Puzzle for the Secret Seven

Puzzle for the Secret Seven begins with a treat. Jack's mother has won a pound at the whist drive and handed it straight over, so all seven of them plus two hangers on are off to the fair at Hilly-Down for the evening.

What happens

They spend the lot. Roundabout, hoopla, coconut shy, swings. A woman selling hot gingerbread gives them the broken pieces for nothing because she can't sell those anyway, and Janet stops to play with her baby.

Then, cycling home up the hill in the dark, George spots flames on the hillside. It's a shack, and it's almost gone, and it belongs to the gingerbread woman.

That's the engine of the whole book, and it is not what a modern reader expects from a mystery. There's no code, no map and no villain for a good long while. What the Secret Seven actually do first is call a meeting, work out what a family with nothing left might need, and go round every mother they know asking for a saucepan, a blanket, a mattress. Then they scrub out an old caravan until it's fit to live in.

Enid Blyton is very good at this sort of practical goodness. Nobody makes a speech about it. They just get the farm van and go.

Peter takes being leader extremely seriously, which is funny on purpose. There are passwords, badges, and a rule that you cannot come in without the password (Scamper the spaniel gives it away twice). Jack's sister Susie and her friend Binkie exist entirely to wind them up, and they are brilliant at it. Binkie makes up a rude poem about the Seven with a chorus. Colin makes up a ruder one back.

Some things to know before you hand it over. The language is properly old, and the currency has been updated for a later edition, so a pound buys nine children a whole evening. There's a child called Benny who is small for his age, has "enormous dark eyes that stared rather blankly" and puts his hands out in front of him when he runs, and while the book never uses the word, he is plainly blind. The gingerbread woman is described as "gipsy-looking", which is the sort of line worth spotting before your child reads it out loud at the table.

But the pace is lovely and the chapters are tiny. Six pages, a cliffhanger, on you go. If your reader is at the stage where a whole book feels like a mountain, this is the kind that gets climbed in three evenings.

What to read next

If the shed and the passwords are the draw, they could go back to Secret Seven Adventure, which is earlier and starts with something the Seven see happen right in front of them.