Let's Bust a Recap : The Thirteenth Pearl

Last week in my recap of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, I mentioned that I cut my proverbial reading teeth on The Boxcar Children and Nancy Drew mysteries. When I was a kid, I couldn't get enough Nancy Drew and my grandmother would collect secondhand copies throughout the year. She had a standing agreement with the owner of our local used bookshop in which he called her any time Nancy Drews came in and she got first dibs before he put them out on the shelves. Whenever a birthday or Christmas came around, I got a new stack of Nancy Drews to read which I promptly devoured.

Now I have a niece who has started to read and guess what books she loves. Nancy Drew mysteries. Any time she comes to my house, she is immediately drawn to the shelf with all the faded yellow spines. When she accompanied me to our new home in NC, the first thing we unpacked were the Nancy Drews and she chose The Thirteenth Pearl which we began reading aloud together. 

She left before we could finish it, but I can't start a book and then just quit so I finished it by myself. 

The Thirteenth Pearl is the last of the original 56 Nancy Drew mystery stories published by Grosset & Dunlap. There have been many iterations since then and now there are literally hundreds of Nancy Drew books including the Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew collection which are the ones my niece has been reading on her own. The Thirteenth Pearl was published in 1979 under the familiar pseudonym Carolyn Keene but was actually written by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. As the Nancy Drew books were first being published, there were a few different authors who wrote them, and it was written into their contracts that they would be paid $125 per book and required to give up all rights to the work and maintain confidentiality. In every book, Nancy Drew is an 18 year old high school graduate and amateur detective who solves crime with the help of her two best friends George and Bess and occasionally her hunky college boyfriend Ned. She lives with her widowed father and their housekeeper Hannah Gruen, and she drives around in a blue convertible. She often gets kidnapped or caught up in some kind of danger before she solves the case. 

In The Thirteenth Pearl, Nancy is trying to find a rare and valuable pearl that has been stolen which leads her all the way to Japan tracking an international ring of jewel thieves. The book takes an odd turn when Nancy finds herself in the midst of a creepy pearl-worshiping cult, but she, of course, solves the case and catches the bad guys. 

I was pleasantly surprised in reading this book how well-researched it was, and also by the positive depiction of Japanese people and culture. My grandfather served in WWII, and I grew up with a somewhat negative image of the Japanese. After my brother and sister-in-law lived in Japan, and now that I have a Japanese niece, I became a lot more sensitive about this issue and started intentionally adding Japanese literature to my collection. This book has aged surprisingly well given that it was written and published in the '70s, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with my niece one day. 

Nancy Drew has become a cultural icon and is cited as a formative influence by a number of high powered women including Supreme Court Justices and former First Ladies. This collection will always be special to me because of the gift of love they were from my grandmother, but rereading them as an adult is proving to be a rewarding experience in its own right. Definitely would recommend a Nancy Drew book for your daughter or niece or neighborhood kid or even you if you're looking for something quick to bust you out of a reading slump or to kickstart a reading life that's gone stale. 

What books sparked a love for reading in you?

~a 10 year old Hannah reading The Secret of the Old Clock~