Well, if you thought this book was slow to get going, you’ll just love Mystery of the Hidden House, where half the book goes by while the five play fool tricks on Ern Goon, and only get into the real mystery when Ern tumbles head-first into it. Although Mystery of the Burnt Cottage has the cottage burning by the end of page one, I’ve noticed that most of the five find-outer stories do begin with the kids – often Bets – bemoaning the fact that no mystery has come along, and that there’s only three weeks left ’til they have to go back to school. It really is a very common theme.
I actually quite enjoy the stuff where the kids are hanging around, getting up to mischief because no mystery has come along to keep them busy with something more constructive. At least in Mystery of the Strange Bundle Enid has found a creative sub-plot, of them all having the ‘flu: it rings the changes on Fatty disguising himself just for a lark, or just to annoy Mr Goon, or just to deceive Ern. But actually, in the first 14 stories, she does very well, consistently coming up with tales that are interesting in themselves, and would be fun to read even if no mystery ever happened (Banshee Towers was a bit of a disaster, written so long after the others that she had completely forgotten how to structure it to match the style of the earlier books: don’t get me started on all the things I thought were wrong with that one!)
I enjoy the strange world the kids inhabit, where all the families are so poor they have to live in small houses in a tiny village, but yet are so rich that they can all afford to employ cooks, parlour maids and gardeners. Yet the Hiltons live next door to Lady Candling, so rub shoulders with the Aristocracy. And in the first book, the Trottevilles are living in a hotel opposite the burning cottage: what a scream, a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, but it has its own Hotel!
And the kids are constantly worried that there’ll be no mystery before they have to leave Peterswood and go back to school: meaning, everyone except Bets goes to boarding school! Even Buster! How many kids did you know whose folks were so rich they could afford to send all their offspring away to school?
Giving a kind of enchantment, that distances the stories from the modern world, is the fact that the kids don’t have mobile phones (they use public telephone boxes – horror!), but do have old money. Somehow it gives a quaint picturesque feeling, that the stories really are taking place in another world. It’s such a different world that it really seems more like an E.Nesbit tale of the late Victorian Age, when families did perhaps still employ cooks and housemaids, send their children away to school, and give them half-a-crown a week pocket money.
There is so much going on in these stories, and so much of it is strange and exotic to our way of thinking, that you hardly notice you’re half way through Mystery Strange Bundle and no sniff yet of a mystery in sight. But these are well-bred kids: there’s no hanging around on street corners, no smoking, no swearing, no chasing girls, no pub-haunting, no punch-ups. The list of bad habits they never get into is endless, making the stories seem very far removed indeed from the modern world.
As has happened before (in Mystery Spiteful Letters), a bundle of clues falls into Mr Goon’s lap, and he promptly hands it over to the five find outers. So perhaps there’s some indication that Enid is beginning to run out of fresh ideas in this one. But it doesn’t really grate, nor harm the story. Goon is as dim-witted as ever, and even Bets is now able to run rings around him, instead of merely being frightened of him. The fact that the village actually has its own policeman is another element which places this tale in a never-never land of the remote past: such things were long past when even I was growing up.
This is a nicely written, humorous, fun tale; with a decent mystery to boot. But these are not modern kids, and this is not the modern world: this is a fairy-tale world that never really existed, of boarding schools, impossible village life, aristocrats, children who are smarter than the police, middle-class families who are impossibly wealthy, and a hero (Fatty) with a politically incorrect name and waist size, who could out-think Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot combined.
Even the book-burners who love to alternately ban and re-write Blyton can’t keep up with the number of changes needed in these stories, to disguise the tales as modern stories of modern children in the modern world.
Enid Blyton, Humour –
My favourite Enid Blyton joke :
In the ‘Five Find Outers’: Daisy has a baby, and doesn’t know how it happened, in The Mystery of the Strange Bundle. :-)
Stephen Poppitt's Blog-o-Sphere 