The Mystery of the Invisible Thief

Enid Blyton's The Mystery of the Invisible Thief is a summer holiday whodunnit for 9 year olds about a burglar who climbs in and somehow never climbs out.

What happens

It's SO hot. The Find-Outers are four weeks into the summer holidays, lying flat on Pip's lawn with iced lemonade and not a single mystery between them. (Buster is too hot to chase the cook's cat, and the cat is too hot to run away.)

Then comes a gymkhana and a picnic tea with their friend Inspector Jenks. Halfway through the sandwiches a policeman arrives with news of a daylight robbery up the hill. The Inspector rushes off and leaves them behind, and Fatty is very put out.

But the burgled house turns out to belong to Hilary, the Inspector's shy little goddaughter. She's in floods of tears and needs someone to see her home. Guess who volunteers?

The puzzle itself is a really good one. Jinny the housekeeper heard a man's cough upstairs and saw a ladder at the bedroom window. She stood in the hall where she could see the stairs AND the ladder, and nobody came down either. So where did he go? Jinny's quite sure he made himself invisible!

Fatty measures enormous glove prints and enormous footprints. There's a strange round mark in a flower bed and two dirty scraps of paper with what might be addresses on them. Your reader gets to puzzle over all of it right alongside him (what on earth could "1 Rods" mean?).

The friendship stuff is lovely too. Bets gets stuck admiring Hilary's riding cups for ages so Fatty can sneak off and snoop. She's quite jealous of the fuss he makes of Hilary as well, which feels very real.

And then Mr Goon comes back from a course on disguise. He's convinced he can finally beat Fatty at his own game!

The language is very old-fashioned (lots of gosh and jolly) and Goon calls Fatty a toad. If you've got a reader who likes a locked-room style puzzle with plenty of laughs, this is a great pick.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, they might like the case that comes just before it. The Mystery of the Pantomime Cat starts with the Find-Outers dreaming up a pretend mystery for a stand-in policeman.