56 Weeks with Nancy Drew - The Mystery of the Ivory Charm

Week 18, Book 13 

Welcome to the 56 Weeks with Nancy Drew series! If you are new here, welcome. You can find my introductory post to this series here. Please note I will be including plot spoilers in this review series. I explain my reasoning at the start of this post.

Edition pictured: Revised text (20 chapters, 179 pages)

Cover illustrated by: Rudy Nappi

Revised text publication date: 1974

Original text publication date: 1936

My edition printed: approx. 1978

Ghostwriter: Mildred A. Wirt Benson

Editors: Edna Stratemeyer Squier & Harriet Stratemeyer Adams

Revised by: Priscilla Baker-Carr

Setting: River Heights and local towns, Tannberg and Hanover

Originally published in 1936, I will be reviewing the revised text edition of The Mystery of the Ivory Charm, published in 1974 and pictured above. 

Carson Drew’s friend, Stanley Strong, needs someone to look into possible illegal activity going on at the wild animal show he owns and, of course, Nancy Drew is the one for the job (1)!

With friends Bess and George, and 5-year-old Tommy from down the street in tow, Nancy attends the wild animal show. There they come across a runaway elephant and have a run-in with a cruel animal trainer, Rai, who threatens to whip his son, Rishi, for not looking after the elephant. Nancy notices the man wears a beautiful ivory charm in the shape of an elephant on a cord around his neck. When she asks him about it, he tells her that the person who wears it is protected from harm (9). 

Afterwards, Mr. Strong tells Nancy he is suspicious of Rai. Beyond mistreating his son, Mr. Strong doesn’t know what Rai might be up to, but he would like Nancy to investigate the man (10-11). When Nancy arrives home from the excursion, she discovers a stowaway (12). Rishi has run away from Rai, who is not his real father. Before Rai’s wife died, she told Rishi that his real father is alive and living in River Heights (14). 

In this one, Nancy finds Rishi’s father, uncovers the power of the ivory charm, and restores a stolen fortune to a maharaja. She still has time to temporarily adopt a child (19), search for property (34-36), provide first aid (57-58), find an English tutor (63-64), have a long conversation about mysticism (73-76), help Hannah make breakfast (83), read the newspaper… or at least the headlines (84), dig herself out of a collapsed tunnel (92), go to a “wild-animal show”… twice (3-11, 100-106), go to the market (109), go to Emerson for the weekend for a fraternity party (134-138), pretend she has psychic powers (144-147), use her first aid skills a second time (148-149), jump to conclusions with little proof twice in one chapters and prove to be right both times (157, 159-160), save someone from drowning (162-163), provide yet more first aid (that course sure is coming in handy!) (175-176), eat six meals (which has got to be a record for the lowest number of meals mentioned in any Nancy Drew book!), and have a snack of tea and cake.

Time of year

    [Carson Drew’s] slender, attractive daughter walked toward the car. It was a sunny, warm May afternoon. Nancy’s strawberry-blond hair vividly contrasted her teal-blue convertible. (2)

In this one, there isn’t much mention of the weather,  the temperature, or even what Nancy is wearing. By setting the book in May, I assume the idea was to give Nancy good weather in which to solve the mystery, with the added benefit that Ned is still in university, so Nancy can take a weekend off of sleuthing to visit him. Of course, it doesn’t exactly work out that way, but Ned can keep on hoping!

There is one mention of the weather, a thunderstorm, which gives Nancy and her friends the opportunity to explore a house that has had the insides removed.

    “Rain hard outside,” Rishi said.

    “Then we’ll stay here until the storm’s over,” Nancy suggested.

    Rishi began to test the ropes and swings. Bess uttered a little cry of alarm as the boy swung through space, hanging by his knees from he bar of a trapeze. 

    “He’ll be killed!” she exclaimed.

    Nancy warned him to be careful. “The safety net is broken,” she cautioned. “And some of the ropes look very old and insecure.”

    “Rishi not take chance,” he promised.

    Outside the old house rain fell in torrents.

