The Mystery of the Strange Messages

Enid Blyton's The Mystery of the Strange Messages is a detective story for 9 year olds about anonymous notes made from words snipped out of newspapers.

What happens

Somebody keeps leaving them around Mr Goon's house. One sits on the coal shovel. Another is stuck to the dustbin lid. One even turns up in the peg-bag!

They're rude and they're baffling. Who is Smith, and what's his real name? And why should he be turned out of a house called The Ivies, when there's no house called The Ivies anywhere in Peterswood?

Goon is quite sure he knows who's behind it. Fatty, obviously. So he storms round to accuse him of creeping about in his old butcher-boy disguise.

It wasn't Fatty. And while Goon is busy shouting at the Find-Outers, the next note turns up in his empty milk bottle.

So Goon has another idea. He pays his nephew Ern half a crown a day to keep watch on the house. Ern goes straight round to tell Fatty all about it, of course.

If your reader has met Ern before, they'll be very pleased to see him. He's still writing his "pomes" and still getting stuck halfway (one has taken him six months). Fatty finishes it for him on the spot, and those last lines hand the gang their first real clue.

It's a really satisfying one for a child who likes working things out. The five line up the notes and talk through what each one might mean, so your reader can play detective right alongside them.

This is book fourteen in the series, and it shows. Ern, Goon and the shed full of disguises are all treated as old friends (and old enemies).

A few things here feel very much of their time. Goon kicks out at Buster, calls his cleaner "woman" and gets so purple and shouty that Bets wants to run out of the room. Fatty's weight is still a joke too, even from his own mother.

Most children will see Goon as the cross, silly grown-up he's meant to be. A child who finds shouting adults frightening might like you nearby for the first chapters.

What to read next

For more of Fatty in disguise, The Mystery of the Missing Necklace is the one where his voice breaks and he starts planning proper grown-up disguises instead of boys' ones.