Dana Girls Mystery Stories No. 2 - The Secret at Lone Tree Cottage

The journey through the Dana Girls Mystery Stories continues with this second book, published alongside By the Light of the Study Lamp and In the Shadow of the Tower as the breeder set for this series in 1934.  Written by Leslie McFarlane, author of original Hardy Boys stories, this is the second of the first four books in the series that he wrote (after which, Mildred Wirt took over the authorship of the series).  From everything I've read and heard, McFarlane did not enjoy writing this series at all; yet, what I find strange, is that I like these stories far better than I do his Hardy Boys stories (don't shoot me, Pam!).  I feel like Louise and Jean Dana have a lot more personality than the Hardys, and the constant antagonism between the Danas and Lettie Briggs is so much fun to read!  This second book serves as a great follow up to the sisters' first mystery.

 

The Secret at Lone Tree Cottage takes place a few months after the conclusion of the first mystery.  In Study Lamp, the girls were just starting their new school year at Starhurst; in this book, it is November (p. 96), and the Thanksgiving holidays are just around the corner (p. 144). I like this type of continuity in a series, and it appears the Syndicate made this decision to follow the seasons, as the reference to Thanksgiving appears in the outline written by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams (which outline, it must be noted, was considerably more detailed and quite a bit longer than Edna's outline for the previous book!).  Moving time forward in a sequential manner such as this gives the books a sense of realism that helps overcome the fact that the Danas (like the Hardys, Nancy, and so many other series sleuths) never actually age, despite moving through the seasons and holidays year after year after year after year.  Ruth Fielding and Judy Bolton are just two of the few series book sleuths who actually did age as their respective series progressed.

 

The mystery this time around involves their English teacher, Miss Amy Tisdale, who disappears after receiving a strange note in class one day.  Louise and Jean think it odd, and so they decide to track down their teacher, especially after her parents reveal that Miss Tisdale did not come for a visit over the weekend as she normally does.  The Danas are already aware that Miss Tisdale has a twin sister, Alice, that is estranged from the family, and when following up on a lead in the small town of Hilton, the girls discover Mrs. Alice Brixton, their teacher's twin!  Of course, they discover the woman after finding her toddler daughter lost in the woods on the way to Hilton.  It is those series book coincidences that always help our favorite sleuths solve their mysteries!

 

It is a fairly interesting mystery, with somewhat cryptic clues, including coded messages that Miss Tisdale sends to her teacher where one must read every fourth word of the note in order to get the "real" message being sent!  The girls are determined to locate Miss Tisdale, even engaging the assistance of their Uncle Ned, who is only too willing to drive from Oak Falls to Penfield to help his nieces.  The fact that the kidnapper - one Sol Tepper (p. 36) - portrays himself as the injured party, having been cheated out of money by his former business partner, Mrs. Brixon's deceased husband, leaves the readers and the Dana Girls wondering how far he will go in order to get what he believes he is deserved. Ultimately, he also kidnaps Mrs. Brixton's young daughter to use both her and Miss Tisdale as bargaining chips.  When you stop and think about that, it makes you realize just how "adult" of a story this mystery could truly be!

 

As with McFarlane's first entry into the Dana Girls' series, this second book also features some pranks played between the Danas and Lettie Briggs. When the sisters leave Miss Tisdale's car parked just outside the school's entrance, Lettie secretly moves it, so that the Danas believe the car has been stolen (pp. 65); later, when a private detective hired by Miss Tisdale's mother shows up at the school to talk with the Danas, Jean informs Lettie a man is there to see her, causing the girl to make a fool of herself before the private detective (pp. 119-21); and later yet, when the sisters purchase all the food necessary to make a good Thanksgiving dinner for Mrs. Brixton and her daughter, Lettie slyly steal the food and replaces it with rocks inside the container (pp. 151-53).  What is odd about the last trick is that the "mystery of the vanished dinner was forgotten (p. 154), and Lettie is never truly revealed as the culprit or made to reveal what she did with the food (did she throw it out? did she give it to the cook? did she simply eat it herself?).

 

And since we are on the topic of the Danas driving Miss Tisdale's car, for two girls who do not have a car of their own, they certainly manage to find transportation to use in the course of solving mysteries.  In the first book, they had free use of Mrs. Grantland's car, and now, in this story, they are given use of Miss Tisdale's car until they are able to locate the missing teacher.  Although, before they gain use of the car in this book, they are forced to walk quite a distance to the town of Hilton in order to follow in the steps of their teacher (pp. 16-17).  McFarlane seems to be spatially-impaired in his storytelling, just as Mildred Wirt was time-impaired, as he writes about Louise and Jean walking distances in a relatively short amount of time, but later in the same book, he describes how they drive these distances, and the driving takes a bit of time (in the first mystery, it was their trips to the park; in this mystery, it is the girls' trips to Hilton).  

