Enid Blyton, mystery vs adventure, Rock and Rill

The R Mysteries/ Barney Mysteries of Enid Blyton

 

 

Fellow-blogger Invisible Event and I share an interest in prolific children’s author Enid Blyton, though we come to her from different angles. I read huge amounts of Blyton when I was a child, whereas I think Jim is solely an adult reader. Jim is very much keyed to Blyton as a mystery/crime author, whereas I liked them all – eg very keen on the school stories at St Clare’s and Mallory Towers.

Jim has blogged on all the Five Find-Outers and Dog books: great favourites of mine too, and I have covered a few. Now he has started on the ‘R’ Mysteries: six books with titles of the nature of The Ring O’Bells Mystery and The Ragamuffin Mystery, featuring children Roger, Diana, Snubby and Barney, plus two maddening animals, Miranda the monkey and Loony, a dog who should be put down.

So naturally I was inspired to look at these books again. These are my thoughts on the series:

-      JJ  wants more detection in the books, while I’m less picky: I don’t mind just an adventure.

-      Throughout the series, the parents are  amazingly whole-hearted about getting rid of children – they seem anxious to spend no time with them at all. They send them away to boarding-school, then find something for them to do during the holidays. I can see this is good for the adventure aspect, but still…

-      I can’t bear the animals, particularly the very badly-behaved and very destructive dog, and I don’t think it hilarious when it  attacks people and belongings.

-      All the pranks and tricks leave me straight faced.

But apart from that…

Starting with the first

The Rockingdown Mystery 

published 1949

The children are staying in a Dower House, something I always enjoy – see Heyer, Wentworth, Davis-Goff, Pim. It originally belonged to a very sinister old mansion.

There is a surprisingly dark backstory about dead children. And they are told:

‘Folks do say that once a young fellow managed to get in there, and he couldn’t never get out again. That might happen to you too. There’s doors there that shut of themselves, yes, and lock themselves too.

And there’s rooms there still full of furniture, left by the last owner – my they’ll be full of moths and spiders. A strange, creepy place I wouldn’t go into, not if you paid me a thousand pounds.’

The reaction is: ‘This sounded pleasantly eerie. The three children at once made up their minds to do a bit of snooping that very day.’ I love it that the children have zero qualms about breaking into the weird old house and making free of it – neither moral qualms nor a sense of self-preservation.

There are some features very much of their time:

Whilst the boys amused themselves by looking through the old toy cupboard and picking out more of the beautifully carved old soldiers… Diana got very busy tidying up and cleaning.

The boys help by offering her 'a large handkerchief' to tie round her head so her hair doesn’t get dirty.

Later ‘the rooms were in  dreadful state  now. It would need a good morning’s work from Diana to get them straight again.’

The three very upper-middle class children (private schools, servants) meet up with Barney, a boy who works in fairs and circuses with his monkey, and wanders the country, ‘tramping around’ he calls it, looking for his father. There is the grim unexpected realism of the privileged children hating extra lessons, while the child who has nothing, Barney, is longing to learn. He will feature in all the books, and they are known by some as the Barney books.

There is a crime plot. If you want to know about it, I recommend Jim’s blogpost…  

 

Next came 

The Rilloby Fair Mystery 

published 1950

 

The posh children are again mixing with the admirable Barney who (with his monkey Miranda) is working and living with the Fair of the title – which is very old-school, with a travelling menagerie as well as the expected roundabouts and hooplas. There is quite a lot of intriguing and vaguely-convincing-sounding detail of this.

Meanwhile – there has been a series of thefts of important historical papers from locked rooms in old houses: no-one can work out how the thief got in.

Now, to be honest, no adult reading this book is going to be very long in solving this – and certainly not anyone who has read a particular classic of early crime books. Blyton waves it in the readers’ faces, and you think the cast of characters are quite slow in getting to it. But it is an attempt at a locked-room mystery: good for her.

And there are some nice moments. I like that in her books the children are unrespectful and take a very cool view of adults.

There is a nuisance of a Great Uncle visiting the family (although he is the gateway into the mystery).

Great Uncle tried to settle down and go on writing what he called his ‘Memoirs’, which Roger said were another name for ‘Nodding over a Pipe’.

He introduces Diana to a 16^th century proverb

‘When ye thunder-clouds come, think on the Storm-cock bird – he sings’

Diana has no problem translating this to modern idiom:

‘When you’re up to your neck in hot water, think of the kettle – and sing!’

An unexpected exchange.

And Snubby gets very cross when Great Uncle gets him into trouble, and says, as if talking to a chum in the fourth form, that he’s finished with him :

I’m not telling you, or anybody else, a single thing! Sneaking and blabbing like that and getting me a whacking. It’s not fair.

Whacking and similar do feature in these books, signs of a different time.

Cook has a ‘marvellous Sunday hat. It’s got three roses, a wreath of violets, and five carnations in it. It’s wizard.’

Completism means I will read the whole series, so there will be further entries…

Children and trees from the State Library of North Carolina.

Swing boat ride photo taken at a fair near Newcastle in the 1940s – Tyne and Wear archives.

c