Another case for Fatty, Bets, Daisy, Larry, and Pip, albeit one that rings a few minor changes…

The established pattern of the Five Find-Outers mysteries is that we start with one or other of the four siblings either lamenting an absence of adventure or eagerly awaiting Fatty’s return so that he might bring some mystery into their comfortably middle class lives. Imagine my surprise, then, when fourteenth title The Mystery of the Strange Messages (1957) opens instead with policeman Mr. Theophilus Goon receiving unusual missives at his home, with letters cut from newspapers, stuck on pieces of paper, and left for him to find in a variety of borderline impossible circumstances.

The purpose of these communications? To get Goon to visit someone in Peterswood called Smith who lives in a house called The Ivies, and to challenge Mr. Smith about secrets in his past that will hopefully see the man cast out. The only problem? There is no house in Peterswood called The Ivies. And so Goon goes to visit Fatty, convinced that Master Trotteville is playing a prank on him, and unwittingly brings the Five Find-Outers — yes, and dog — into the riddle.

From here, things progress in a manner that has come to betoken this series of (mostly) detective tales: with the sort of clever reasoning that you can well believe a group of young minds would conceive, and with the sort of good, old-fashioned Humdrum detective work that increasingly proves a balm to my crotchety, ageing soul. Blyton isn’t quite Agatha Christie’s class when it comes to construction, of course, but there’s a remarkable smoothness to some of this: Goon’s nephew Ern — alas, no sign of his brothers Sid and Perce — is brought in to keep watch for the letter writer, for one, and his compulsive “portry” writing, always finding the opening lines for a “pome” but then getting stuck, feeds back into the development of this plot so neatly that you’d swear Blyton had planned all this when Ern first appeared nine years earlier.

It’s the way the little details matter that’s the most pleasing thing about these books: that the name of the house is wrong, say, or the implication that the writer of the notes has obscured their fingerprints because “he’d had them taken already for some reason [and so] might have been in prison”. The reasoning required to get to the end isn’t always seamless, but witness, in its stead, the democratisation of the Five Find-Outers, with Daisy, of all people, being the one to come up with the key deduction that untangles the muddle. I mean, what is the world coming to?

The mystery resolves well, too, with the matter of both the who and the why of the letters wrapped up with several pages to go, allowing for some crowd-pleasing nighttime shenanigans and then a quick wrap up which was never in doubt (especially if you’ve more than glanced at the cover art above — cripes, who designed that and thought it would be a good idea to give everything away, and why did they make it look like Superintendent Jenks has a wooden leg?) and doesn’t linger once the answers have been provided. ”The jigsaw of the mystery was fitting together now” we’re told at one point, and seeing the pieces coalesce so well is always a pleasure when it happens in these books.

For a writer who is hardly recognised for her work in social realism, there’s a pleasing thread here of the lingering memory of wrong-doing, and the idea that the sins of the past should either stay there or, if paid for, should be allowed to pass from memory. See the elderly gardener Mr. Grimble’s unwillingness to dredge up old memories of Wilfrid Hasterley, or the lament that prison does as much damage to a man’s body as his reputation. This is nothing new, of course, but the sense of these books as simply light, forgettable fun from which there are no consequences and nothing worth troubling your little head about it somewhat shaken up here in a very deliberate way. No-one is going to be paying for counselling as a result of reading it, but Blyton didn’t need to include these elements yet still obviously felt compelled to.

My one gripe? If the Trottevilles have lived in Peterswood for nineteen years, as we’re told in chapter 7, then how did the Daykin and Hilton children not meet Fatty before The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage (1943)? And why were the Trottevilles living in the local hotel in that first book, hm? As complaints go, it’s pifflingly minor, however, and gives some indication of how strong this entry is in a series that doesn’t lack for strong entries. Detection for younger readers has rarely been demonstrated so cleanly and intelligently, and it’s with some regret that I note only a single entry in this series remains…and that’s widely understood to be a rather poor entry — indeed, strong enough to end the series for good, despite the four years it took to come to fruition. But we’ll get to that in due course, and naturally give it every chance to delight us as others in this series have; if this is the last hurrah for the Five Find-Outers, however, it’s certainly one that comes recommended.

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