    “While we’re waiting I believe I’ll do a little investigating,” Nancy said. (50)

The house “without insides” and other nonsense

    An amazing sight met their gaze. The house was indeed “without insides.” The floor had been torn away. From the rafters of the ceiling hung several swings and trapezes, similar to these used in wild-animal acts, as well as many entangled ropes. (49)

I had a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of a house without insides when I read this book as a child, and I find it even more confusing now. Would it not make more sense to use a building that is already an open space, such as a barn, for the purpose of training animals or practicing a trapeze act?

Stranger still, one of the characters in this book lives in a barn. It is commented on as evidence of him being eccentric. Okay, fine. But clearly, there is no shortage of barns in the area. 

    “You won’t find Pete living in a regular house, though—not that guy. He’s too stingy to build himself a decent place. He lives in an old barn that was standing on the property when he bought it.”

[…]

    “This must be the place,” Nancy commented, stopping the car near a strange structure, which resembled neither a house nor a barn.

    The queer, tumble-down building had originally been painted brick red, but now appeared to be washed-out pink. A porch had been build at the front, and large windows were cut into the walls at uneven angles. An old silo, long since useless, adjoined the east side of the structure, while the west side was supported by a massive stone chimney.

    “Did you ever see such a crazy-looking house?” Bess giggled. “I wish I had a camera with me.” (115-116)

But the architecture in this book is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to things that make no sense. Given the title and the fact this is a children’s book that was repackaged in the 1970s, we can anticipate some racist stereotypes with this one and this is definitely the case. The racism in this book could probably be called “casual”, which is so easy to gloss over as just being of its time. 

Rishi, the Indian boy that Nancy meets at the wild animal show and who stows away in her car, refers to himself in the third person throughout the book despite Nancy having found him a professor to tutor him in English who comments on Rishi being unusually bright for a 12-year-old. I have never heard anyone who’s first language wasn’t English refer to themselves in the third person! All I can say is that is seems a lazy and insensitive way of handling Rishi’s dialogue. Thankfully, there are three other characters from India in this book and neither the author, editor, or publisher felt the need to impose any unusual speech characteristics on any of them!

Final thoughts 

Judging by the fact that all I’ve done is complain about this book, I’m sure you’ve already guessed that I didn’t enjoy this one very much. After reading the The Message in the Hollow Oak in the original text a few weeks ago and really enjoying the more adventurous and free-spirited version of Nancy in that book, I’m a bit worried that I’ve ruined myself for the revised texts. Although, I don’t remember particularly liking this one as a child either. I would have liked to have more scenes at the “wild-animal show” — which sounds to me a lot like a circus — and less time spent going to fraternity parties, and visiting the house “without insides”. Beyond the tunnel that leads from the house to a door that looks like it is part of a rock, the setting felt lacklustre. I don’t think the tunnel is ever property explained. The house “without insides” is explained as once being “the headquarters for a circus troupe” long before the current owner came into possession of the property (163). You know, just one of those odd coincidences!

Bonkers quotation

I have got into the habit of finishing these posts off with a favourite quotation from the book, but since I appear to only be ragging on this one — and I didn’t mark a single passage that I liked — I thought I might as well share this very strange section that made me wonder who this imposter is who is trying to pass herself off as Nancy Drew.

    Rishi bubbled with enthusiasm and his gaiety was imparted to the others. He loved the outdoors and amazed the girls with his stories of country life in his native land.

    He asked eager questions about the names of unfamiliar trees and birds he saw in the area. The girls were slightly embarrassed when they could not always answer him, and they resolved to devote themselves to nature lore with new interest.

    “I’m ashamed that I don’t know the names of half the birds I see,” Nancy confessed. “I’ll find out.” (34)

I found this very odd. In the Password to Larkspur Lane, Nancy shows herself to be knowledgeable about flowers, and she has some knowledge of birds too, as she nurses a homing pigeon back to health in that one. How are we supposed to believe that she can’t name the birds they see on the short drive in the countryside near her house? I’m all for a version of Nancy who is willing to admit when she doesn’t know something, and who is eager to learn more to fill in the gaps in her knowledge, but I would also like to see some consistency in Nancy across the books! 

Here’s hoping I have better luck with The Whispering Statue. This is another title where I have both the original and revised text versions in my collection. This time I plan to start with the revised text, in an effort to learn from the mistake I made reading the original text of The Message in the Hollow Oak and noticing all of the places where the revised text failed to live up to the original. Wish me luck!