The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat (1944) by Enid Blyton

So far, I've grossly neglected the juvenile detective story in 2021 with my review of Bruce Campbell's The Mystery of the Vanishing Mystery (1956) dating back to October, 2020, but a certain someone acted as a constant reminder to return to this largely unexplored nook of the genre – particularly to the surprisingly plot-conscious Enid Blyton. The Rat-a-Tat Mystery (1956) was my previous exposure to Blyton and it was disappointing, but it didn't erase the rigorous plotting, clueing and clever use of red herrings in The Mystery of the Invisible Thief (1950). The Rilloby Fair Mystery (1950) added a new angle to an age-old locked room-trick. Why not return to Blyton with another one of her locked room mysteries that has received some praise from her resident fanboy. 

The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat (1944) is the second novel in The Five Find-Outers and Dog series and takes place at the beginning of a long, nine-week summer holiday. A holiday reuniting Fatty, Larry, Daisy, Pip, Bets and Fatty's free spirited dog, Buster, who solved The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage (1943) over the Easter holiday. So they wish there will be another mystery for them to solve during the summer, but everything appears to be quiet and peaceful in the Peterswood.

Only thing of interest that has lately happened is Lady Candling moving into the house next door to Pit and Bets. While their new neighbor doesn't have any children their age, Lady Candling has brought along her prize-winning collection of Siamese cats, who have a cat-house in garden, where they strike up a friendship with the gardener's boy, Luke – a 15-year-old lad who can hardly read or write. Luke is "terribly clever with his hands," carving wooden animals and making twig-whistles, as well as knowing everything about the birds in the countryside. And that's more than enough for the Five Find-Outers! All they have to do is watch out for the head-gardener, "horrid Mr. Tupping," who's one of the vilest creatures to ever wander onto the pages of a children's story. More on that in a moment.

The Five Find-Outers finally get "a real, proper mystery" when the cream of Lady Candling's prize-winning cats, named Dark Queen, disappears from her cage in the cat-house, but the Monkey's Paw is at work as their wish comes at a prize. Dark Queen was stolen between four and five o'clock, which means that only Luke could have stolen the cat. At the time, Luke was working around the cat-house and swore nobody else had been anywhere near it.

Constable Goon is more than willing to go along with Mr. Tuppering to apprehend Luke as the cat-napper, as nobody else could have possibly done it, but The Five Find-Outers believe their new friend "would never, never do a thing like that." So they recklessly plunge themselves headfirst into another rabbit hole with Buster leading the charge.

A notable highlight of their detective efforts is when they investigates the cat-house, ahead of Goon, where they find an incriminating clue and conclude it must have been planted to cast suspicion on Luke. So they nick the evidence, empty their pockets and litter the cage with false-clues like peppermint drops, a shoe lace, a ribbon, a button and cigar stubs – which "surprised and puzzled" Goon to no end. An act so legally questionable that it would make Perry Mason beam with pride at the next generation of detectives. Another thing I thought was really well done is that the disappearance act is repeated a second time, like a script, under practically identical circumstances. Once again, the only person present at the time was Luke. Even the Find-Outers begin to wish "everything wasn't so dreadfully puzzling."

Blyton showed her credentials as a mystery writers by playing a fair hand, although not quite as brilliantly as in The Mystery of the Invisible Thief, but the given clues should give the story's intended audience a shot at putting all the pieces together themselves. However, it won't fool an adult reader for even a minute and a jaded mystery reader can figure out the locked room-trick before it happens. But there was still much to admire about the plot. 

Blyton used the locked room trope like an expert as it served two very specific purposes (ROT13): gb tvir gur png-anccre na hafunxnoyr nyvov and unaqvat gur cbyvpr n ernql-znqr fhfcrpg, which Blyton handily jenccrq hc naq cerfragrq nf n ybpxrq ebbz zlfgrel. Something I can appreciate as a snobbery prone connoisseur of puzzle plots and locked room mysteries. While the whole thing is as clear as day to adult readers, it was amusing to see how Blyton misdirected her young readers using adult authority (gur haoernxnoyr nyvov) and the general inexperience of the Find-Outers. Such as not immediately understanding the clue they smelled in the cat-house, but never in a condescending or superior way. Blyton respected both her characters and readers. A fact perhaps better reflected in the dark, realistic undertone of the series.

