The second Nancy game, Stay Tuned for Danger, is also based on a Files book. This time it’s #17, which means there have been 16 books between this one and the last one I recapped, and I have no idea what happens in them. I’m not going to bother to find out, but this series barely has any continuity, so I’ll probably be fine.
The Files series was published very quickly, at the rate of about one book per month. This means that it was only 1987 when this book was published — Secrets Can Kill was released in 1986, for reference — thus it is still the ’80s and thus, soap operas are wildly popular and mainstream. Let’s have a book centered around one, and while we’re at it, let’s throw in a reference to Donald Trump, too. It will age like a fine wine.
Nancy and Bess are on their way to New York, at the behest of Nancy’s Aunt Eloise. Oh, hey, Aunt Eloise! Nice to see you’re in this series after all. George drops them off at the airport and exposits that she won’t be coming along, as she’s set to participate in an upcoming marathon and being athletic is her only character trait. At the airport, Nancy eats an ice cream sundae and Bess looks at it “longingly” because haha Bess fat.
We cut to Nancy and Bess arriving at Aunt Eloise’s apartment. Bess notes that there are trees in the backyard, and Aunt Eloise tells her that ~actually~, in New York, it’s called a courtyard, which seems like a weird show-offy nitpick. Aunt Eloise is such a transplant. Nancy chirps that she’s really looking forward to relaxing and not solving any mysteries, which prompts Aunt Eloise to admit that there is, in fact, a mystery afoot. Nancy is oddly unenthused, saying she doesn’t want to hear about it, but then Aunt Eloise says it has to do with a TV show and Bess makes Nancy do it because she wants to meet famous people. Jesus, Bess, you’re getting a free trip to New York and staying in a fancy apartment because Nancy was generous enough to let you come along to visit her aunt. As uncharacteristic as it is, maybe you should respect that she doesn’t want to work on her vacation.
Anyway, Aunt Eloise lives in the same building as one Mattie Jensen, star of the soap opera Light of Our Love Danner’s Dream. Lately, strange things have been happening to the show’s male lead, Rick Arlen (“daytime’s cutest hunk”, as the game tells us). Mattie heard that Aunt Eloise’s amateur detective niece was coming to stay with her, and decided that the best way to get to the bottom of this is to fuck up an 18-year-old’s vacation. Bess says George loves Rick Arlen, too, and is shocked that Nancy isn’t familiar with the show — Mattie and Rick’s characters are “the hottest couple on the soaps!” I guess Bess and George have plenty of time to watch daytime TV, since they’re not ever mentioned or implied to be in college or have jobs.
The next day, Bess and Nancy accordingly go to the TV set. There are several tour groups milling around, and Nancy overhears them trashing Rick Arlen for — as rumor has it — thinking of leaving the show to become a movie star. Nancy specifically notices a man in the group, whom she overhears saying, “You’ll find out, Rory [Rick’s character]. You’re not that great.” Also trashing Rick Arlen is the show’s producer, William Pappas, who’s demanding a violent death scene for Rory if Rick leaves the show. Then he yells at someone to get him a pastry. Bess is like, “What an asshole,” which is also what I said when I met a TV producer in real life. (She was a customer who came into my job at the time. She was a dick. Just had to get that off my chest.)
Bess and Nancy go to meet Mattie. Nancy tells Mattie that she’s here on vacation and doesn’t want to get too involved, but Mattie’s like, “Stop saying words.” She insists that Nancy has to help, as Rick is in real danger: someone sent him gross chocolate, then followed that up with a watch and a note saying “Your time’s running out.” Rick refuses to go to the police and ask for help, as he’s not taking any of this seriously.
Speaking of whom, he makes his entrance just then, announcing that he’s received a new threat. This time, it’s a torn-up photo of himself, accompanied by a note that says “If you won’t be mine, you won’t be anybody’s.” He’s offended that someone would tear up his face, but not actually frightened by the threat, and he refuses to go to the police, again, some more. He blows off Nancy and Bess when Mattie tries to introduce them, but this doesn’t deter Bess, who insists that Nancy has to help Rick because he’s “such a hunk.”
