“The Incompetent Security Game”

As a child, I read three of the eight Famous Five Adventure Games (see a discussion of another aspect here) – The Sinister Lake Game, The Whispering Island Game and The Secret Airfield Game. I was probably attracted by the numbers of the paragraphs in the games working out the games’ structure, which is quite logical but not explained anywhere on the web as far as I know.

Even back in my childhood, my brother always said the games were contrived – something I will admit without a grudge and which still gives me a bit of humour even in my forties. Since my unsuccessful librarianship course, I have collected the five remaining titles, although I have not been able to get the full cards for The Wreckers’ Tower Game or The Shuddering Mountain Game.

I always could recognise Blyton’s xenophobia in most of these books. Most although not all the villians are Italian (The Whispering Island Game) or Russian. No doubt this xenophobia reflects Blyton’s upper-middle-class hostility to the internationalism of Europe’s socialist working classes, and of course Russian international power and the spread of Stalinism was an especially salient issue in the 1950s.

Often, and still today, I have imagined whilst knowing it wrong that the Famous Five is fact rather than children’s fiction written by a middle-class woman undoubtedly hostile to the urban lower classes. However, despite having known the problems of the stories for a long time, today my brother offered a new twist on many jokes we tell about them. He argued that the story of Jeff being abducted by two men was entirely unrealistic because a secret military airfield would be much better guarded than the story in The Secret Airfield Game (and the related story in Five Go to Billycock Hill) implies. He also said that theft of a top secret military jet would have been investigated by military police much more quickly than implied in the stories, where there is no evidence of any investigation other than by the airfield’s ordinary guards. My brother made a really funny joke of calling the game “The Incompetent Security Game”, arguing that a secret military airfield would never be left unguarded even in the dark of night. Even with the limited technology of the 1950s, I agreed and agree enough to see that I had overlooked entirely unlikely elements in the plots of the Famous Five Adventure Games.

The name “The Incompetent Security Game” is really, really funny, unlike my brother’s “Child Labor Game” which implies that the Famous Five did not enjoy what they were doing. Its only problem is that it would imply that the mystery is to be solved in government negligence, which Blyton would not have wanted to convey. In fact, she likely wanted to convey the idea that ordinary people should take responsibility for crises as deep and as specialised as theft of critical military equipment or of minerals or old treasures.