Firstly, in this story, there's that "rude, bad-tempered old man," Tupping, who regularly abuses Luke verbally and boxes his ears, but he also tore apart Bets strawberry garden in a rage. Bets had been given a few strawberry runners from his garden ("he really thought it was his garden, and not Lady Candling's") and had to get even with an 8-year-old girl. Luke also lives in constant fear that his abusive stepfather will belt him "black and blue," if he finds out he's suspect or loses his job. Something else that's always hovering in the background is the parental neglect of Frederick "Fatty" Trotteville as Larry remarks in passing to him "Your mother and father don't bother about you much, do they?" as "you seem to go home or go out just whenever you like," which is very different from the household of the brother and sister of the group, Pip and Bets – whose parents have a bed-time bell to let them know its time to brush their teeth. So these moments drift over the blue, sunny skies of this series like dark, wispy clouds that occasionally intrude on the lull of the lazy, endless summer holiday as brief reminders of their impending adolescence and coming adulthood. However, it's still something far away on the horizon and there's nothing that will impede on the summer-time mystery adventure!

So, yeah, The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat is another top-notch (locked room) detective story and stands closer, quality-wise, to what made The Mystery of the Invisible Thief such a pleasant and welcome surprise. So, hopefully, there's more where those two came from.

The Rat-a-Tat Mystery (1956) by Enid Blyton

Enid Blyton's The Rat-a-Tat Mystery (1956) is the fifth of six novels in The Barney "R" Mystery series, the only series she wrote for children over the age of eleven, which follows the exploits of "a down-at-heel circus-boy," Barney – whose sole companion used to be his pet monkey, Miranda. A rather lonely existence that ended when he befriended two siblings, Roger and Diana Lynton, along with their mischievous, trouble-making cousin, "Snubby," in The Rockingdown Mystery (1949).

So now they're spending their holidays together and these sleepovers generally result in the Lynton home resembling a disaster-stricken area.

The Rat-a-Tat Mystery opens with Mr. Lynton putting down his newspaper, as a crash came from upstairs, asking his wife "how long do these Christmas holidays last." Christmas had been "a mad and merry time" in the house with a drizzling rain keeping the children indoors and Snubby's always enthusiastic black cocker spaniel, Looney, sweeping through the place "like a hurricane" – slowly driving Mr. Lynton to his limits. Luckily, an unexpected telephone call from Barney invited Roger, Diana and Snubby to come and stay with him for the remainder of their holiday at a big lakeside house that his grandmother owns. Apparently, Barney found his long-lost family in The Rubadub Mystery (1952).

Rat-a-Tat House is an old, remote place with turrets, towers and tucked-in windows, where "Oliver Cromwell once stayed" and "a celebrated Spaniard" was imprisoned, which lays at a now frozen lake. The house also has a ghost story to tell.

Originally, the place was named after the lake and village, Boffame House, but 250 years ago, someone began hammering on the front-door with "the enormous lion's head knocker." When the footman hurried to answer the door, nobody was standing there. This phantom knocker went on for a hundred-and-fifty years and people believed it was a warning that there was "a traitor in the house," but it has been over a hundred years since the ghost "hammered at the door" with the lion-headed knocker. So why would it start it now, right?

Well, the first few days at Rat-a-Tat House were pure bliss with them playing card games, ice skating, snowball fights, tobogganing and building a huge snowman, but the silence of the second night is broken by a strange, eerie knocking sound ("RAT-A-TAT-TAT! RAT-A-TAT-TAT!") – someone was hammering on the front-door with the knocker. When they go investigate the following morning, they discover a singe track of heavy boot prints going to the bottom of the front-door steps. There were, however, "no footmarks showing that he walked away again." Whoever this person was, he could not have entered the house through the front-door, because it was securely locked on the inside with two great bolts, top and bottom, two locks that were stiff to turn and "a heavy chain." So how did this person manage to vanish into thin air? And this is not the only impossible situation of the story.

Mrs. Tickle is the sister of Barney's grandmother's cook and the adult supervision at Rat-a-Tat House. She witnessed how the big snowman the children had made, which has now disappeared, shuffled pass the kitchen window and had looked inside! Add to this that the snowfall has cut them off from the outside world and the presence of two of unsavory characters with an interest in the cellar, they once again find themselves up to their necks in trouble. Sadly, this charming and intriguing premise is as good as The Rat-a-Tat Mystery is going to get.

