In the most recent episode of our podcast, I mentioned how Agatha Christie’s The Moving Finger (1942) was the book which made me appreciate how threatening a poison pen campaign could actually be. And four years after Christie used the conceit to drive a town mad, surprise Crime Writers’ Association member Enid Blyton made it the background for some childhood japes. What fun!
We start once again with poor, youngest Find-Outer Bets waiting for everyone else to returns from boarding school — it has to be said that to woke, early 21st century eyes the amount of assumed privilege in this book is frankly astonishing — that they may hopefully stumble upon a fourth mystery to solve. And the novelty this time around is that when a mystery does fall into their laps they first need to penetrate the mystery of what that mystery is since everyone — their parents (taking a sudden an unexpected interest in the lives of their children), the Hired Help (feeling that the topic under discussion is Not For Your Eyes Or Ears), and of course the policeman Mr. Goon (who, you feel, might be the Professor Snape of this series when I consider how I’d struggle to deal patiently with such a group of self-satisfied youngsters) — seems keen to keep the details away from them, despite their previous successes in this field.
Although — spoiler in the title — when it turns out to be a tide of poisonously spiteful letters, the Find-Outers are again struck by a previously-unconsidered difficulty beyond simply finding out who is sending them:
“[I]t’s no use looking for footprints or cigarette ends or dropped hankies or anything like that. There’s just nothing at all we can find for clues.”
Indeed, the genius of Christie’s take on this is that her eventual solution hinges specifically on the absence of a clue; such subtleties are possibly lost on Blyton’s younger audience and so some manufacturing of Things to Do is needed, and a delightful sequence ensues in which Pip and Bets try to outdo each other in Fatty’s eyes as having the best idea.
Pip did not look too pleased. He always thought of Bets as his baby sister, and didn’t want her to receive too much praise.
I can’t help you with the Americanisms, sorry, since I only have these books in the Swedish translations, but I can tell you that the translators easily skirted this issue in chapter 18 by not mentioning any denomination at all: “I’d bet a million on it”. 🙂
This was one of my first three books in this series (“Disappearing Cat”, “Spiteful Letters” and “Vanished Prince”), and therefore it holds a very nostalgic place in my heart. I remember this with a lot of fondness and can’t find much negative to say about it at all.
And the very beginning is really funny with Fatty disguising himself and fooling old man Goon completely.
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Well, they don'[t have money in Sweden, do they? Everything’s free. So any mention of currency would confuse the poor young Swedes and start the entire county on the path to financial armageddon.
I have nothing negatie to say about the plot or the manner of its unfolding — it’s lovely, in fact, to see Blyton taking on a different type of mystery where the way to proceed is so nebulous and abstract. It’s difficult to do that, and to have the parents wishing to shield the children from it, while also having the plot progress in a meaningful way.
Man, I sm so enjoying this set of books. Sure, there’s gonna be a duff one at some point. That’s fine. For what she’s done in these opening volumes, Blyton has earned my patience as well as my GAD-loving respect.
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The plot to erase British spelling has been carried out methodically over the years with supreme care. It began with Operation Past Simple. So far, we Yanks have scored a victory by destroying the ghastly ‘lighted’ (elegantly repeating the participle ‘lit’) and made progress in ed’ing ‘burnt’ and ‘learnt’ out of existence. By next year, ‘got’ will be gone, replaced by ‘gotten’ and forever changing the phrase, “Have you got any pocket money?” to a more utilitarian “Do you have…” Before you realize it (with a ‘z’, not an ‘s’ or a ‘zed’) you will recognize our spelling as the correct one and apologize with good humor.
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I always assumed that the -t end to past participles was the AmericaniZed version. Consider “spelt”, which is a grain in my house (well, no, it isn’t, on account of my gluten intolerance), vs. “spelled” — surely only the English mind could cope with such distinctions. Americans only have one “practise” after all…
I think I just like The Old Ways. I write about “clewing” after all, and read books relying on obscure principles from the 1930s (party telephone lines, entails, cranking handles for cars) for fun. And all this new music makes my ears hurt. Ouch, my knees…
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My 1988 Armada edition also has “inquiries” and “million dollars”.
I read a few books of this series in Portuguese when I was a child; I reread them a few years ago and had to get all the others, this time in English.
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Huh, good to know — thank-you. Can anyone go earlier than 1988?
It amazes me to hear so many people knew of this series — well, no, it doesn’t amaze me they knew of it, since Blyton is a hugely popular author and they’ve been republished a number of times. It amazes me that these books weren’t more discussed in the fandom of classic mysteries; they’re textbook examples of how to write this sort of story, and even the impossible crimes are workable. I would have been raving about them from the rooftops!
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This is the first – and only, so far – Find-Outers mystery I have read (thanks to you, JJ!), and I thoroughly enjoyed it, as my own review will bear out. Subsequently, I have gathered together nine or ten more titles and, in the ways of a GAD hoarder, have read none of them yet. But just you wait, my pretties. The time will come when I enter my second childhood and have the leisure to savour these.
