Not among the best of the series.

It's clear that Blyton's adventure books capture my imagination better than these detective ones. We don't have the advantage of interesting new settings, a wonderful sense of freedom and exciting adventures.

At best, these Find-Outer books are surprisingly good mysteries, Agatha Christie for kids, with a gang of typical Blyton kids as main characters. Unfortunately, in this one the mystery was kind of underwhelming, since the children, led as always by Fatty, only do some investigation before the larger mystery is explained by Inspector Jenks. I would have liked them to find out a lot more than what they did, because the resolution was kind of anticlimactic.

Another highlight is the comical element of the children's war with the local constable Mr. Goon. We get our fair share of that here, with Fatty trying some ventriloquist tricks on Mr. Goon. My problem with this is that, even when read through the eyes of my inner child, these things are a bit too un much. I mean, it's always the same tricks and the same victim. How dumb can Mr. Goon be? It's more fun for me to see Kiki's antics in the Adventure series, since at least the "victims" who wonder at the things the parrot says are different people in each book. ( )

The tenth entry in Enid Blyton's Five Find-Outers and Dog series, in which a group of British schoolchildren play detective on their holidays, The Mystery of the Strange Bundle sees Fatty, Larry, Daisy, Pip and Bets involved in a puzzling case of house-breaking. When Larry and Daisy's neighbor, Mr. Fellows, disappears, leaving behind a scene of utter chaos, burglary is suspected, and the Find-Outers are immediately on the case. What was the thief looking for? Where had Mr. Fellows gone, and what was in the strange bundle he'd taken with him? Could it have anything to do with the little red mitten Fatty had found in his house? And would the children discover the secret before their nemesis, police bobby Mr. Goon?

I enjoyed this installment of the series, particularly the scenes where Fatty uses his new ventriloquism skills to play tricks on the pompous Mr. Goon. As mentioned in my reviews of some of the other Five Find-Outers and Dog books, these aren't terribly original (or plausible) stories, nor are they particularly well-written. But the humor, when Blyton gets it right, can be infectious, and the characters appealing.

I did feel that the resolution of the mystery was a little too much in the "world conspiracy involving ALL the traditional bugaboos of the upper-class British mind-set" vein. It reminded me a bit of the conspiracy uncovered in Agatha Christie's N or M?, in which everything from Irish Republicanism to labor unrest was depicted as being part of one monolithic whole. In a similar fashion, the nameless intelligence agent here reflects upon all the fifth column activity going on, including all those "people undermining every industry in our country - provoking strikes, sabotage, anything that would harm Britain." The idea that strikes occur because of unjust labor practices was (and probably still is) somewhat difficult for a certain demographic to grasp. Ah well! ( )

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