I've praised Blyton's superb handling of the clues and red herrings in The Mystery of the Invisible Thief (1950) and the warm, lively characterization and sparkling humor of The Rilloby Fair Mystery (1950), which also had a clever innovation on an age-old locked room-trick, but none of those qualities were present here – as the plot is largely uninspired and razor-thin. The solution to the single track of prints in the snow is another oldie, but this time without a touch of originality and the answer to the peeping snowman was disappointingly simple. And those two shadowy villains lurking around the house? They only briefly appeared, but mostly remain in the background and the conclusion to these main plot-threads, which tied everything together, was concluded off-page.

The Rat-a-Tat Mystery still has some wintry charm and a lingering Christmas spirit, but lacked the lively, sparkling humor and characterization of The Rilloby Fair Mystery. It didn't exactly helped that the plot was uninspired and starved of even an ounce of ingenuity. So you can say this was a bit of a letdown.

However, I don't want to end this review on a sour note and so decided to give you my own two alternative solutions to the two impossible situations from this story. If only to prove why I'm everyone's favorite locked room fanboy (right, guys?).

Firstly, we have the puzzle of the single track of boot prints in the snow, but my answer depends on a third, mini-locked room puzzle: how where the villains able to enter the kitchen when Mrs. Tickle had locked and bolted the kitchen-door? The answer to this little side-puzzle is quickly found and I would have used as both a clue and as the key to the ghostly knocking on the front-door. In my scenario, one of the villains would enter the house through the kitchen and unlocked the front-door, while the other walked towards it, knocked and entered – locking the door behind them and vanishing from the house with their kitchen-door trick. This would make it appear as if the knocker had impossibly vanished from the front-steps. You only have to come up with an explanation as to how they got their hands on a (duplicate) key to (un)lock the front-door.

My alternative solution to the wandering snowman may seem obvious, but there were certain items present in the story offering a way to make the situation appear to be truly impossible.

I would have tightly wrapped a piece of tarpaulin, taken from the boathouse, around one of the toboggans and remade the snowman on top of it, because one snowman looks very much like the other – especially if you dress him up with the ornaments from the original snowman. And then you drag it across the kitchen window. Why wrapped the toboggan in tarpaulin, you ask? The tarpaulin helps make the track-marks of the toboggan look (slightly) different from the track marks the children made with the unwrapped toboggans. More importantly, it would give the impression that the snowman had actually come alive and had dragged himself through the snow.

So what do you think of my two alternative solutions? Would you accept them as solutions to these, admittedly, originally posed impossible problems?

Anyway, The Rat-a-Tat Mystery was a huge disappointment after being pleasantly surprised by the unexpectedly good The Mystery of the Invisible Thief and The Rilloby Fair Mystery, which I didn't expect from Blyton, but if you're looking for a harmless, wintry mystery with a little charm, you can easily throw this one on your holiday reading-list. Other than that, I can't really recommend it.

The Rilloby Fair Mystery (1950) by Enid Blyton

Enid Blyton's The Mystery of the Invisible Thief (1950) earned a spot on my best-of list of 2018 as a textbook example of a perfectly plotted and fairly clued detective story. A children's mystery novel about a rash of burglaries in a small, quiet village and the seemingly impossible disappearance of the culprit, but my second excursion in The Five Find-Outers and Dog series, The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage (1943), was more focused on introducing the characters than with the plot – as it was the first book in the series. So that was a little disappointing.

However, someone (anonymously) recommended a title from another one of Blyton's many series in the comment-section. A story tentatively described as a locked room mystery about "a series of mysterious thefts of various valuable documents from rooms that are hermetically sealed." Say no more!

The Rilloby Fair Mystery (1950) is the second title in The Barney "R" Mystery series and the only series from Blyton's hands "recommended solely for children over the age of eleven." The stories are reportedly "full of atmosphere" with "a haunting, wistful quality," sparkling humor, strong characterization, clever plots and sophisticated language – a perfect summation of the qualities of The Rilloby Fair Mystery. Honestly, the protagonists of this series, including the animals, are some of the liveliest and most convincingly drawn (child) characters I have come across in these juvenile mysteries. And that includes Roger and Bill Baxter from Martin Colt's Stranger at the Inlet (1946).

