Digging up the Family Plot: Secrets, Mystery, and the Blytonesque

Abstract

Enid Blyton’s name is synonymous with mystery. She used the word, together with the almost equivalent term ‘secret’, in some fifty titles, and the concept in a good many more. Blyton wrote a number of individual mystery titles in addition to her famous series: the Famous Five (21 titles), the Secret Seven (15 titles), Five Find-Outers (15 titles), the Adventure series (eight titles), the Barney series (six titles), Secrets (five titles) and the Adventurous Four (two titles). Sheila Ray in The Blyton Phenomenon differentiates ‘holiday’ stories from ‘mysteries’, equating the latter term with detective fiction (specifically the Secret Seven and Find-Outers) (152–77). However, I do not find this division useful. Most of Blyton’s plots, as I shall argue, are set in holiday time and are also centrally concerned with uncovering secrets of some sort. Although it could be argued that this use of the word ‘mystery’ was mere commercial expediency, I shall suggest in this essay that a sense of mystery in Blyton’s work runs deeper, and I shall endeavour to lead us down its dark passages towards some sort of illumination. Let me begin by looking at Blyton’s conception of story, and her closely associated views of home — as expressed not only in her mysteries, but in her autobiographical writing, too.