The second half of Nancy Drew‘s freshman season delivered on the first half, but it also disappointed. Disruptions to production from the pandemic crisis mean the last four episodes got kicked over to next season so it wrapped up this week. It’s a satisfactory stopping point: enough stuff resolved to count as a season ender, but a couple of major elements left as cliffhangers.
The season launched with the murder of wealthy Ryan Hudson’s wife, but by mid-season another murder had loomed equally important: Lucy Sable, a classmate of Ryan and Nancy’s father Carson, known as “Dead Lucy” after she jumped off a cliff for reasons unknown. At the midseason break, Carson was arrested as the killer; over the second half, Nancy cleared him, solved Tiffany Hudson’s murder and in the process learned Lucy’s ghost has been haunting her because they’re related. As in mother/daughter: Ryan and Lucy were lovers but the conniving Hudsons convinced Lucy he’d rejected her; after she gave birth she gave the baby to the Drews, then killed herself. One of the elements left hanging for next season is that Nancy’s not speaking to Carson right now, resenting that he’s lied to her his entire life.
The second element is that a spirit, the Aglaeca, that she and her friends (whom I think of as the Scooby Drews, but “Drew Crew” seems to be the name online) raised to get evidence to clear Carson. They didn’t deliver the blood price the Aglaeca required and at first it appeared to be very PO’d. Their attempts to placate the Aglaeca failed because, it turns out, they were placating the wrong entity: whatever they summoned is a human ghost, and so the ritual just enraged it. At the end of the episode, the death portents are getting more ominous, including Nancy seeing herself falling over the same cliff as her mother …
The point of this post is not to thumb up the series, though I really like it, but to look at the successful rebranding of Nancy (well played by Kennedy McMann) and her crew. Part of the change is the added diversity I’d expect from any 21st century take: George is Chinese-American, Ned’s black, Bess is a lesbian. The other part, which is less expected, is turning Nancy into a ghostbuster. Dead Lucy and the Aglaeca are only a couple of the spectres and entities haunting Horsehoe Bay, all of which seem to have taken an interest in the Drew Crew.
This doesn’t work for everyone — my brother says he’d have preferred Nancy crack the case and expose the ghosts as fake — but it does for me. I think that’s because even in her new, supernatural environment, Nancy’s still a detective. There are mundane murders and she cracks those; faced with the supernatural she investigates their origins, tries to identify the spirit, figures out its agenda and how to satisfy or thwart it without loss of blood. It’s no different from stopping a mortal killer, except for, you know, the perp is dead.
Making the series a contemporary version of the novels or the Bonita Granville films with greater diversity might have worked, but I think adding the supernatural side was a smart choice. Changes like this don’t always work: the more down-to-Earth Doc Savage of the post-WW II years doesn’t feel like Doc to me and DC’s The Snagglepuss Chronicles didn’t work at all. Nancy Drew pulls it off.
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SUPERGIRL: The Silver Age Vol. 2 by Jerry Siegel, Leo Dorfman and artist Jim Mooney starts with Supergirl, her powers restored from Kandorian scientist 
THE END OF THE GAME (1975) is a German mystery drama (the German title translates into The Judge and the Hangman) directed by the late Maximilian Schell with an American cast: Donald Sutherland shows up first as a cop’s corpse, which leads terminally ill inspector Martin Ritt to investigate whether powerhouse industrialist Robert Shaw is behind the killing. Ritt, however, has his own agenda: years earlier, Shaw murdered a woman in front of him just to prove he could get away with it (“You know the autopsy said the bruise on her jaw came from striking the parapet.”) and Ritt has been waiting a long time to end the game … John Voight plays Sutherland’s ambitious replacement, who’s also interested in becoming his replacement with lover Jacqueline Bissett. This is well done, and darker than it appears, as everyone has an unsavory agenda; Shaw steals the show in a role that demonstrates how good a bad man he could be.“Sometimes things happen in our minds, sometimes things happen in reality. It is our job, Walter, as policemen, to separate the two.”
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But then again it could just as easily be she’s sad. Or as a couple of my friends said, really fed up with the soldier (“He’s staring at my butt — and he didn’t even bring me good wine!”).
Robert McGinnis showing what used to be a standard pose for women on hardboiled PI paperback covers.
A couple by Earle Bergey showing his odd sense of SF women’s fashion.
Bob Maguire and Engel contribute this one, which for some reason sticks with me.
Here’s another Bob McGinnis hardboiled cover, though the woman looks like she belongs in some kind of zombie horror story instead.
This rather bizarre one is uncredited.
Another uncredited cover with another woman in the bad-girl pose.
Gerald Gregg provides this interesting mystery cover.
Jeff Jones portrays Fritz Leiber’s modern horror as if it were a paperback Gothic romance of the time. I wonder if anyone who bought it was disappointed?
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