 

McFarlane does include some references to Charles Dickens' classic tale, David Copperfield, which is a book that Jean is having to study in her English class (p. 10).  The book is mentioned several times throughout the story, and in one instance, makes a point of discussing the tempest scenes from the book, with Jean shuddering at "what a squall that was" (p. 72).  This is a bit of foreshadowing (given McFarlane in the outline), since the girls, along with their Uncle Ned, later face quite a dastardly squall of their own while going up and down the river next to Hilton in search of Miss. Tisdale (pp. 98-99).  Of course, that buffeting snowstorm is not their only danger, because they are also faced with a speedboat heading straight for them, threatening to crash right into them (p. 99).  It is quite the coincidence, since McFarlane had a similar near-miss of a boating accident in The Hardy Boys' The Mystery of Cabin Island, only that was with ice boats instead of speedboats.  However, the boat incident in this book is detailed in the outline, so one cannot say McFarlane was simply recycling ideas - he was merely following the outline.

 

One thing NOT in the outline that McFarlane seems to enjoy doing is inserting the title of his mysteries into the story itself.  If you recall, at the end of the first book, the comment was made how the Danas would never forget how precious the jewels looked "by the light of the study lamp."  In this book, not only does Uncle Ned remark at the end that they must hurry home to Aunt Harriet because she will want to hear all about "the secret at Lone Tree Cottage" (p. 218), but earlier in the book, the author has the girls find their uncle waiting for them in their dorm room, reaching a newspaper "by the light of the study lamp" (p. 154).  I will be curious to see if, in the third book, McFarlane manages to find a way to integrate all three titles into his story!

 

Finally, something that takes place in the story I can't ignore is when Jean and Louise, along with Mrs. Crandall, come across a cabin deep in the woods, not far from the river.  They see Miss Tisdale in an upstairs window, but they are too far away to hear her or for her to hear them.  So, Jean quickly says, "I'll try sign language" (p. 130), at which point she holds "up her hands and [makes] motions with her fingers such as deaf mutes use" (p. 130).  At no time has it ever been mentioned that Jean knows actual sign language, nor do I ever recall her using it again over the course of this series.  I know people often joke about how Nancy Drew can do anything, knows every language, etc.; but I was not aware that the Dana Girls also had that same gift.  Being an interpreter for the deaf and knowing American Sign Language, this scene stuck out to me, and I wish the Stratemeyers had made use of this talent in Jean and wrote a story that actually did involve some deaf characters, so that Jean could have truly made use of her gift.

 

The internal illustrations are once again provided by Ferdinand E. Warren, and a couple of them offer up some dramatic scenes - from Miss Tisdale narrowly missing a man waiting in the road, to the girls and Mrs. Crandall facing off against some rather vicious guard dogs, to Jean being pushed off of a moving vehicle!  The details of the illustrations from these early series books are so vibrant, and it is a shame they eventually moved away from fully painted illustrations to simple like pictures that eventually began to resemble nothing much more than stick figure drawings.  Warren also provided the "shadow" illustrations for the cover collage. I am not sure who provided the cover art when the format was changed to the wrap-spine edition; however, this book did have a brief run as a free volume during Grosset & Dunlap's "This Volume Free" promotion, where anyone buying the first book in the series would get the second volume for free.

 

This second volume of the Dana Girls Mystery Stories proved to be just as entertaining as the first, and I am enjoying reading a series where the girls do not necessarily have all of the freedoms of their contemporaries, such as Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys - while the girls do seem to come and go as they please quite a bit, those choices are not always without consequences, and often times it takes begging and pleadings, or for intervention by their Uncle Ned, before they can gain permission for their excursions.  I also am enjoying the playfulness of Jean, the spitefulness of Lettie, and the sternness of Mrs. Crandall.  These characters feel a bit more than just cardboard, copy-cutouts of Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys.  The Dana Girls have their own personalities with restrictions that seem similar to Trixie Belden than other Stratemeyer sleuths!

 

One final note - it appears there was a spelling error on one of the internal illustrations with the first printing.  The scene where Jean jumps on the running board of Tepper's car, and he then pushes her off before he gets going (page 186) - in the first printing, the tag line below the illustration says he "threw JOAN from the machine" rather than "JEAN."  It was obviously caught right away, because the printings thereafter show the correct spelling her name as "JEAN."   As you can see from the illustration to the right, the name is "JOAN" rather than "JEAN." Compare that with the corrected illustration shown above in this blog post.  Not sure if this was a publisher error or an editor's error (honestly, I'm not even sure who creates these tagline for the internal illustrations); but I think this is the first time I've ever seen a series book with a glaring error like this on an illustration.  Definitely an oddity to keep en eye out for!

 

RATING:  8 games of mental algebra out of 10 for a fairly challenging mystery that was less about the "whodunnit" and more about finding the missing person!