Defeated by Mattie and Bess’s total disrespect for her time and boundaries, Nancy agrees to stay and look for clues. They go down to the set and meet another suspect: Lillian Weiss, the assistant director, whom Nancy immediately describes as beautiful. So true, even the graphics of 1999 couldn’t ruin her incredible bone structure. Lillian is all mean and impatient and seems to particularly hate Rick, for reasons that I’m sure will soon be revealed.
During a scene, disaster strikes again: a klieg light falls and nearly hits Rick. Nancy pushes him out of the way and they fall on top of each other. Rick takes the opportunity to hit on Nancy and invite her back to his dressing room. Lillian assumes Nancy set this whole thing up (somehow?) to meet Rick, and she makes a catty remark about Nancy being a starfucker. In total fairness, Secrets Can Kill did not exactly make me think Nancy has good judgment or restraint when it comes to rich blonde guys. That said, she thinks Rick is pretty skeevy, so Bess has to pick up the slack re: having terrible taste in men. She must have broken up with her boyfriend from book #1 sometime in the intervening 16 books, because she’s all about going to Rick’s dressing room to “get to know each other a little better.” Bess is lucky she’s a fictional character, because this would end so badly in real life.
Nancy tries to ask Rick about his recent string of threats and accidents, but he blows her off and just keeps smarming about how lucky he is and how hot Bess and Nancy are. The game actually sticks pretty close to how Rick speaks in the book — they even kept in the way he keeps calling Nancy and Bess “love.” He’s being super corny and weird, but silly Bess thinks his lines are romantic, and she stays in his dressing room when Nancy goes back to investigate the set. Once again, Bess is so lucky this is a book for preteens.
Back at the set, Nancy walks in on an argument between Pappas and Dwayne Powers Casper, Mattie’s agent. Dwayne is infuriated that Mattie might’ve been injured, but Pappas is mostly annoyed by his presence and kicks him out. Then he asks who set up the lighting rig that day and fires the guy on the spot. Damn. RIP to that guy.
Nancy is suspicious, so she pokes around a bit and finds a clamp that’s been sawed off, proving the light was purposely rigged to fall. Pappas suspects a rando from a tour group might’ve done it, so he closes the set to visitors. (He doesn’t say anything about rehiring the lighting guy, though. It’s fine; the technicians’ union is probably preparing to sue Worldwide Broadcasting as we speak.) Since the set is now closed, Nancy and Bess have to leave.
Nancy goes to retrieve Bess and runs into Lillian in the hall. Lillian is once again overly aggressive and catty about Rick hitting on Nancy. Nancy gets curious and goes into the room that Lillian exited, finding it to be the prop room. She has a brief encounter with the wacky propmaster, who’s some semi-senile old guy. In the game, the propmaster is a fully-fleshed out suspect (and also a woman, because it was 1999 and girl power was in); however, in this book, he just appears in this one scene. He tells Nancy that he didn’t see Lillian come in, and in fact, she never comes into the prop room if she can help it. Nancy is suspicious again, some more.
Nancy finally makes it back to Rick’s dressing room and finds Bess about to make out with him. She is rightly disgusted by this, especially when Bess tells her that Rick asked her out the next day. Nancy worries that the culprit is still out there and it’s not safe, but Bess and Rick are both like, “Stop saying words.” Rick invites Nancy to make it a double date with a friend of his, and she accepts — partly to watch out for another attack, and partly to make sure Bess doesn’t let Rick smarm his way into her pants.
Back at Aunt Eloise’s apartment, Mattie comes over for dinner. She’s not at all happy to hear Bess bragging about being in Rick’s dressing room and warns her that Rick has broken a lot of hearts and stepped on a lot of people on his way to soap opera fame. Bess, like the cliche Girl Who Is About To Get Tragically Used from every YA book ever, insists that Mattie doesn’t know Rick like she does. Mattie’s like, “You literally met him today.”