So about that British “u” JJ: I wrote savour for you . . . and my computer promptly underlined it in red. That red line . . . whoa! It’s doing my OCD no favours. Oh, God! There it goes again . . . We Americans are trained out of using the “u” through Word and Google and all things American. It can’t be helped. Perhaps if I dictated my responses to my secret-tree . . . or, is that a desk?
Never mind: we cut out all the “u”s, and you Brits refuse to say the letter “r.” It’s a fair exchange.
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I was at a secondhand book market over the weekend and there were about nine or ten of the Find-Outer books there, and I had a moment of dearly wishing there was someone I could buy them for. Then I had a few moments of “Well, I don’t own these particular editions…” but managed to shake off that notion. Multiple Crofts, Carr, Gardner, Christie, Rawson, etc should suffice for now. Best to leave those Blytons for someone else to find and love.
As for Americanizzzzzed spellings, I’m aware that I’m three steps away from writing a letter to my local paper when I sigh a little inside at the incidents of “realized” or “pants” or “butt” or “pajamas” that seem to be invading British versions of books. I’m aware the English language is a flexible thing, and I know the prevalence of TV and movies has a huge cultural impact…but, like, spelling, people — c’mon.
Anyway, it shall continue to happen whether I gripe about it or not. Time to pick another fight I can’t influence and won’t win.
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Well, if British spelling is influenced by American spelling, get ready – because it seems like America is doing away with spelling altogether. I blame it on texting and the fools on Twitter, many of whom are either Kardashians or leaders of the free world.
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I know, right, all these young people with their texting and their jitterbugging and baggy trousers. With all the mumbled lyrics in their music and no-one releasing CDs any more with booklets containing the lyrics, it’s no wonder none of them can spell.
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I’m not familiar with Enid Blyton except as a kids’ author I missed when I was a kid, but I’ll have to check this one out, in spite of now being way older than her target audience. I’m struck by what all those covers, from the cartoonish to the realistic, have in common, namely the font used for the author’s name… I guess Blyton got to be so big her name became a trademark, kind of like Walt Disney!
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Y-you say that like I’m not older than her target audience… 😉
That’s a great point about her signature/name font, I hadn’t recognised that. The same is true of Agatha Christie, too, since British (and I’m sure international) editions of her books have the same looping-A-Agatha font which must be a signature, now doubtless trademaked and copyrighted up the wazoo. Any others anyone can think of?
Anyway, my definitely-adult self can highly recommend these titles, and the detection community that hasn’t yet got on board with Blyton as one of our own needs to do so sharpish!
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Speaking of the covers, I think the ones you’ve included above are fine, but very obviously directed towards children.
In Sweden, the Find-Outers have been published in four distinct variants. (Not editions, because there have been more than four of those, but four different versions from three different publishers with distinctly different covers.)
On this site, http://www.monsterashistoria.se/mysterie.htm, all of them are shown, as well as the first English edition. I think the second Swedish variant is by far the best, even compared with all the English covers I’ve seen. I don’t think anyone would mistake them for adult mysteries, but they’re not as obviously directed towards children as are the English ones.
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I love those first Swedish variants, with the single-colour backgrounds and line drawings — they’re beautiful. Man, some old-style cover art is so goddamned amazing; it really hold up over the decades, hey?
With an interest in well-designed mass produced paperback covers rising again, let’s hope that in 50+ years we’re able to look back on some of the superb work being done now — mostly, admittedly, on reprints — with as much enthusiasm.
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Inquire is not an Americanism. I looked up Fowler on the subject of ’em- & im-, en- & in-‘ and it reads:
‘Tenacious clinging to the right of private judgement is an English trait that a mere grammarian may not presume to deprecate, & such statements as the OED’s “The half latinized ‘enquire’ still subsists beside ‘inquire'” will no doubt long remain true.’
Also see ‘A Murder is Announced’.
Possibly dollars is what Mr Goon says in his character of a vulgarian.
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I…don’t even know what that means, but I’m interested to learn it isn’t an Americanizm. Who is Fowler, by the way?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Modern_English_Usage
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Ah, so the (English) precursor to Strunk & White. Nice.
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Solution to the “dollar” question?
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/dollar
About halfway down the page, we have this definition: “British informal: (formerly) five shillings or a coin of this value”
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That…that actually sounds pretty reasonable, hey? Superb research! This will teach me to jump to conclusions (well, no, I don’t need any help with that…but you know what I mean).
Thank-you, genuinely, for passing this on. I’m fascinated and shall research further.
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Yes, definitely her name written that way (imitating her actual signature) became a distinctive trade mark. It’s in the Spanish editions of her works too, and as a child when I saw a book in the book shop with that signature, it was like a promise “there’s a good story inside”. I was quite sad a few years later when I discovered that Enid Blyton had died a decade before I was even born. Rest in peace, Enid, and thanks for all the adventures.
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