There are four main characters in this series: a brother and sister, Roger and Diana Lynton, who spend their school holidays with their orphaned cousin, Stubby, who's always accompanied by his energetic, overly enthusiastic black cocker spaniel, Looney. During their first adventure, in The Rockingdown Mystery (1949), they befriended a circus boy, Barney, whose only friend up until then was his pet monkey, Miranda.

Apparently, Barney is searching for his long-lost father and this is a plot-thread that runs through the entire series. I wonder if Barney was based on Rémi from Hector Malot's classic Sans famille (Nobody's Boy, 1878). Or, if you're Dutch, you probably know the book under the title Alleen op de wereld (Alone on the World).

The Rilloby Fair Mystery takes place during a four week Easter holiday and the Lynton's are preparing the home for the arrival of two house guests, Stubby and Great-uncle Robert, who have never met each other. So, when they have an unexpected meeting on the train, Stubby tells Great-uncle Robert a tall tale about being on the run from "an international gang," the so-called Green Hands – warning him to be wary of "anyone wearing green gloves." A story that startles the old, pompous man because he has just came from a place where historical documents where inexplicably stolen from a locked room.

A little tall tale that comes back to haunt Stubby when he discovers that the old, stuffy gentleman, whose leg he pulled on the train, is the Great-uncle of his cousins. So he spends a good portion of the story attempting to dodge Great-uncle Robert.

However, the story of a thief who "apparently passed through locked doors or barred windows" to take historical and valuable documents from various homes and museums is too good to ignore. Roger, Diana and Stubby study the newspaper and astutely observe that the string of thefts can be linked to a traveling fair, which means that either "the fair goes to places where there are rare papers to be stolen" or somebody in the fair is snooping around each place they go "to see if there are any in the neighborhood worth stealing." So, off they are to the fair, where they're reunited with their old friends, Barney and Miranda, but also meet a whole host of carnival characters.

There's the ginormous, thunder-voiced owner of the fair, Tonnerre, with his elephants. Vosta and his two chimpanzees, Hurly and Burly. Billy Tell, the "famous cracksman" in charge of the shooting gallery, his son, Young 'Un, and his sharp-tongued mother, Old Ma. All of whom could potentially be the mysterious burglar who can "go through locked doors and fastened windows."

As they roam around the fair and pry information from Great-uncle Robert, the children deduce the next target of thief, Marloes Castle, which has a room housing a modest collection of documents and stuffed animals protected behind three locked doors – of which the third has two locks and a burglar alarm. The windows are always fastened on the inside, protected by bars on the outside, while the chimney is too narrow to crawl through. A practically impenetrable muniment room! Nonetheless, this elusive burglar succeeds in entering and leaving the locked room without any trace, or triggering the alarm, but this time the burglar took something very different from the room. A huge clue to part of the locked room-trick.

Honestly, nearly every adult or seasoned mystery reader will have a pretty good idea how the locked room-trick was worked at this point and I sighed with disappointment. But my disappointment was short-lived.

A very old trick that I don't like to see in a locked room story, but I have to give it to Blyton, she added something very clever to it that made it acceptable again in 1950. Getting in-and out the locked rooms was only one part of the trick, but how the documents and papers were selected put a new spin on an age-old trick. My only real complaint is that the solution was presented as a one-size fits-all locked room-trick. There was an obvious reason why it worked in the private room, of Marloes Castle, but you're not getting that lucky with every single room storing a private collection of valuable papers. A brief, throw-away line in one of the last chapters betrayed that Blyton was aware of this.

So, plot-wise, The Rilloby Fair Mystery can largely stand toe-to-toe with The Mystery of the Invisible Thief. A mystery novel with a locked room problem as its central puzzle and a fairly clued solution, but lacked the clever switch-and-bait with the clues and red herrings – which elevated The Mystery of the Invisible Thief to the status of a minor (juvenile) classic. However, where The Rilloby Fair Mystery shoots pass The Mystery of the Invisible Thief is the more mature dialogue, lively characters, sparkling humor and the warm, homely scenes. Such as the opening scene at the breakfast table or the depiction of a normally quiet household invaded by children and animals. It makes you want to give the world another chance.

