Fun with The Famous Five

My little girl brought home some Famous Five books from the school library. I quite liked reading them as a child, so I read a few again to see if they as bad as the literary snobs say.

They are.

Here's a classic bit of muddled English from "Five Go Off In A Caravan", page 95:

"We don't want to come back and find the caravans damaged or half our things stolen" said George.

"I should think not!" said Dick. "… I think we ought to leave Timmy on guard, don't you, Ju?" said Dick.

"Yes I do," said Julian at once, "These caravans are too valuable to leave at the mercy of any passing tramp - though I suppose we could lock them up."

What strikes you most is that the books turn the traditional crime novel plot back to front. In the Famous Five books, the children identify the suspects first, then wait for the inevitable crime to be committed, then pin the crime on the suspects and then have them arrested.

Isn't the crime supposed to happen first and then the master detective works out who the suspects are and narrows the field down to the actual perpetrator?

Inspector Barnaby adopts the latter approach, but doesn't bother eliminating suspects using logic, he just waits for them to be murdered one by one, and whoever is the last suspect to remain alive is the one who did it.

"Tony Blair and George W. Bush are reunited at the opening of former President's library"

From The Daily Mail:

Ten years after embarking on the bloody Iraq War with bosom buddy and former American president George W. Bush, ex prime minister Tony Blair cut a lonely figure at a presidential reunion yesterday.

As he sat surrounded by empty chairs the former Labour leader, whose government went to war claiming Iraq had 'weapons of mass destruction', Blair looked on as the five living American presidents gathered in Dallas to honor the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

The tanned former prime minister, who George Bush famously called out to as 'Yo, Blair!' at a G8 meeting in 2006, soon cheered up once seats were filled by other past and present world leaders at the ceremony in Texas...

Speaking to the press after the event, the multi-milionaire warmonger Blair revealed that the Bush Library contains the copy of "The Pet Goat" which George Bush was reading to school children on 9/11, as well as the finest and most extensive collecton of Peanuts annuals and colouring books "this side of Alexandria".

Plagiarism

JK Rowling never denied having done her homework before grinding out the Harry Potter books (which I, being a prole, enjoyed reading enormously), so it's all fantasy based on myths based on folklore, and inevitably, there will be people suing her for infringement of copyright.

However, being entirely fair about all of this, a couple of days ago, we cracked open a nice box set of books which The Lass had received for her birthday, called The Worst Witch, first published in 1974, and, pardon my French, the stories are like a first draft (and I mean that in a good way, all the important elements are there) of the Harry Potter books and/or the Harry Potter books boiled down to the level which five- to ten-year old girls would find amusing but not threatening. Only they were first published twenty years before the Harry Potter books.

I accept that there is no copyright in 'ideas', as such, and I find these copyright lawsuits a decade or more after the event rather lame, but in this case, if Jill Murphy had a pop at JK Rowling, I would be rooting for her.

Children's books

There are a load of great children's books out there, but why-oh-why do so many of them have the text above the pictures?

Parents usually have to point to the words while the small child reads (so that they do not lose their place etc). If you are pointing to words at the top of the page then the small child can't see the pictures, which defeats the whole object of the exercise.