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Enid Blyton's The Mystery of the Vanished Prince is a Find-Outers mystery for 9 year olds where a dressing-up joke drops the gang right into a real case.
It's a boiling hot summer and Bets is fed up. Larry, Daisy and Fatty have all been away and there isn't a mystery anywhere. The only thing in the paper is a little prince from Tetarua State staying at a school camp up on the hills. He brought a State Umbrella with him (and only used it once).
Then the others get home. Everyone's sure Fatty will turn up in disguise. Poor Bets ends up hugging the telegraph boy, who is definitely not Fatty!
Fatty had already been, as the gipsy woman selling heather at the gate. He even forgets to take the earrings off before he says hello to Mrs Hilton.
Next he unpacks a trunk of robes from his cruise. Bets becomes Princess Bongawee, the prince's sister. And who should knock on the shed door just then? Ern, Mr Goon's nephew, with his twin brothers Sid and Perce.
They believe every word. Ern proudly holds a State Umbrella over the princess (it's actually Fatty's mother's golf umbrella). Then they bump into Goon on the river path, and the princess tells him he's got a frog face!
It's SO funny. Sid's teeth are stuck together with toffee, so all he can say is "Ar". Your reader is in on the joke the whole way.
Two days later the papers say the real prince has vanished in the night. And Goon is straight on the phone to the Chief Inspector about the sister he's met. Which is a bit of a problem, as she doesn't exist.
It's the ninth book in the series, so everyone here is an old friend by now.
A lot of the jokes are very much of their time. The children pass as "foreigners" because their faces are so brown, and Fatty says anyone would think they belonged to some black or brown race. Their pretend language is nonsense words for laughs. Fatty's gipsy disguise is all dirty clothes and whining, and Goon kicks out at Buster.
If your family would rather skip dressing up as another race played for a joke, this one might not be for you. If you're happy to talk about how things have changed, the slapstick with Goon is classic Blyton.
If this is your reader's first Find-Outers book, go back to The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage. It's where the five (and Buster) first meet, at a fire one April night.
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