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.
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Having recently read the twentieth novel in the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, and the tenth to be written by someone other than series creator Robert Arthur, my mind turns to how Jupe, Pete, and Bob have fared with multiple hands now directing their fates.
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Comments were made in the, er, comments of my previous Three Investigators review, The Secret of Phantom Lake (1973) regarding an apparently love-it-or-hate-it element to the next title in the series, The Mystery of Monster Mountain (1973) by M.V. Carey. So, well, let’s get into it.
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Last weekend, it was my distinct honour to present for a fourth time at the Bodies from the Library conference, in this instance on the topic of Enid Blyton’s detective fiction as represented by her Five Find-Outers series.
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One final mystery for Fatty, Bets, Daisy, Larry and Pip as, nearly seven years after first discovering them myself, and after a literary life spanning some 18 years, the Five Find-Outers and dog reach the end of the road.
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A fourth and — the blurb tells us — final go around for precocious young Aggie Morton and her Belgian friend Hector Perot…but, really, how much trouble can these two get up to on a palaeontological expedition on a Dorset beach?
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It was after finishing Stuart Gibbs’ Moon Base Alpha trilogy that I turned my eye upon his FunJungle novels, wondering if he brought the same sense of open-handed clewing and enjoyable detection to his other books. And, as it happened, he had just published sixth FunJungle title Tyrannosaurus Wrecks (2020), in which a Tyrannosaurus skull disappears from muddy surrounds with no footprints to account for its removal. Colour me intrigued…
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Another case for Fatty, Bets, Daisy, Larry, and Pip, albeit one that rings a few minor changes…
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Pirates! Sunken ships! Mysterious treasure! A race to unscramble a message from beyond the grave! I promise you that The Secret of Phantom Lake (1973) by William Arden, the nineteenth title in the Three Investigators series, contains all these things. So why the hell is there a cowboy on the front cover?
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On one hand, the artwork promoting The Detention Detectives (2023) by Lis Jardine is excessively twee, even by the standards of juvenile fiction; on the other, the author bio mentions that her life has “been shaped by a fierce passion for…Golden Age crime”. Thus, recalling that adage about books and covers, I ventured forth.
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The Invisible Event 