Everything considered, I think I like this series a lot more than The Five Find-Outers and continue my exploration of Blyton with The Barney "R" Mysteries, but don't expect those reads to be in chronological order. The Rat-a-Tat Mystery (1956) is penultimate title in the series and has an impossible problem of the footprints-in-the-snow variety, which is presented in a way very reminiscent of the impossibilities from Edward D. Hoch's "The Gypsy's Paw" (collected in The Iron Angel and Other Tales of the Gypsy Sleuth, 2003) and Anne van Doorn's "Het huis dat ongeluk bracht" ("The House That Brought Bad Luck," 2018). Now I want to know if Blyton had a third solution for this particular vanishing-trick.

So you know what to expect next!

The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage (1943) by Enid Blyton

Last year, I reviewed the eighth title in Enid Blyton's The Five Find-Outers and Dog series, The Mystery of the Invisible Thief (1950), which is a juvenile mystery aimed at children between 8-12, but has a plot drenched in the traditions of the pure, Golden Age detective story and scrupulously observed the rules of fair play – even turning the red herrings into clues once you realize they're red herrings. A schoolbook example of how to plant clues and red herrings!

Naturally, older or more seasoned mystery readers will immediately peer through the veil of intrigue, but that doesn't take away from the fact that The Mystery of the Invisible Thief is a technical achievement in plot construction. A plot that must have surprised and impressed its intended audience. So, as a fan of the simon-pure jigsaw-puzzle detective story, I intended to pay a second visit to this series. Just to admire Blyton's putting together a fair and sound plot.

My fellow crime fiction addict, "JJ" of The Invisible Event, was the one who pointed my attention to this series and he posted a glowing review of the "exceptionally promising" debut of The Five Find-Outers and Dog.

The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage (1943) begins on a dark April night, in the village of Peterswood, when the titular cottage of Mr. Hick is set ablaze.

The cottage is old, half-timbered and thatched with a straw-roof that had been converted into a workroom, where Mr. Hick kept valuable papers worth "thousands of pounds," which impelled Mr. Hick to dart towards to the burning workroom – getting pulled back by three people while screaming "my papers" and "get them out, get them out." A fire expert from the insurance company determined that petrol had been used to torch the cottage. This was a case of arson!

Peterswood is a small, quiet village in the English countryside where Larry, Daisy, Pip and Bet live. Larry is the oldest of the group and Daisy's older brother. Bet is the baby of the group, just eight years old, who's often teased by her brother, Pip. Just around the time of the fire, a plump, well-dressed boy moved into the village with his jet-black Scottish Terrier, Buster. The name of this initially unpopular, self-satisfied boy is Frederick Algernon Trotteville and his ingratiation into “the little company of four friends” is the high-mark of the novel.

I mentioned in my review of The Mystery of the Invisible Thief that the antics of the children were very cartoon-like and how their pestering of Constable Theophilus Goon kind of reminded me of The Exploits of Quick and Flupke, but here the children were surprisingly realistically characterized – even showing how mean-spirited they can be. Frederick is christened "Fatty" on account of his size and initials. He had already been "Tubby" and "Sausage" at school and now he would be "Fatty."

In his own review, JJ pointed out the obvious subtext of Fatty being emotionally neglected by his parents. Fatty can do whatever he want, wherever he want and whenever he want. There's no parental oversize. Larry remarked Fatty has "so much pocket-money he doesn't know what to do with it" and there was a rather sad scene where Fatty was eagerly lapping up the attention Pip's mother was giving him. This is surprisingly dark, if you ask me!

Fatty bonds with Larry, Daisy, Pip and Bet when they form a detective-club to find out who burned down Mr. Hick's cottage and destroyed the valuable papers. Bets comes up with the name when Larry explains to her what a detective is ("oh, a find-outer").

The Mystery of the Invisible Thief has many features of the Intuitionist School of G.K. Chesterton and John Dickson Carr with a seemingly impossible disappearance, a bizarre clue, disguised red herrings and the kids are even friends with Inspector Jenks – who's the antithesis of Constable Goon. On the other hand, The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage is firmly rooted in the traditions of the Realist School of Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode. A good portion of their investigation consists of trying to find the person who left rubber-soled footprints, with criss-cross markings, in a muddy ditch in the garden of Mr. Hick's garden and "a bit of grey flannel" from a suit caught on a thorn. This puts them on the trail of a tramp who was one of the many people in the garden on the night of the fire. And they discover that there were "a lot of quarrels and upsets on the day of the fire."

