A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
The Treasure in the Royal Tower (Nancy Drew #128)
Carolyn Keene
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers.
Sometimes nostalgia pays off. I have fond and irritatingly detailed memories of this book dating from childhood, but I hadn’t thought of it until recently, when a casual conversation with Lori brought it back out of long-term storage. I wasn’t originally planning to review it but then I reread it and the intrusive thoughts won as usual, which I guess by this point shouldn’t really be a surprise. Anyway, I can see why I liked it when I was little, though as always I have thoughts. (Little me loved the setting and the coziness. Adult me was delighted to be able to translate the French without Nancy’s help.)
The mystery begins in the middle of winter, presumably sometime in the ’90s. Eighteen-year-old Nancy Drew packs her best friends, cousins George Fayne and Bess Marvin, into her Mustang and drives them all to Butter Ridge, Wisconsin, where they plan to spend several days at a new ski resort. In lieu of the traditional lodge, the resort is based out of Wickford Castle, built in the 1920s by Ezra Wickford, a crazy millionaire who paid through the nose to import a round castle tower from France. In the present day, the castle still has the French tower, but it doesn’t match the other three towers and in fact sticks out like a sore thumb, all of which is to say that Nancy flags it as a potential mystery the second she pulls into the parking lot. Upon arrival, she insists that there will be no mystery-solving on this vacation but stumbles into a mystery mere hours later, when she and George follow the sound of unidentified footsteps because “it couldn’t hurt to check it out” and end up trapped in an elevator. (JFC, are you fucking kidding me? I’m annoyed with her already.)
After escaping the elevator – the girls are nothing if not resourceful – Nancy and George resume their vacation, though with the knowledge that someone might have deliberately turned off the elevator while they were in it. At dinner they learn that the castle is built of bits and pieces taken from other structures – the round tower came from France and is rumored to contain a treasure hidden by Marie Antoinette, the library came from England – but their after-dinner tour is cut short when the library is found to have been vandalized. Circumstances having evolved beyond Nancy’s own powers of self-control, she immediately volunteers her services as a private detective to Mark and Christi Lane, the anxious young couple who founded the resort. I can’t imagine finding the assistance of three teenagers reassuring in any way, but I guess the ’90s were a different time, or at least the Lanes are themselves young enough to take Nancy at her literal word. Either way, the case gets nasty fast, as someone seems determined to silence Nancy, and everyone in the castle becomes a suspect: Dexter Egan, a handyman with a shady past; Jacques Brunais, the ruggedly handsome ski instructor; Lisa Ostrum, a writer with Ski World magazine; Professor Hotchkiss, a Massachusetts-based expert in French history; and Dr. Maria and Meg Alvarez, a mother-daughter pair from Chicago. The only castle resident who never makes the suspect list is Gus, a darling sheepdog who makes sure to befriend every guest.
The case seems like it might be resolved when Nancy and co. break into the round tower and find Jacques methodically taking the wall decor apart, but he explains that he is in fact searching for a bundle of letters presumed to have been written by Marie Antoinette. The letters were originally discovered by his grandfather, who was on the construction team charged with taking apart the tower and shipping it to the States to be integrated into Wickford Castle, but he then had to hide them in their original niche before he was discovered with them, and he never saw them again. Realizing that Jacques means no harm, Nancy persuades him to tell the Lanes about his secret search. Unfortunately, his story is overheard by the actual culprit, who becomes seriously bold in their own quest as they attack Meg during an ice skating party, strand Nancy in a ski lift, and break into Nancy’s room in the middle of the night to steal a library book. After the break-in, Nancy asks the Lanes for a master key, which they obligingly provide (again, why isn’t anybody questioning her legitimacy as a detective???), and she and her friends search the other guests’ rooms. It doesn’t take long for them to find the stolen book in Lisa Ostrum’s room, along with the rediscovered letters, which turn out to have been written by Rochelle de Chaffin, lady-in-waiting to the queen.
All roads eventually lead back to the round tower, where Nancy and her friends find Lisa holding a fabulous diamond, hidden in the tower’s chandelier by none other than Marie Antoinette herself shortly before her overthrow and execution. The showdown that follows is probably the worst I’ve ever seen in my life, as both Nancy and Lisa turn out to be black belts, but, well, this thing was written in the ’90s and it shows. After a brief fight filled with “loud karate yell”s, Lisa is apprehended by Gus, who knew Nancy was in trouble and came tearing to the rescue. With Lisa safely behind bars, the Lanes decide to return the diamond to the French government; Jacques, meanwhile, wishes to return the letters as well, but asks that Professor Hotchkiss be allowed to study them first. Even better, the publicity from the case is expected to bring more business to the fledgling resort, so everyone is happy, except Lisa who is of course in jail.