Nevertheless, she facilitates getting Bess and Nancy jobs as extra on the set, so Nancy can keep snooping around and Bess can keep…setting feminism back, I guess. When they get to set, though, another disaster occurs: someone’s changed the teleprompter to say YOUR TIME IS UP, RICK ARLEN. I’M GOING TO KILL YOU. Hee! No points for subtlety. The teleprompter operator protests her innocence, but Pappas refuses to listen, and he fires both her and the security guy on the spot. Nancy’s like, “He’s taking these threats so seriously! What a great boss!”
Rick once again thinks the whole thing is a joke, and he needles Mattie for freaking out about it. Then Dwayne shows up and he and Rick have a pissing contest over Mattie. Rick tells Mattie she ought to work with a real agency instead of Dwayne’s sad little one-man operation, but Mattie says she feels loyal to Dwayne, since he was the only agent to take a chance on her when she first arrived in NYC.
The next day, Bess and Nancy go on their date with Rick. He’s set Nancy up with some guy named “Gil” who is a wannabe standup comedian and tells a bunch of lame jokes and his real name is Fred Gilbert but he had to change it when he got to New York and he dyes his hair and he is literally only in this one section so I don’t know why we’re getting all this background about him. Anyway, Nancy thinks he’s kind of charming, but quickly self-corrects: There was no way that she was going to fall for any of Rick Arlen’s friends—not when she was in love with Ned Nickerson. Of course, Ned would understand her being on this date—she had to go. Someone’s life was in jeopardy. I bet Ned hears that excuse all the time.
They take an ostensibly-romantic boat ride around Manhattan, and all goes well up until they’re about to disembark. All of the tourists on the boat suddenly recognize Rick at once, and then a guy attacks Rick, shrieking that Rory Danner has to die for “destroying” Mattie’s character. Nancy recognizes him as the guy from the studio tour, who was muttering about how he wanted to kill Rory. The ship’s crew manage to pin him down and the police show up, and Rick’s like, “Glad that’s over!” Then he adds they should celebrate: “Why not go for the best! Driver—take us to Trump Tower!” HEE!
Bess marvels at the tower and wants to know why the apartments are so expensive: “What do they have, solid gold faucets?” Oh, Bess, if only you knew. They do some more touristy shit at the Empire State Building and Tavern on the Green, and I feel the need to mention I only know about Tavern on the Green from the first Princess Diaries book. Anyway, as they wind down the date, a taxi comes out of nowhere and tries to run Bess and Rick over. Rick immediately dives behind a tree, leaving Nancy to pull Bess out of the way. Tragically, this does not make Bess any less dickmatized, and Nancy frets that Bess doesn’t even seem to realize that hanging with Rick is putting her in danger.
Nancy calls Ned that night and tells him about the case, asking if he can share some insight. Ned bizarrely delivers a line that sounds straight out of a game: “Sounds like you need some on-the-scene help. I’d be on the next flight, but I have a big paper due. I do want you to promise not to take any unnecessary chances, though.” What does this mean? Is “on-the-scene help” a clue? Do I need to go back to the set for the game to progress? Anyway, this would’ve been a nice place to show how Ned is still a good partner for Nancy despite not being a detective himself. I always liked it when, in the games, Ned was able to draw on having more book-learning than Nancy and could complement her practical smarts with explaining suspects’ literary references or giving her background on whatever 19th-century treasure she was looking for.
But I guess we don’t have any room for that since we spent like 10 pages on Gil’s budding stand-up career. Anyway! Mattie comes over and Nancy is surprised to realize that Mattie is clinging onto Nancy and Aunt Eloise because she doesn’t seem to have any real friends, despite how famous she is.
Mattie, like Rick, assumes that the crazy boat guy is our culprit and is relieved that the evil has been defeated. Nancy corrects her: the taxi incident happened after that guy had been arrested so it must be someone else, and when Rick received the damaged photo of himself, it had his resume stapled to the back, which a random member of the public wouldn’t have. (At least not in 1987, before actors had websites with their CVs on them.)