Mr. Hick had "a fine old quarrel" with his man-servant, Horace Peeks, who was fired on the spot, but had he set fire to the cottage as revenge? Peeks has been secretly dating a fellow servant, Lily, who still works for Mr. Hicks and uses the Five Find-Outers to post a warning letter to Peeks. Mrs. Minns is the talkative housekeeper of Mr. Hick and is constantly yelled at by her employer about her cats or letting the children into his kitchen. Finally, there's a scholar obsessed with old documents, Mr. Smellie, who had an argument with Mr. Hick over certain papers.

Unfortunately, the plot and clueing were uninspired, workmanlike and lacked genuine fair play.

The footprints in The Mystery of the Invisible Thief was a clever, tell-all clue presented as a red herring, but here it was simply a question of tracking down the person who owned a pair of rubber-soled shoes with criss-cross markings, which didn't even seem to matter in the end – because the arsonist made a stupid slip of the tongue. Fatty noticed. Same story with the piece of cloth. More annoyingly, you never really get an opportunity to break the alibi, because you're told about a certain location when the alibi-trick is explained. Very unfair. However, you don't need these clues to figure out who or why.

All in all, The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage is not as good a detective story as The Mystery of the Invisible Thief, but serves its purpose as an introduction to The Five Find-Outers and Dog. So a good, but imperfect, series debut that will not deter me from exploring this series further. The Mystery of the Pantomime Cat (1949) and The Mystery of Holly Lane (1953) sound promising!

The Mystery of the Invisible Thief (1950) by Enid Blyton

Back in 2015, I reviewed Robert Arthur's The Secret of Skeleton Island (1966), an early title from the prodigious The Three Investigator series, which I read purely out of curiosity, but this excursion sparked an interest within me for juvenile mysteries and have since gone through an entire pile of them – comprising of such writers as William Arden, Bruce Campbell, Manly Wade Wellman and Capwell Wyckoff. JJ of The Invisible Event joined me and has since uncovered many interesting titles. One of his discoveries, in particularly, attracted my attention.

Enid Blyton's The Mystery of the Invisible Thief (1950) is the eight book in The Five Find-Outers series, which began with The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage (1943) and ended with The Mystery of the Banshee Towers (1961), described by JJ as "classically-styled a piece of Genius Amateur Detection as you can get." On top of that, the plot partly revolves around "a legit impossible disappearance." So it was fast-tracked to my to-be-read pile. And honestly, it didn't disappoint.

The head of The Five Find-Outers and Dog, as they're officially known, is Frederick Algernon Trotteville, simply called Fatty by everyone, who's the brains of the team and has a talent for disguises and imitations – making him the most well-rounded character of the group. Fatty somewhat reminded me of Jupiter Jones from The Three Investigators. Larry, Daisy, Pip and Bets are, as JJ pointed out, just sort of there, but lacked (here at least) personalities and their characters, as well as their roles in the story, were easily interchangeable. Lastly, the group is rounded out by Fatty's jet-black Scottish Terrier, Buster. When the series began, the age-rage of the group was 8-13 years, but, from what I understood, they age (slightly) through out the series.

They live in the fictitious village of Peterswood, a quiet country place, where, according to Constable Tonks, "the only thing that happens is a dog that chases sheep" or "a man that doesn't buy his wireless license." Or so he thinks. Inspector Jenks knew better and is "a great friend” of The Find-Outers, because of "the many curious mysteries they had solved" during their school holidays in Peterswood.

However, the village policeman, Constable Theophilus Goon, refers to the children as toads or pests and always suspects them, especially Fatty, of playing dirty tricks on him – which is usually the only time when he's right. The interplay between the five children and Goon kind of reminded me of The Exploits of Quick and Flupke.

So there you have the groundwork for a series that ran for nearly twenty years and fifteen novels, but let's take a look at the title that JJ called "an unexpected delight."

