Five Find-Outers & Dog Standout Moments

[Betsy's Bear]

One of my all time favourite moments is when Fatty is practising ventriloquism and Goon is terrified -- "ooh where's me auntie" - Think it's in the Mystery of the Strange Bundle.

[Barnard]

At the same time as ‘where’s my auntie’, Goon also hears a pig grunting loudly upstairs and thinks there is a fierce dog ready to ‘gobble him up’.
Absolutely brilliant.

[Lucky Star]

It's a funny scene and I loved it as a child. But when I reread it now as an adult I can't help thinking how utterly unrealistic it is to imagine that a child is such a great ventriloquist that he can fool a full grown police officer into thinking there are ghostly animals and old men roaming a house! Usually I can read such scenes through my own childhood eyes but that one somehow fails. The rest of the book is great though.

[pete9012S]

Well John, I dressed up and disguised myself as an old lady like Fatty when I was around his age.
We bought some matches to light a fire on the common. Then (making sure I came from the opposite direction) I ran past some thugs who had just thrown stones and hurt my little dog, Pip, cutting her leg and leaving her limping.

Running past the gang leader at some pace, I swung my old fashioned shopping bag ( which contained my Dad's Black & Decker electric drill) at him.

It caught him fair and square and knocked him down. The gang chased after me, (still in disguise) but I scaled a high wall and jumped down into our large garden which backed on to the vicarage.

The gang rang the police, concerned that an eccentric old lady may had hurt herself jumping off a high wall into a garden...

I had just changed back into my civilian clothes when a policeman called to the front door with a story about searching our garden for a possibly hurt old lady.

I told him I would help him search our large garden - of course we found no old lady as she had now vanished.

He noticed my little dog Pip was limping and bleeding and I told him about the boys who had cruelly stoned her and laughed about it.
He realised they were the same boys who had reported the old lady jumping the wall when I described them in detail.

He went back to the boys, grabbed the two surprised ringleaders and marched them off to the police station.
I can still remember the confusion amongst the gang about what had happened.

They never connected bricking my little dog and the subsequent, supposedly 'out of the blue' attack from an old lady coming from the opposite direction.

I was definitely influenced by reading The Find Outers - Fatty's exploits gave me the green light to try and enact some of them for myself!!

[Nair Snehalatha]

It was easy.to trick a police officer like mr. Goon-- and fatty was brilliant.In Secret room fstty disguises as a french boy- taking in the rest of the five--and Goon ofcourse.Its wonderful to see fatty escaping from a locked room.-- I love to read and re read all these books of blytons-- Thats what we do -- my younger son and I.-- we spend quiet evenings reading these treasures.Nice way to.use valuable time.

[Barnard]

Of course, everything that happens in all the Find-Outers books is absolutely impossible. But they are all such FUN. SwatIsaid!

[pete9012S]

It was interesting to read this persons stand out moments after they decided to re-read the entire series of books:

Remember Fatty? The Five Find-Outers and Dog? Recently I had one of my many bouts of regression — a time when I find I can only read the stuff I had as a kid. During my last such bout, I decided to do a marathon of Enid Blyton’s Five Find-Outers and Dog Mystery Series. Having acquired all the 15 books for my Kindle, this would be the first time I could read all the books in the sequence they were published. Of course, for a literature student, this also means that one gets to see how the series, stories, and the characters developed over time.

My random thoughts and observations on the Five Find-Outers and Dog Mystery Series:

https://inkscrawl.blogspot.com/2011/08/ ... ytons.html

[Anita Bensoussane]

Quite an interesting personal overview of the series, though I don't agree that Larry, Pip and Daisy are superfluous. In some mysteries they play an important part when it comes to interviewing people or gathering potential clues. And having five members of the group enables Enid Blyton to create that wonderful childhood world of camaraderie, cheer and companionable conversation.

It's a funny scene and I loved it as a child. But when I reread it now as an adult I can't help thinking how utterly unrealistic it is to imagine that a child is such a great ventriloquist that he can fool a full grown police officer into thinking there are ghostly animals and old men roaming a house! Usually I can read such scenes through my own childhood eyes but that one somehow fails. The rest of the book is great though.

I can believe in scenes like that simply because Fatty is always so remarkable and I have faith in his ability to succeed at almost anything! When we were children, my sister and I and our friends never referred to "the Find-Outers books". We always said "the Fatty books" because his extraordinary abilities made such an impression on us.

[Boodi 2]

That overview and the following comments were interesting and for the most part fair, although I agree with Anita that Larry, Daisy and Pip were not superfluous. I liked the fact that Ern's "pomes" got a mention!

[Nair Snehalatha]

Ern's 'pomes' are all started by him and completed by Fatty.I believe nothing is impossible with.Fatty-- a real genius.In.Strange messages his poem abput The Ivies led to.the first.clue.

[Viv of Ginger Pop]

Fatty has been practising ventriloquism down on the farm
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-65553748

[Splodj]

Investigated by the Enid police department!

[Inspector Jenks]

I’m currently working my way through the entire run of Columbo, and Fatty’s clever observation about Hicks’ mentioning seeing the airplanes in “Burnt Cottage” struck me as an insight worthy of the legendary Inspector himself.

[Wolfgang]

It would have been nice, though. if we as readers had known that, too.

[Splodj]

If it had been a Columbo episode we would have seen the flyover. In fact we would have seen who set fire to the cottage too!