After stumbling over the Five Find-Outers books and learning that there was more to Enid Blyton’s juvenile mysteries than a group of precocious youths seeing some lights in an unusual place and then stumbling over a smugglers’ plot, I turn my attention to her six ‘Barney’ mysteries which, I’m told, provided similar detectival delights.

The headline here, then, is that if the Barney mysteries represent Blyton’s detective novelist leanings — as often seen to such strong effect with the Find-Outers — it clearly wasn’t her intention when she wrote this first volume. Sorry to say, this is pretty generic Blytonia: precocious kids, mysterious lights, and smugglers foiled in time for lashings of sandwiches and ginger beer. Nothing here comes close to the mysteries she was writing elsewhere, and were it not for assurances received about future entries in this series I would happily not read one word more about Barney and his adventures.

Home for the summer holidays, fourteen year-old Roger Lynton and his thirteen year-old sister Diana are palmed off onto governess Miss Pepper on account of their parents being “away”. While not exactly delighted by the prospect of spending the time with Miss Pepper, they are even less enamoured of the notion of being cooped up with their 11 year-old cousin Peter (known throughout as Snubby) and his spaniel Loony.

Both Diana and Snubby would have to be kept in order these holidays, Roger was certain. Diana was cross and disappointed at being sent off with Miss Pepper to some place she had never heard of — she would be annoying and perhaps sulky. Snubby would be more irritating still, because he wouldn’t have Roger’s father to jump on him and yell at him. He would only have Miss Pepper, and Snubby hadn’t much opinion of women.

Spending the hols in the isolated Rockingdown Cottage, the three children are dismayed to learn that a tutor will be employed to fill in the gaps in the education and intrigued by the nearby, deserted and “pleasantly eerie” Rockingdown Manor. Before long, however, they meet Barney — the teenage equivalent of a hobo, really — and this monkey Miranda, and things start to look up: the older Barney, whose circus performer mother has died recently, is seeking the actor father whom he has never met, travelling the country and sleeping wherever the opportunity presents itself in pursuit of his goal.

What follows is fairly unsurprising, evincing many of the trappings of Blyton’s adventurous writings: intelligent animals, absent parents, a mystery that only young minds notice and set about solving, and a bit of mild peril sprinkled in for good measure. At times the vocabulary here feels more advanced than in the other books of Blytons I have read, but the novel as a whole is so very dull that I honestly don’t have the energy to examine that in any great depth. We’re in a sort of carefree post-war bubble where rationing once again fails to affect the availability of food for picnics and Barney is welcome at any meal held in Rockingdown Cottage, and where ne’er-do-wells are big on threatening language but more likely to offer someone who has stumbled across their scheme a job than to, say, actually cause him any harm.

Oh, look, it’s not completely without interest, I guess. There’s some atmospheric writing concerning the spooky old house, and one piece of identity is — if not exactly earth-shattering — at least well-wrought. And we do at least have an acknowledgement of the effect of war and death on people, and a hint of the sort of clandestine work done up and down the country that must have only been dimly in public awareness at the time of writing.

“Lady Rockingdown’s son was killed in a war and his wife died of a broken heart,” said the old woman, remembering. “The place went to a cousin, but he never lived there. He just let it. Then it was taken over in the last war, and some kind of secret work was done there — we never knew what.”

Her children are, as befits former teacher Blyton’s experience, well-observed, and there’s a reflection of sorts on the privilege the Lyntons enjoy in contrast to Barney’s at-first-glance more appealing existence…

[Diana] was worried about Barney. Was it comfortable to sleep under a haystack at night? Did he have enough money to buy himself the food he wanted? Suppose it rained? What did he do then? He didn’t seem to have any clothes except those he had on. What a strange life he must lead with Miranda — just the two of them, wandering about together

…say, or the fact that he has never received a formal education on account of his itinerant childhood. Not much is done with this, of course — we don’t come to Blyton for searing social realism — but it’s interesting to see it confronted, if only for a moment or two.

Even if I hadn’t come to this book expecting something else, however, I still doubt that there’s enough here to hold my attention. Buy, hey, I wasn’t the target market, so I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised. Having delighted in Blyton’s mystery-making elsewhere, however, it’s to be hoped that what’s on offer in this series takes a swift upturn in quality, or else I might not get much further into these adventures.