The Mystery of the Invisible Thief takes place in the middle of summer holiday and the Five Find-Outers have nothing to find out, nothing to solve and only four weeks left in the holiday. Buster is terribly close to overheating and their old nemesis, Constable Goon, is temporarily away on "some kind of refresher course." So it looks to be a hot, uneventful holiday when, all of sudden, Inspector Jenks is called to Norton House, in Peterswood, where a daylight burglary has taken place. And the intruder appears to have vanished into thin air.

Jinny, the housekeeper, was alone at Norton House and half-asleep-like with her knitting work on her knees when "a sort of thudding noise" in the garden startled her. This was followed by a quickly stifled cough upstairs. Jinny notices that the gardener's ladder was standing underneath one of the windows outside and, as she was standing in the hallway of the house, also had an excellent view of the stairs, but nobody came down from either side and, when help arrived, nobody was found upstairs – all of the escape routes were eliminated as the windows were either securely closed or looked out over a dangerous, nearly fatal drop. So how did the burglar escaped from the house without being seen or caught?

Well, the clues, red herrings and red herrings that become clues once you know they're red herrings are indeed something to behold!

The burglar left behind several large glove-and boot-prints, indicating a very large man, while outside in the garden a curious print-mark was found in the soil outside. A large, roundish mark with criss-cross lines showing here and there. These clues and red herrings, in combination with the details of the burglary and statements of suspects, will immediately spell out the entire solution to older, more experienced mystery readers, but poses a genuine and fair challenge to its intended audience.

Everything fits together logically and encourages its young readers to take all of "the different clues" and fit them together "like a jigsaw puzzle" in order to create "a definite picture of the thief," which not only makes this a clever and entertaining detective story, but perhaps even educational one – as it encourages logical thinking and reasoning. All the clues are there and, for those who lagged behind, a late chapter is included in which Pip plays a trick on Fatty. A trick, or rather joke, that helps everyone understand how to properly view all of the clues. This should help everyone to see who was responsible and how the impossible disappearance was accomplished. Absolutely marvelous!

The locked room trick is not exactly, what you call, an original one, but what made it more than acceptable is how well the locked room was presented and handled. And further improved by the first-class clueing!

Anyway, the story between the opening and closing chapters contains a few more burglaries, but the high-light of these parts, besides the excellent clueing, is the parallel investigations of the five and Constable Goon. Fatty and Goon are even engaged in a battle-of-disguises, which the latter hopelessly lose. Despite getting free reign to chase a burglar, Blyton still portrayed The Five Find-Outers as genuine children on an adventure during their school holiday. Even after JJ's glowing review, this made for a leisure, but excellent, summer reading.

I'll never cease to be amazed at how many locked room and impossible crime stories there are to be found in the juvenile corner of the genre, which tend to be pretty decent tricks or even turn out to be very innovative for the time, but readers with a special interest in locked room fiction are barely aware of them – none of them made it into Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991).

Dutch edition

So, perhaps, it would be a good idea if someone, like John Pugmire's Locked Room International, published an omnibus edition of some of these relatively short juvenile locked room novels. There are more than enough potential candidates to fill such an omnibus edition: Blyton's The Mystery of the Invisible Thief, Bruce Campbell's The Clue of the Phantom Car (1953), Robert Arthur's The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy (1965) and William Arden's The Mystery of the Shrinking House (1972). You could pepper such a collection with one or two short stories. Theodore Roscoe's "I Was the Kid With the Drum" (Four Corners, 2015) and John Russell Fearn's "The Thief of Claygate Farm" (The Haunted Gallery, 2011) immediately come to mind, but JJ also found a number of modern-day short stories in a post titled "Trifecta Perfecta – A Trio of Locked Room Riddles for Younger Readers."

I think these titles would make for a great omnibus and introduce locked room readers to a side of the impossible crime genre they're probably not too familiar with.

All in all, The Mystery of the Invisible Thief proved to be a minor gem of a detective story and is not only, plot-wise, one of the better juvenile mysteries I have read to date, but could easily serve as a textbook for mystery writers on how to properly handle clues and red herrings. Because this is what John Dickson Carr meant when he said that a good detective story has a ladder of evidence, or a pattern of evidence, which, when properly applied, can fool even the experienced reader – until, in the blaze of the surprise ending, he sees the whole pattern. Sure, the difficulty setting here was on easy, but an intelligent writer/plotter should have no problem in applying this technique, beautifully put on display here, to an adult audience. Highly recommended!