A gay old time!

 Before we dig deep into reviewing Mabel Maney's Nancy Clue and the Hardley Boys in A Ghost in the Closet, I should preface this with some background. I first read this in 1995, having bought a copy at a now defunct bookstore across from Wright State University. I don't quite know what I was expecting (at 19, likely angsty erotica with the Boys realizing their long buried love of other boys... You know, Brokeback Mountain, with its 90 minutes of angst and 1 minute of pleasure, although that came out LONG after this one), but at any rate, I wasn't particularly thrilled with it at the time. Here, in 2023, I found myself laughing hysterically and appreciating it in its full 90's irony. 

So, evidently two books precede this one, although I have never seen them, let alone read them, that set up the messy love triangle between Jackie, a San Francisco detective; Nancy Clue, a plucky girl detective of societal import in River Depths; and Nurse Cherry Aimless, who can't decide which girl she loves more. 

Nancy and her friends and rivals start the book off at a dog show, where men in trench coats try to purloin purebred poodles! Nancy, concerned about losing Cherry's love, winds up dragging her chums Frank and Joe Hardly in to solve the mystery and win Cherry back from Jackie. With a lot of help from Uncles Willy and Nellie, the plot careens deep into 1959 High Society as everyone gets wrapped up in a mystery involving the kidnapping of not only dogs, but Frank and Joe's parents, Mr. and Mrs Fennel P. Hardy, with an emphasis on the Atomic Age!

That's the basic plot, and anyone who ever read the series being parodied here can probably guess some of the twists and turns contained within. Although, with the addition of Velma and her girlfriend Midge, we also get a few Scooby Doo traps late in the book. 

Maney does an excellent job of capturing the revisions made in 1959 to both series, when the hardcovers were heavily edited and repackaged for the new age. (Evidently, the original versions from the 30s and 40s were really racist and overly wordy.) It's all here, from Nancy's glove box being a bag of endless holding and being able to disguise herself with a mere change of clothes to Frank and Joe's patented Detective kits and the random ability to have learned whatever skill was needed for the narrative by a sentence insertion describing how they got the merit badge in boy scouts. 

Double entendres and innuendo fly like scared geese throughout, although some of the best funny bits point out to modern readers exactly how much language has shifted since the era this is set in, although there are some rather serious bits hidden in the humor, like the Sanitorium where troubled women wind up. Honestly, in many ways, it reminds me of The Brady Bunch Movie released the same year, except in the case, the characters aren't anachronisms in the setting. 

While I can't say it's on my list of favorite reads, I will say it's a hell of a lot better than I judged it in 1995.