Mattie says that any old rando wouldn’t have Rick’s resume, but most people in the industry would — even Dwayne, since he used to be Rick’s agent. Nancy is shocked by this, and Mattie explains that she, Rick, and Dwayne met “in an acting company doing Shakespeare in Oregon” and I laugh because this is indeed a real thing and my high school drama club’s annual “fancy” trip was going up there every spring. (The choir kids got to go to Disneyland. Sigh.) Tragically for Dwayne, his acting career stalled while Rick and Mattie got famous. Nancy wants to snoop around Dwayne’s office for clues and Mattie advises her to pretend to be a new actress looking for an agent.
Rick calls for Bess, which makes Mattie all emo. Nancy realizes Mattie still likes Rick. Oh, Mattie, you’re actually not nearly as annoying in the book as you are in the game, whereas Rick is way worse. You can do better than this.
Nancy goes to sleep and has an ominous dream about a shadowy figure with eyes of “indescribable evil” stalking Rick. Heh. Let’s not be too dramatic here. When she wakes up, she realizes Bess is gone and flips out, but Bess turns out to have just gone on a nighttime drive with Rick. Nancy suggests that perhaps going out alone, in the middle of a night, with a guy who just experienced two (2) attempts on his life is not the best idea. Bess gets all pissy that Nancy is throwing off her groove.
Nancy goes out for a walk the next morning and is bizarrely happened upon by Lillian. Lillian continues to be even weirder by casually telling Nancy that Rick is going to die and he has it coming so there’s no point in trying to stop it. Both Nancy and I are confused as to why Lillian hauled ass across New York City to find Nancy in a random park, just to have a five minute conversation wherein she implicates herself as the culprit.
Nancy goes to breakfast with Aunt Eloise and Mattie. Mattie reveals that Rick dumped her for Lillian, but as soon as he used Lillian for her film industry connections, he dumped her, too. Mattie says that Lillian really holds onto her grudges, and Nancy’s like, “Intriguing!” She’s not intrigued enough to, you know, investigate Lillian any further, though. Then she gets a call at the restaurant: “You have a phone call,” the manager said. “You can pick it up at the main desk by the coatrack.” Man, I can’t believe we used to live like this before cell phones. The call turns out to be from the villain, who yells at Nancy to stay away from Rick Arlen.
Does Nancy stay away? Of course not. She swings by Dwayne’s office and, as advised by Mattie, pretends to be an aspiring actress. “Well, well, well— What shall we do about that?” Dwayne pursed his lips, thinking. Then he stood up, walked to the door, and locked it. “So we won’t be disturbed,” he explained.” SO CREEPY.
Nancy tells Dwayne that she heard he used to represent Rick, and Dwayne is like, “I must confess that the man has NO TALENT!” He seethes that Rick has no loyalty, either, and one day he’ll learn that screwing people over has consequences. Gosh, do you think Dwayne is out for revenge?
Bess shows up, pretending to be another actress, and successfully distracts Dwayne while Nancy rifles through his stuff. She finds a bunch of eviction notices and letters from collection agencies. But not a ticket to Brazil? Get on my level, Nancy; I found that in his office ten years ago. Bess mentions that people tell her she looks just like Mattie Jensen, and Dwayne flips his shit about how NOBODY looks like Mattie and HOW DARE Bess compare herself to THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN TO GRACE GOD’S GREEN EARTH. Nancy muses that Dwayne seems to have a crush on Mattie. Yes, yes he does, which means that…maybe…he has a(nother) reason to hate Rick? Maybe even a motive? Nancy, I am begging you to draw some conclusions here.
After snooping, she makes her escape, and she and Bess go over to the set. As soon as they arrive, they hear screams and follow them to Rick’s dressing room. Rick and his assistant come out covered in blood and tell everyone that the mirror exploded. Luckily Rick was covering his face at the time, lest he no longer be daytime’s cutest hunk, but his hands were badly injured and he has to go to the hospital. Bess and Nancy follow, but Mattie gets there first, and they overhear Rick confessing his love for her: “Mattie, I need you so badly—no one else ever meant a thing to me. You’re the only one I’ve ever loved!” Bess runs off crying and Nancy’s like, “Wow, who could’ve seen this coming.”
When they go back to Aunt Eloise’s apartment, they receive a ticking package but it turns out to just be a clock. Eloise is shaken up that someone is trying to scare Nancy away, but Nancy’s like, “Whatever, they’re going to have to actually try to kill me to get my attention.” They only have one full day left in New York, and Nancy vows to solve the case before then.
