless they were lucky enough to own an AGA gas cooker - and so much more. These novels are rare gems.
The Secret in the Old Attic has Nancy helping a World War 1 veteran and his orphaned granddaughter recover his son's musical compositions that have been stolen by an elusive ghost-burglar that enters the old plantation house through a secret door and leaves behind scary traps for Nancy, Bess and George. Along the way Nancy helps her father solve a mystery of his own (want to know how Gossamer was made?) and avoids going to a dance with a very persistent young man. It's a fun Nancy Drew mystery. It has everything a Nancy Drew enthusiast expects from the intrepid sleuth.
Here's a great site that gives a chapter-by-chapter analysis of the differences between the revised and unrevised novels.