This is one of the rare instances that make me seriously rue the power of my long-term memory, because my auto-spoiler mechanism hummed back to life the minute I started reading, exactly as it did when I was rereading the Redwall series, and it really needs to cut it the fuck out. I went in knowing perfectly well that the treasure was a diamond and that Lisa Ostrum was the culprit, and also that she was a writer for a ski magazine, but I wasn’t expecting every little plot point to come back while I was reading. It would’ve been nice to have some surprises, but no. I remembered Nancy getting crushed under a snowmobile right at the moment the snowmobiles appeared. I remembered her getting stuck in the ski lift and having to jump down. I remembered Meg getting attacked. This is annoying as shit. If I could delete my internal browser history, I would.
One thing I really wasn’t expecting was my irritation with Nancy, whose nosiness is annoying rather than endearing. I mean, that nosiness is the point of the series, so I get why she has to be the way that she is, but for some reason it rubbed me exactly the wrong way for 160 pages, I suppose because she just can’t miss an opportunity to follow somebody who seems out of place. The first time she does this, she and George get stuck in an elevator while following some phantom footsteps (which later turn out to belong to Lisa, who turns off the elevator while they’re in it because she’s a nasty bitch); the second time she gets a snowmobile kicked on top of her after she follows a black-suited snowmobiler (also Lisa) for no other reason than that they give her sneaky vibes. Another point of irritation: a smart detective would’ve told her friends she was about to creep up on the black-suited snowmobiler, because apparently they had no idea what she was doing and George just suddenly started yelling about the goddamn snowmobiles, which led to the bumbling chase sequence that ended with Nancy getting her leg crushed by a snowmobile.
I am similarly annoyed with Lisa’s nastiness, which seems unnecessary and also has the effect of doubling Nancy’s determination to solve the case. In a way she has no one but herself to blame for her own arrest, because she just straight up sucks at keeping a low profile. If Lisa hadn’t vandalized the library – a crime committed in haste because her French also sucks and she conveniently forgot that the library in fact came from England – and if she hadn’t then felt such a need to scare Nancy away, the case could conceivably have ended with Jacques confessing to his search for the letters. If she had confined her activities to a mere eavesdropping, she could still have gotten to the letters first, found the diamond, and gotten away scot-free. She so nearly got away with it, and she probably would have if she hadn’t made such a point of antagonizing Nancy. I am not in the business of advising criminals on their technique, but this seems rather obvious.
Aside from that, I did enjoy this reread and I don’t regret re-buying the book (my original copy probably got donated a long time ago). Frankly, it’s making me want to go on a ski vacation even though I don’t ski anymore, preferably one where I get to hole up in a castle with my Kindle for a week or so, and maybe go shopping in the local village. I suppose it’s the nostalgia that saved it; it is so unapologetically ’90s that I almost love it just for that reason, though that karate scene is still making me cringe. I am unfamiliar with the rest of the series – I think I’ve literally only read this one book in its entirety – but I am curious about Nancy’s evolution through time. Given that the series has been written over decades by a multitude of writers who all use the same pen name, I am wondering whether the Nancy Drew in this book is a continuation of the Nancy Drew from the classic series, or whether she is a reinvention of the original character and general story. “Reinvention” is perhaps not the right word: a previous writer is reputed to have imbued the character with a feistiness that this Nancy lacks, unless you count her unabashed nosiness, which I don’t. I know that George is outdoorsy and Bess is boy-crazy and I can glean the outlines of their personalities from there, but I don’t know anything about Nancy, except that she is chronically incapable of minding her own business. I really have to laugh at the book’s tagline, because no, in fact, the 200-year-old mystery did not put Nancy in immediate peril. Nancy put Nancy in immediate peril.
All in all, the book is fine. I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone raised outside of the ’90s, but I also wouldn’t discourage anyone who wants to read it. Adults like myself might find themselves piqued by eighteen-year-old Nancy’s Mustang and apparent ability to go on unsupervised vacations at out-of-state resorts; I am also still questioning the Lanes’ unquestioning acceptance of Nancy’s detective experience. Even if they really are that young and inexperienced, you would think they would at least be old enough to ask some basic questions, but they never do; nor do they seem to have any qualms about allowing Nancy and her friends to pillage the rooms of the other guests in what I can only describe as an appalling breach of privacy. As I say, I don’t know anything about the other Nancy Drew books and it’s possible they’re better than this, but if this is an accurate representation of the series in general, I don’t really see a need to pursue it.
