The Mystery of the Pantomime Cat

Enid Blyton's The Mystery of the Pantomime Cat is a village detective story for 9 year olds that starts with the Find-Outers making up a mystery of their own.

What happens

It's the Easter holidays and Mr Goon, the village policeman, is off on holiday. Standing in for him is P.C. Pippin. He's young and pink-faced and very keen (Bets likes the way his ears stick out).

Goon warns Pippin to keep an eye on Fatty, Larry, Daisy, Pip and Bets. And on Buster, of course. So Bets has an idea. Why not invent a teeny mystery for poor Pippin to solve?

What follows is SUCH good fun. Fatty and Larry dress up as two horrible-looking ruffians, rustle a bush as Pippin walks past and leave a torn-up note behind for him to find. It names a time and a place behind the Little Theatre.

Then red-haired strangers start popping up all over the village. A telegraph boy. A man with a basket and dreadful teeth. An old man with a stick. Pippin begins to think he's got red hair on the brain, and he ends up tugging at the very real hair of the vicar's brother on his tricycle!

Reading it feels like being in on the joke. You know every clue is fake and Pippin doesn't, so watching him sit up past midnight piecing the note together is very funny. Who hasn't wanted to send a grown-up on a wild-goose chase?

But the Little Theatre is putting on a show based on Dick Whittington. Its cat is an actor in a furry skin who never seems to take it off. Fatty peers through the window and a huge glassy-eyed cat stares straight back at him. Then Pippin turns up for his pretend meeting and walks into a real robbery instead.

It's worth knowing that this is a very old-fashioned book. A little girl describing the actors says one of the parts is "a black man, of course" in the play, a throwaway line that's very much of its time. Mr Goon calls Fatty a toad and a halfwit and kicks out at Buster. During the robbery a man is found slumped over a desk, groaning, which might make a nervous reader jump. If your reader loves a prank that gets out of hand, they'll probably race through it.

What to read next

If they'd like to see how the Find-Outers got together in the first place, The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage is where it all began. It opens with a thatched workroom blazing one April night and a boastful new boy with a black Scottie.