Another of Blyton's many mystery stories17 June 2012tAfter having read the first five of the Famous Five books I decided to try a different one of Blyton's mystery stories, and thus I picked up this one where the group is known as the Five Finder-outers and Dog. Actually I have noticed that Blyton wrote a number of books using different groups of children, which includes the Secret Seven and the Adventurous Four. With the Five Finder-outers, it appears that she wrote fifteen adventures, each of them beginning with 'Mystery of'.tThis is the only one of the Five Finder-outers stories that I have so I cannot really compare this with any of the others, however it appears that most of the adventures occur within their village of Peterswood. In a way the story is very similar to the device used in the Famous Five. We have a group of children who on their holidays always seems to stumble onto an adventure which they manage to solve thus outwitting not only the villains, but the police as well.tThis adventure begins with the children on holidays and it seems to be somewhat more farcical than the Famous Five books that I have read. It seems to take them a quarter of the book before they actually stumble on the adventure, which involves a furnished room in an otherwise empty and deserted house. However the first part of the book has one of the children, Fatty, telling his friends about all the spy books that he read, and then teasing the local police officer, Mr Goon, using the devices that he has learnt, such as disguises and invisible writing.tI quite liked the character of Fatty, he is smart and witty and seems to have a keen sense of getting out of trouble. In fact it appears that Fatty, at least in this story, is the main character upon which the adventure revolves. At the beginning he managed to launch a coup-de-tat and become leader of the group, though there was really no hard feelings amongst them. The dog also seems to take a backseat in this story, probably because he is not as large and has brave as Timmy from the Famous Five. Further, they are not related, so while I would not go as far as talking about romantic interests (they are in their early teens though) you can see something could develop latter on between Betts and Fatty.tWhat I really enjoyed about this story is Mr Goon, otherwise known as Clear Orff. He's the local police officer and seems to be very dimwitted. He doesn't like the children because they are always showing him off when they are able to solve the mystery while he simply gets himself into no end of trouble. It seems that his role is not to think, but rather to make sure everybody behaves themselves, but I guess there is concern for the children since the people that they are taking on are quite dangerous (and Fatty does get a bit of a thrashing in this story). I can see the character of Clear Orff developing into the local, stupid, police officer that simply steps in to stop people from having fun, for whatever reason. I guess his motives aren't bad (he doesn't want the children to get hurt) but I guess he is also quite jealous of them in that they always solve the mysteries before him. Still, the job of the local police officer is to maintain order, not to solve mysteries, that job is for the detectives.
Do You like book The Mystery Of The Secret Room (2015)?
