Look Out, Secret Seven

Enid Blyton's Look Out, Secret Seven is a detective club story for 7 year olds, and the first thing the club has to sort out is sitting in its own shed.

What happens

The holidays have started. Peter's godmother turns up with a tin of chocolate biscuits big enough for the whole club, so a meeting is called for five o'clock the next day.

Passwords are checked at the door. Badges are dug out of Janet's jewel case. Everyone files in and sits down on a box.

Then Scamper starts growling. He is their golden spaniel and he has never once growled at a member before.

He has noticed something the other six have all missed. It ends with a pail of very cold water over their heads and two girls running off up the garden, shrieking with laughter.

What the club really needs, someone says, is a proper job. They pick two. An old soldier who lives next door to Colin has had his war medals stolen and sits in his garden crying about them. And there is a gang in Bramley Woods pulling nests apart.

A lot of the fun here is the club itself. The password that changes every week. The green S.S. letters pinned back on the shed door. Who has remembered a badge and who very much has not. Your reader will pick up straight away how seriously all this is being taken (very seriously indeed).

Susie is the other joy. She is Jack's sister, she is banned from everything, and she is quite a bit cleverer than all seven of them put together. She knows it, too.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The bird-nesting chapter is rougher than you might expect. A boy up a tree throws a blackbird's egg into Jack's face, Jack and George both get knocked down and sat on, and Barbara runs off screaming for help. The boys have been taking eggs, and the reason the Seven are watching the wood at all is that someone has been killing the young birds in it.

If you've got a child who takes animal cruelty to heart, that bit may land hard. A child who already gets fired up about it will probably be firmly on the Seven's side.

This is book fourteen of the series, though nothing needs reading first. The club introduces itself all over again every time.

What to read next

If it goes down well, the much earlier Secret Seven Adventure is in the library too. Same shed, same passwords, same Susie bluffing her way in, and a pearl necklace that vanishes right under their noses.