Secret Seven
Secret Seven! The name evokes disdain or contempt among many readers who are otherwise ardent fans of Enid Blyton. What did this ragtag band of four boys, three girls and one dog do to arouse such revulsion?
The first book in the series (informatively titled The Secret Seven) is their very first adventure. But there are hints that the Secret Seven have been active even earlier. For instance, there's a reference to how they raised money to send Lame Luke away to the sea. We never hear of Lame Luke again, so the ungrateful wretch presumably decided never to come back.
This first book in the series begins with the Secret Seven Society already formed. According to my research, the formation of the group happened in a short story called "The Secret of the Old Mill" that was written in 1948.
It's been oh-so-long since I read this series. I always remembered the books as being "juvenile" even when I read them at ten or eleven years old, so I wasn't overly bothered about reading them again. But I was pleasantly surprised. It's true that the books make for very light reading, at only a third of the length of, say, the Five Find-Outer Mystery books. You might call these books "bite-sized," great for a quick nibble between meals.
The Secret Seven were intended for a younger audience, but were chronologically written after the Famous Five and the Five Find-Outers and Dog—the Secret Seven novels started in 1949 while the latter two series started in 1942 and 1943 respectively. Before the novels came the short stories. The first one appeared as "The Wonderful Adventure" (1924), and though the storyline is missing from most sources, I found a couple of sources corroborating the fact that this was the first appearance of the characters. It seems as if Blyton did not have a full-blown series in mind at this juncture.
