The Clue Of The Tapping Heels (1969) - Plot & Excerpts
This book took forever!!!!!!!!!!!!!This was one of the WORST Nancy Drews I've read - this was clearly a 'stuffer book'. No offense to whoever wrote this (because I understand that Carolyn Keene is just a pen name, there have been about 5 Nancy Drew authors) but it needed work to make this more enjoyable.I try to defend Nancy Drew to my brother when he insists that her mysteries are more pathetic than Hardy Boys', but this time I admit - she can literally tap-dance, and for fun. Then she taps for a tap-dancing troupe that she goes to on weekends to be the MAIN ACT not an extra or anything. Then her housekeeper's, friend's, boss literally was a dancer-girl/ actress back in her day, and now raises and sells Persian cats???? And naturally she finds the sliding panels (some day I'd like to read about a panel, that shuts up like a telescope, instead of sliding, sliding, sliding!) that no-one else found before, and the strange man living secretly in the attic with unique features, who turns out to just be misunderstood. And possibly mentally unstable..... And in the last chapter of the book, because Nancy needs to get tied up for Ned and her father to save her, two masked men literally pounce on her after everyone high-fives and goes home, ties her up and throws her down some stairs. Which also did not break her neck, or knock her out or anything. In a real thriller/mystery we would come back to find blood-splatters, and then open the door to find a blue-ish, cold, Nancy Drew lying stiff on the last few stairs from the bottom, with 2 extra joints in her neck. And then the rest of them would buck up, and find her killers (who would be held for something much more interesting than kidnapping, or turning off lights, or making annoying tapping noises, or stealing kittens...) and send them to prison after a grueling trial. And then we would go to her funeral, and swear to either to never solve another mystery, or to solve every one we could find, in her legacy. Now that's a mystery. Of course then there would only be one Nancy Drew book.Anyway this was upsetting, and I suggest you go ahead and skip this one, the only important detail was at the very end she tapped a message in Morse to her audience at her tap-dance show: **"If anyone has a mystery for please find me backstage and tell me, kk?!"**, to which an army man in the audience replied in Morse **"Kk, I have on about a BRASS BOUND CHEST (hint hint)"** Nancy: **"WOW! A BRASS BOUND CHEST!? How exciting! Kk meet me in the back!"**That was the only important thing, because it blended into the next book.Other than that: SAVE YOURSELVES!!!!!!Thanks for Reading! ~Simone
The plot of the 1939 version is a bizarre stew of Persian cats, real estate conspiracies, aging actors, and a little boy with a head injury secretly living on cat food in the basement of some lady's house. Some of these books are really weird, man. The 1969 revision has an incredible set-up for the next book in the series: at the end of a play Nancy tap dances a request for mysteries to solve in morse code and someone in the audience stands up and says, "MISS DREW, I HAVE A MYSTERY FOR YOU!" See, that's why that Nancy Drew movie starring Julia Roberts' niece was such a flop. It didn't have a scene this cool.
What do You think about The Clue Of The Tapping Heels (1969)?
As an aside, Nancy stars in a play where she tap dances, and the asshole director is named Mr. Skank. HA! This book is pretty much a redo of #2 but with a more convoluted plot involving a stolen estate and the Persian cat trade. A bunch of guys are all targeting an old lady at once. At the tail end Nancy gets bound and gagged, then immediately found and rescued. No major characters lose consciousness but someone sets a bomb under Nancy's car and someone commits arson and sabotage at the play rehearsals.
—Melanie
The Clue of the Tapping Heels is only the second Nancy Drew I've read. My copy was published in 1969 so it went through the massive hatchet job. The book was originally published in 1939.This late in the series, Nancy's fairly well established as an amateur sleuth. She is in the middle of telling her school friends about a case when she's trust into the middle of a new one involving the theft of some Persian cats and a mysterious tapping noise.The mystery itself has some creepy elements to it worthy of an episode of CSI. There is a man with a history of mental health problems stemming from abuse, a house with hidden passageways, fraud and identity theft. Unfortunately the plot is hacked to bits, lacking coherent segues as the old text and new text lie side by side with piss poor editing.I would like to find an original copy or perhaps a reprint that has the unaltered text because I know in a few years my daughter will love this mystery. She'll enjoy the odd ball combination of missing cats, tap dancing and Morse code.
—Sarah Sammis
