The Secret Seven revisited

Good Old Secret Seven by Enid Blyton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Jack is given a telescope, which he shares with the Secret Seven, who notice strange doings at an old castle up on a hill.

Load shedding at 6:00 am, so I read Good Old Secret Seven, and finished it in an hour and a half before load shedding ended. I'd read a few of the Secret Seven books, but even as a child had not been very impressed with them. My main memory of them was the children's encounter with the village policeman who kept telling them to "Clear orf", but he didn't appear in this one. And the only one who seemed to have any character was Susie, the villain of the sub-plot, and she was far more interesting than the rest of them put together.

Perhaps that is because readers are expected to be familiar with the Secret Seven from reading the earlier books in the series, but, on the other hand, Susie is the sister of Jack, who seems to be one of the more prominent members of the group, so she probably makes an appearance in the other books as well.

Perhaps this is may also be because Enid Blyton's kid whodunits, in which a group of children encounter and outwit a group of criminals or other bad guys, are strictly age age graded. The Secret Seven books seem to be aimed at readers aged about 7-9, the Famous Five at readers aged about 8-9, the "Secret of" series at readers aged about 9-10, and the "of Adventure" series at readers aged about 10-12. The ones for older readers seem to have more definite characters. 

 

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Enid Blyton and the "Famous Five"

Five Go to Demon's Rock by Enid Blyton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book has all the usual Enid Blyton trade marks -- a superfluity of exclamation marks, stilted and unconvincing dialogue, and an adventure that doesn't begin until two-thirds of the way through the book. It also, however, has a weak and unconvincing plot.

So why did I buy it and read it?

We went to the library last Tuesday and it was closed -- a member of staff had tested positive for Covid-19, so all the rest of the staff were in quarantine. So we went to a second-hand bookshop to get something to read. I found  a few books, and then asked for their children's book section, but they only pointed me to a teenage books section. Then when I was paying for the other books, I saw this one in a pile on the counter, and picked it up. The woman in front of me in the queue said, "Ah, Enid Blyton, the Famous Five and the Secret Seven" and that started a conversation with a couple of staff members as well, who also recalled the Famous Five and the Secret Seven.

And I wondered about that. As a child, I read and enjoyed some books by Enid Blyton, but the Famous Five and the Secret Seven were not among them. I had read one or two Famous Five books and found them boring and unmemorable, and did not read any more. Now, as an adult, I bought this book mainly to see what the appeal was. And this one had all the faults of Enif Blyton's writing with none of the good points of her better children's adventure stories, like The Secret of Kilimooin and The Mountain of Adventure.

Arthur Ransome wrote some children's stories where the "adventure" was simply going and camping out on their own, so the adventure in this case, the children's encounter with some criminals, need not necessarily be the main part of the story, but even the camping part Arthur Ransome wrote so much better. He even, sometimes, included encounters with criminals, for example in The Big Six. But in this one the story was weak, and I didn't much like the characters either.

I bought this one, therefore, partly to see why I hadn't much liked the Famous Five as a child, and to see why the Famous Five were the first thing most people thought of if you mentioned Enid Blyton, or even children's adventure stories in general. And this one was a long way from being among the best of children's adventure stories, and also a long way from being among the best of Enid Blyton's ones.

The other reason for reading this one now is that I wrote a children's adventure story, which some reviewers compared with the Famous Five, and I rather hope that mine was a bit better than this one. 

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