Monday, December 22, 2008

#51: Mystery of the Glowing Eye



This book opens fantastically! And check out the Technicolor, Hitchcock cover...


The book opens...

Nancy: "What did Marty King mean by her remark?"


And what does Nancy mean by that?

Nancy's J-E-A-L-O-U-S of her father's new secretary! Her father dares to mentions to Ms. King a new mystery involving a glowing eye. You traitor, Carson! [/sarcasm] Also, Ned has been kidnapped, and the only clue is a message from him, dropped from a robotic helicopter, which had landed on the Drews' front lawn. There is only one line--Beware of Cyclops! But Mary King, Carson's new secretary, cattily claims she's already solved part of the mystery!

Nancy admits to Bess and George she's jealous. "Jealous!" George exclaims, summing up the character profile that the ghostwriters must have had. "That's one trait you don't have!"

So let's sift it out to the best parts: There's a creepy museum with a glowing eye image in the wall. Burt and Dave hang out in a suspicious house. The gang is mesmerized by hypnotic beams of lights shaped like eyes, with disembodied voices echoing in the room. There is a mysterious experiment by Ned! It's like a Nancy Drew drug trip.

It was a really, really, weird attempt at a "sci-fi" kind of mystery. It was pretty cool, but it concentrated too much on the stupid glowing eye clue. On a 1-10 scale? 6.

And this one mentions computers! Back when the yellow-spine books were written, computers were pretty much restricted to labs\science. I think, but am not sure, a lot of people were kinda suspicious of the "new-fangled invention". Thus my tag, "OMG computers!"