Nancy Drew Mystery Stories #55 - Mystery of Crocodile Island

Okay, so with this whole pandemic thing, we've had to place our Central Florida Sleuths get-togethers on hold. However, with Barnes & Noble open again, and the coffee shop back to having tables and chairs, we decided to have a small get-together - and I figured what better way to start things off than to read one of the mysteries set in Florida! I have not read this 55th book in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories since it first came out back in 1978 (yes, I'm that old!), so quite honestly, I didn't recall very much from it (in fact, I had thought it was set in the everglades, but it turns out it was set in the Keys!).  Thus, it was almost like reading it for the first time again.

Mystery of Crocodile Island was published back in 1978. It was written by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who, at this point, had been writing the books for over twenty years.  By the end of the run of books published by Grosset & Dunlap (who stopped publishing them with book 56, at which point, Simon & Schuster took over with books 57 and on), the stories were becoming a bit more unusual.  The Crooked Banister, Mystery of the Glowing Eye, The Sky Phantom, etc.  In this book, however, Nancy and her friends travel down to "Crocodile Island" down in the Florida Keys to investigate the crocodile farm in which one of Carson Drew's clients is a partner.  The man believes his two partners in Florida are doing something untoward, and he wants Nancy to find out what it is.  This premise sounds straight-forward enough.  Yeah, well, don't let appearances deceive you!

SPOILER ALERT!

SPOILER ALERT!

If you don't want to be spoiled on the mystery, then read no further.  If you've already read the book, or if you don't mind spoilers, then go ahead and keep reading.

While the mystery is set on Crocodile Island and peripherally references crocodiles that the girls do see on the island and at a local family's home zoo (yes, this family actually has their own zoo at their home!), the mystery itself has nothing to do with crocodiles - although Nancy, Bess, and George first believe it does.  It seems this endangered species is not quite as valuable to the criminals as ... are you ready for this? ... smuggling cameras into Mexico.  Yes, that's right.  The big mystery here is that the business partners Roger Gonzales is so worried about are actually using the crocodile farm as a front to smuggle cameras out of the United States and into Mexico, where they are making a huge profit selling them.  And what's even more surprising is that they are using a submarine to do it!  A huge tanker ship brings crates of the cameras down the Atlantic from Connecticut to the Keys, where they dump the crates into a small watercraft used by the island in the dead of night, and then the crates are then emptied into the waiting submarine that lies silently in the waterways around the island before taking off to Mexico to sell the wares.

Okay, now forgive me for not being overly knowledgeable about this, but was smuggling cameras out of the United States really such a big thing in the late '70s?  Did Mexico have such a hard time getting cameras that they had to buy them from the black market at inflated prices to give criminals a steady income?  Drug smuggling, I can see.  Even human trafficking I can believe (I certainly don't like, approve, or condone it - in fact, it's down right inhuman and the traffickers should be taken down at all costs!!!).  But smuggling cameras?  That makes no real sense and comes out of left field in the story!  There's no references whatsoever to stolen cameras or missing shipments from up North, or anything?  I mean, if somewhere in there, Nancy or one of her friends had read an article or heard a news report about a shortage of cameras or police investigating the thefts from a camera manufacturing plants, then at least the seeds for the story would have been planted.  But, no, there's nothing.

So, while Rudy Nappi gives us a great, spooky cover with Nancy getting ready to feed a crocodile with someone watching her in the background, inside readers get a story about a group of men who are using forced labor (with the very threat of their lives if they leave the island or tell anyone!) to help cover up their camera smuggling operation.  For me, I would have much rather had the mystery been the illegal selling of crocodiles to private collectors, or maybe even the criminals trying to pass of alligators as crocodiles or some such - something at all related to the crocodiles themselves.  I think that might have made for a much more interesting tale.  Instead, the only dangerous instance we get is when Nancy does try to feed a crocodile in that home zoo and gets a little too close for comfort, barely jumping out of the pen before one gets its teeth in her!

Now, that's not all to say there aren't some good points to the story.  As Adams so often did with her stories, there was some educational information in the book, as Carson explains to the girls the differences between alligators and crocodiles. And for the first time that I can ever recall in a Nancy Drew book, she actually speeds well over the speed limit - going seventy in a fifty-five mile per hour zone! (p. 119) However, in true Nancy Drew fashion, as soon as she explains that she was chasing some criminals, the officer just lets her off with a warning and informs her he will go back to the station with the information she has provided.  Would it be that we could all get out of a ticket so easily!

I do love the fact that on page 2, George is described as a "vivacious dark-haired girl with a winning smile..." Don't know that I've ever seen George described as "vivacious" before, but hey - you go, girl! Another scene that made me laugh out loud was on page 104 - while playing a game of catch with a ball of seaweed, Bess accidentally overthrows, and it ends up landing on a sunbather.  When Bess sees the man, she thinks to herself, "He's old and fat and bald-headed...I hope he won't try to get too friendly." Wow, talk about judgmental! Usually the derogatory descriptions are saved for the villains, but not in this case.

Mystery of Crocodile Island is a quirky book, and aside from the whole camera thing, it was a fun little read.  Let's see if it takes me another 40 years before I pick it up and read it again...

RATING:  6 bobby-pins and nail-files for lock-picking out of 10 for trapping Nancy and Ned in a submarine with two rough-and-tough villains with no way to escape!