Mattie gets Bess and Nancy parts as extras again so that they can get back on the set. Someone tries to kill Rick again but fails. Nancy’s like, “Wow, I guess I better solve this mystery soon :/”
She goes to dinner with Bess and Aunt Eloise, and their waiter is a struggling actor who pretends to be French when he serves them, just to practice his ~craft. This prompts Nancy to finally be like, “OMG, sometimes people pretend to be something they’re not! What if the culprit disguised himself to get onto the set?!” We are, for reference, literally 87% of the way through the book.
This revelation does not lead any more actual detecting, though, because Lillian calls and is like, “I’ve solved the case for you, meet me before rehearsal starts when nobody is on the set.” Not suspicious at all! Nancy goes anyway, wherein Lillian tells her that at first she was happy to just sit back and let the culprit kill Rick, but then she did some digging, and now the villain is after her, too. Nancy’s like, “Ooh, tell me who it is, because I have no idea!”
Now, of course, we have the reveal: Dwayne turns the lights on and announces that he’s trapped Lillian and Nancy on the set and now he’s going to kill them. If only Lillian had, you know, not arranged this meeting in the empty studio that she knows full well Dwayne has successfully been sneaking into for the past month. Seriously, what was the logic here? Anyway, Dwayne crazies that Rick has to die because he killed Dwayne’s self-esteem by eclipsing his acting career and stealing Mattie. He has a gun, but Nancy tackles him and only gets clipped when he tries to shoot. This is basically the same thing that happened during the showdown at the end of book #1 (with Daryl getting hurt instead of Nancy). I can only assume — although maybe that’s optimistic — that the intervening 16 books had different endings and it wasn’t as obvious that they pulled the “culprit shoots and slightly injures one of the protagonists” ending twice. Then the police show up to arrest Dwayne. Lillian has fainted and Nancy is all judgmental about how sure, Lillian might’ve figured out Dwayne was the culprit, but she was no help at all in fighting him off. Heh. Jealousy isn’t a good look, Nancy.
So Dwayne goes to jail and Nancy and Bess depart for Illinois. Rick and Mattie come to see them off at the airport (at the gate! Oh, pre-9/11 times) bearing flowers, which makes Nancy think that perhaps Rick isn’t such a “heel” after all. Because she’s eighty years old. Rick still is a total heel, though, because the flowers weren’t his idea and he doesn’t really give a shit about leading Bess on. In fact, he and Mattie are now engaged! Also, Pappas agreed to kill Rory Danner off so Rick can go be a movie star, so everything is coming up Rick Arlen and he hasn’t learned anything from this. So…good luck, Mattie. Oh, and Pappas has rehired everyone he fired — Mattie says it’s “All thanks to you, Nancy,” but I bet it’s because the stagehands were unionized and were going to sue. Also, we are really giving Nancy a lot of credit for completely failing to solve the mystery.
Back in Illinois, Nancy and Bess reunite with George. Bess has been disillusioned about the acting industry and says she wants to be model now instead, because modeling is totally safe and nobody in the modeling industry would ever use her like Rick Arlen did! Nancy and George just cackle that Bess is too fat to be a model. George needles Bess for details about meeting Rick, but Bess just snipes that he’s not even that dreamy anyway and she’s done with men forever. Then she sees a hot guy pass by and gets all twitterpated. Nancy and George have a hearty chortle over how fickle Bess is, and that’s how the book ends. Glad that’s what we’re taking away from all this.
Man. That was a slog, tbh. This book was surprisingly boring, given how fun the game is. There’s a lot of action, what with the explosions and attempted hit-and-runs and acid attacks, but it still doesn’t actually feel like much is happening? After every near-death experience, Nancy just wibbles about how omg, someone is really truly trying to kill Rick, and who could it be! But let’s not bother investigating; instead, let’s go on another date! A truly excessive amount of the book is spent detailing Bess’s doomed love affair, which like…as a subplot it’s fine, but who really needed an entire chapter of them swanning around Trump Tower?
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