Ghost in the Closet: A Nancy Clue and Hardly Boys Mystery is a book written by Mabel Maney. It is written as a queer parody of the Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys series. It was first published 1995 and was a Lambda Literary Award nominee in 1996.
The story is a bit of a mess but let me try and sum it up. Nancy Clue solves a case of missing poodles with the love of her life, the nurse Cherry Aimless and the hunky detective Jackie Jones who is stealing Cherry away from Nancy. Nancy runs to the Hardly boys for help and gets the perfect opportunity to show Cherry that she is a great detective when the Hardly boys father and mother get’s kidnapped and they have to solve it.
Now, people told me that this book was genius because the characters was recognizable… I don’t know what books they read but sure.
The original Nancy Drew was a bit of Mary Sue, she could do everything and was the perfect girl. She was meant to be a perfect role models for young girls so she was gentle, humble and generous along with being unusually active, not fearing doing a car chase or fix a car. The Nancy in the parody is a useless airhead who only thinks of clothes and her crush. That is the opposite of Nancy Drew in any of the books.
The Hardly boys then? Well, they are famous and boyish in the original and actually quite useless. They often stumble across the answer by pure curiosity and the books are more of an adventure than actual detective stories. They barely do any actual investigation. This changes in the new series where they are girl crazy (because the old ones acted a bit gay at least to modern readers) but at least they investigate. In this book they seem to be gay and be jacked up super detectives. I guess this version acts as a parody but I’m not sure if it is of the old versions or the new.
It bothered me that the side characters often took over the book, like Cherry and Jackie often taking up quite a lot of the story. The book would have done better if it removed all the times the author showed things from their perspective.
The writing was also a bit cringey. The author made it “fun” by overusing the words gay and queer. The gay flowers? Really? I’m guessing she was making a joke on the language of the old books but then she threw in things like (spoilers) the Hardly boys father being a transman and that it wasn’t accepted in the old days. It isn’t especially accepted today either so when does the book supposed to be set. If they speak like they are from the 1930s shouldn’t the book be set back, then. A transman would be locked up in the mental hospital back then. There was plenty of things that was supposed to be a joke that just made it confusing. Not to mention that I felt like I missed the jokes. The father coming out as a transman was supposed to be a joke, but what was it that was supposed to be funny? In the end the joke was that the father was transman, like being a transman is a joke.
The same happened with the Hardly boys being queer. It comes across as being gay is a joke instead of the joke being things around it. Such as the original Hardly boys often chose to spend time with their guy friends instead of girls which in todays society would be seen as strange. That could easily have been a joke on the views of today’s society, but instead the boys are gay and that is the joke.
As you can imagine, a parody is only good if the person watching/reading it thinks its funny. I didn’t, and I don’t think much of the humor holds up today. The book was 250 pages long and most if it was about repeating jokes and copy and pasting characters. The airhead women in this book were plenty and it stopped being funny a long time ago. Shortening it down would have made it better.
I also see the characters a bit different. I would have painted Nancy Drew as an exaggerated version of herself. Which means overly perfect and can do anything even if it makes no sense such as flying a plane despite never being in a cockpit before and having knowledge about everything to the point of making her god. Making the characters around her noticing it. I would probably have made the Hardly boys the chipper but slightly useless boys who stumbles over the solution by mistake and get’s really famous by doing so. Even more so than Nancy. Luck is all a detective need after all.
This book acts more as a way to look into the author’s view of the characters and the humor of back then. It feels cheap today and I cannot really see what is so funny about it. I was more annoyed by the characters than I was finding it funny. Maybe I just have higher standards on parodies after Team Four Stars abridged series. Now, I would give this book a 2 out of 10. Yes, it is really low but I see no creativity, and I wasn’t expecting much as a fanfic parody but at least put in some effort than just making Nancy Drew an idiot, overusing the same jokes until it became annoying and everyone being gay. I’m not sure that is funny. At least not to me. The writing was also just a long cringe fest which never is a good thing. I’m sorry, but this one is not for me.
With Kind Regards
Senefer.
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