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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Lying in the Deep (2023) by Diana Urban was brought to my attention by a piece the author wrote on CrimeReads in which she said that she had taken the setup and some “iconic plot beats” from Death on the Nile (1938) by Agatha Christie in order to inform the structure of her own book. Holy lawsuit, Batman, colour me intrigued.
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The return of my In GAD We Trust podcast, and a welcome return for Alasdair Beckett-King, comedian and now children’s author.
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The Invisible Event 