Five Have a Mystery to Solve

[Nair Snehalatha]

Wilfrid in FHAMTS- was quite a good character with his talemt to imitate any bird or animal so that they came to him-- they must have trusted him a lot. But I also feel that Enid Blyton was feeling a bit weak an tired as she was suffering from dementia-- so Wilfrid is not portrayed as a character like Berta or Henry.or Jock.or Toby etc

[Gary Russell]

I would have liked to see a version done in 1978, though I don't know if filming was possible on Brownsea that early

I dont think access to Brownsea would have mattered in 78. We’d have no need/money to lug cast and crew and equipment to the island by boat, it would have just been shot around Exbury/Lepe as Kirrin Island always was. I wish we had done Mystery, it was always one of my favs as a kid, mainly cos I found Wilfred more interesting than the likes of Tinker etc as he had a skill, ie the animals, rather than just being annoying like Tinker or bratty like the Finnistone Farm duo or the Mystery Moor lot.

[pete9012S]

Yeh, I liked characters that didn't creep and crawl all over the Five.
Characters like Sooty from Smuggler's Top seemed to get the balance just right.

Sid the the paperboy and Henrietta showed a bit too much hero worship.

Ragamuffin Jo was a great character, but when young I felt she was just slightly overused in too many books - I'm not sure many will agree with me on that score though!

[Julie2owlsdene]

I liked Ragamuffin Jo. She made the books interesting as she was different and didn't conform to the usual rules and regs, as it were. I think the Five had a fondness for her too, for her outgoing ways, and likeable character.

[John Pickup]

I never took to Wilfrid, he seemed arrogant and rude.
I did like Jo, she only appeared occasionally and I didn't feel she was overused.

[Lucky Star]

Jo was good. I think her three appearances were about right. Any more and she would have become a bit of a fixture. She may seem overused because her three appearances were fairly close together, books 9, 11 and 14. Enid could maybe have spaced them out a bit better.

[Boodi 2]

I always felt sorry for Jo! With regard to FHAMTS, the cover illustration that I like best is actually the BM one, as I found it very evocative and better than the others, although in some ways the story did not really live up to the expectations triggered by the illustration.

[StephenC]

Interesting comments from Lucky Star about Jo. I tend to agree that her three appearances, are about right. Hard to see how she could have been slotted into any of the later books, from Secret Trail onwards. Her final appearance, in Plenty Of Fun, certainly transformed that book, from a potentially mediocre Fall Into Adventure rehash, into a fairly reasonable work. As she appears so late in the plot, I sometimes wondered if Enid always intended it to be that way, or if she only added Jo as an afterthought, after she started writing, to embellish the book. Regardless, Jo remains one of Enid's great support characters.

[Inspector Jenks]

Moved from another topic.


Just finished “Five have a Mystery to Solve”, and I have to say that “sensible, grown-up” Julian was nothing of the sort! I’ll give him a pass for getting stranded on the island by the implausibly strong tide, and for losing the boat when the tide came in, but as soon as Wilfrid showed up, on the island with vicious criminals actually shooting live ammunition at them (blowing some of poor Timmy’s fur off in the process), he needed to get them all the heck out of there and hightail it to the police station to tell them about the gunmen and the golden statues. Not skulk around to conduct his own investigation, taking his sisters down some dangerous cliffs, at nighttime, into some dangerous caves, where he knew that armed criminals lurked. And later on, when they were perfectly able to complete their escape, he thinks it’s a good idea to sleep on the island instead of rowing to the mainland? Really Julian, WTF? Probably a good thing the meeting with the police was not recounted in the book. “So your friend arrived with a boat to rescue you…. and you decided to do what?” Maybe I’m being a bit too harsh as these implausibilities never bothered me as a child, but it’s probably a sad sign of an aging Enid’s declining skills and attention to detail.

[Lucky Star]

I take your points Inspector Jenks but had he done as you suggest there would have been very little story!

[pete9012S]

Thank you Inspector Jenks.

I have to say, even as a staunch advocate for every Famous Five book ever written, these things DID bother me as a child in this particular book.

I remember screaming at the book in amazement when they decided to have a sleep on the island instead of leaving asap.

Little did my ten year old self realise these plot loopholes were due to Enid's declining health issues and inability to write like her former self anymore.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Yes, I found myself puzzled by quite a lot of things in Five Have a Mystery to Solve as a child - and (to a lesser extent) Five Are Together Again. Luckily I didn't make a point of reading the books in order, so I still had about ten superior Fives left to enjoy!

[John Pickup]

Mystery To Solve and Finniston Farm are the two weakest Five books in my opinion but if Julian had done as Inspector Jenks suggested, it would have been pointless writing the book in the first place.
I first read Mystery To Solve when it was first published and I admit that the points highlighted didn't bother me at all.
As a child, I wanted excitement and adventure, not Julian being sensible and fleeing from danger.

[Splodj]

To say that there would have been no adventure if Julian had acted sensibly assumes that what happened to him cannot be changed. As it was a work of fiction the circumstances could have been altered to provide an adventure and believable decisions by Julian.

[Anita Bensoussane]

I was mainly thrown by the numerous little details that seem peculiar, especially as many of them occur right near the beginning of the book.

It was news to me that George could just pop over for the evening, and that Julian and the others could cycle over to Kirrin for the day.

The arrangement about staying at the cottage so that Mrs Layman can visit her sick cousin is also odd. The children cycle over to the cottage to see it first, and introduce themselves to Wilfrid. Mrs Layman appears briefly, standing near the gate, about to get into the car to go to her cousin's. This suggests she's certain the Five are going to stay, yet they themselves weren't sure enough to bring their things. They have to go off again to fetch clothes, etc. from their homes.

Anne discovers that the larder has nothing in it except a few tins, a jug of slightly sour milk, two loaves of extremely stale bread, and a tin of rather hard cakes. She thinks, "Mrs Layman doesn't appear to be a very good housekeeper for herself and Wilfrid." Of course, Mrs Layman believes her usual woman is coming in each morning "to cook and clean." The woman would surely have been informed about four children and a dog coming to the cottage, yet Wilfrid tells Julian he has "sent her off" and adds that "She left me some food"! This all sounds most unlikely. Why would the woman accept instructions from a sulky ten-year-old, especially as her pay would be affected?!

The immediate hostility between Wilfrid and the others seems out of proportion, and the notion of Anne turning into "a tiger" is rather contrived.

Naturally, I had no idea as a child that Enid Blyton was suffering from dementia by the time she wrote Five Have a Mystery to Solve. Now I do know, I still find it astonishing that the publishers don't appear to have gone through her books and edited them to any great extent!