KEY POINTS:
Enid Blyton's books have a reputation for innocence, innocence even to the point of banality, with their handy clues, helpful dogs and lashings of parochial adventure. The truth, however, may be rather less cosy.
A new biography of the writer, who is still loved by hundreds of millions of readers all over the world, has discovered a strain of cleverly disguised spite running through her children's books.
Writer Duncan McClaren has researched the real-life connections and resonances in the books that Blyton wrote during her prolific career for his new study, Looking For Enid: The Mysterious and Inventive Life of Enid Blyton.
While McClaren argues the novelist's imaginative powers and wit have been vastly under-rated, he has also found evidence one of her silliest characters, the bumbling local policeman of Peterswood in the successful Mystery books, was, in fact, a prolonged and sometimes cruel joke at the expense of her first husband, Major Hugh Pollock.
Throughout the series of 15 books, PC Goon is repeatedly humiliated and bested by a gang of five smart children known as The Finder-Outers - Fatty, Larry, Daisy, Pip and Bets, not forgetting Buster the dog. The Mystery books, like her other adventure series, The Famous Five and The Secret Seven, each involve solving a problem or crime.
McClaren now believes Blyton was laughing at Pollock, the influential older man she wed in 1924.
"Enid loved riddles as a child and had developed a secret code, which I call the box and dot code, which she used to write postcards to her friends," he said. "Ostensibly, the Mysteries are about the solving of mysteries by the Five Finder-Outers and Dog," he argues, "To a large degree, the books are really about the ridiculing of Goon."
The biographer's theory, already vetted by members of the Enid Blyton Society, fits the facts neatly, he claims, and the full name of the fictional policeman involved provided his first clue.
"In the first Mystery written in 1943, The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage, the pattern is set. Fatty and the gang pit their wits against the local policeman, PC Goon," said McClaren, going on to explain that in the second book Blyton "gives this buffoon of an authority figure" the unlikely name of Theophilus.
"In The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat, for instance, the sentence is, 'If I don't force a confession out of him, my name's not Theophilus Goon'.
"I noticed that this sentence type, ending with 'my name's not Theophilus Goon', was repeated in several books," he said.
McClaren then played with a series of mildly abusive anagrams of Theophilus Goon involving the name "Hugh", such as "O Hugh Spoilt One". He had recalled the fictional Peterswood setting of these books had already been established by Blyton scholars as Bourne End, the real Buckinghamshire village where the author shared a home with Pollock and their two daughters, Gillian and Imogen. This was also the place where the marriage broke down and where, as revealed in Barbara Stoney's 1974 biography of Blyton, Pollock used to go to the cellar to drink.
Clue Number Two is the cellar itself, which recurs as a motif in several books. At the conclusion of The Mystery of the Secret Room, Fatty locks the unfortunate PC Goon in a dirty cellar overnight.
But perhaps one of the most persuasive new clues follows from the idea that Blyton came to regard her first husband as imaginatively hamstrung.
Pollock was a well-connected publisher and instrumental in launching Blyton's career, but McClaren suggests he began to resent his wife's success.
"Enid was an extraordinarily creative person with very easy access to her imagination," McClaren said.
"What surprised me when I looked into it was not just that everything that ever happened to her would be used in some way in her writing, but the most important things that happened to her became fundamental to her writing."
In The Mystery of the Vanished Prince, PC Goon vainly tries to speak in a fake foreign language, something the children have done to fool him earlier on in the book. He is unable to relax into this childishness, just as Pollock could not follow Blyton into letting "her mind go free" when she wrote. "When you've got the imagination that Enid had, and the playful intelligence, and the hurt from the breakdown of the marriage, then that makes it almost too easy for her to put together a literary revenge," McClaren said.
The biographer also believes Blyton's emotional development was arrested at the age of 12 when her parents' marriage broke up. "That kind of froze her and explains why so much of her work deals with pre-adolescents," he argues.
The Mystery books were written during her happy second marriage to the surgeon Kenneth Waters, at a period when she was writing an average of 5000 words a day and turning out 20 books a year across all her many series.
For McClaren it is this extraordinary child-like fluency that makes Blyton books still so appealing to children and so charming for adults.
- Observer
