Top Ten non-Blyton series

[timv]

I would have loved to have read more of the Violet Needham individual books and series, as the 'Prisoner of Zenda' -style adventures there in medieval and early C20th Central Europe reflected the same 'Ruritanian' world as Enid's 'Castle of Adventure'. But these were incredibly hard to get hold of in the 1970s, and I only read one or two that survived in hardback editions in my school library plus a new paperback edition of 'The Changeling of Monte Lucio' (one of my favourite historical stories).
The same applied to Geoffrey Trease's historical adventure/ mystery books; at school I only came across 'Crown of Violet' (set in ancient Athens< with a teenage boy writing a play for a theatrical festival and stopping a 'Cue For Treason' -style plot to overthrow the government) and 'The Hills of Varna' (where a manuscript of this play turns up in a Balkan monastery around 1500 and an English boy and girl are sent to retrieve it). The other book in his history series which I read was the ever-popular 'Cue For Treason'. With Antonia Forest, I did not get to read her non-school Marlows books until I was an adult, in some cases tracking down the British Library copies; the most recent of them, 'Run Away Home' (pub 1982), was ironically the most elusive.

[John Pickup]

My favourite non-Blyton series are:
The Jillies books by Malcolm Saville, followed by his Lone Pine series.
The Billy Bunter books by Frank Richards. I've got 34 of the 38 yellow-jacketed hardbacks.
The Jennings books by Anthony Buckeridge.
The Crusoe books by David Severn. I just need one hardback to complete the set.
The Bannerdale series by Geoffrey Trease. There are five of these and I also like the two books in the Maythorn series.
The Cherrys by Will Scott. These are really hard to find in hardback but I believe that GGB are thinking of publishing them.
I also have lots of adventure stories in the Childrens Press imprint which were reasonably cheap to buy when they came out.
I've got about 12 of the William books but I was never a big fan.

[Fiona1986]

The Cherrys by Will Scott. These are really hard to find in hardback but I believe that GGB are thinking of publishing them.

Really? That would be great, I've only ever managed to find two and one of those was passed down to me by my mum!

[John Pickup]

Fiona, I receive the weekly e-mail letter from Clarissa at Girls Gone By and about a month ago she asked who would be interested in buying this set if they decided to publish it. They will only go ahead if enough people are prepared to buy them and I replied I would certainly want them. I've heard nothing since but she did mention that plenty of people had registered an interest.
Hopefully, GGB will go ahead as they are practically impossible to find in hardback.

[db105]

With all the good work that publisher (GGB) does recovering worthy out-of-print books, it's a pity they don't do print on demand or ebooks so that the titles they recover remain in print. As it is, if you miss it when they print it, you lost the chance. I would love to buy new editions of the Lone Pine books, but...

[Fiona1986]

I've got two GGB editions of the Lone Pines (The Man with Three Fingers and Where's My Girl) but have been lucky enough to find all the rest in their original form, though some are ex-library etc. I didn't buy them directly from GGB though, I'm sure I got them on eBay or AbeBooks. As you say, they only print in limited numbers and then that's it.

[GloomyGraham]

After Enid, I certainly tried some other series like 'Bobbsey Twins' or 'Three Investigators' but I don't think you can beat Malcom Saville's 'Lone Pine' series for a Blyton fan who is growing up

[Courtenay]

I'm not sure I can really rate my "top ten" non-Blyton series that I've read, though there have been quite a few that I've enjoyed (not all of which I've re-read as an adult, though). There were a lot of ongoing series that were very popular at my school (in the late 1980s / early '90s), like the Babysitters Club, Goosebumps, Sweet Valley High, and later Animorphs, but I was too big a snob to read any of that generic stuff. (NOT an anti-Blyton snob at all, though, ever. Everyone in my family loves her books and so did I, right from the start!)

Out of the other series I did read as a child, the Chronicles of Narnia were my favourite — and still are my favourite children's books, even as an adult. Yes, even over and above Enid Blyton. (There we go, I've confessed it. Shoot me now. )

My other favourite was The Lord of the Rings (vying back and forth with Narnia for top spot, but as an adult, it's Narnia that's stayed with me the most). Not sure LOTR counts as a "series", though, since although it was published as three books, I gather Tolkien always intended for it to be seen as one book — and the three volumes can't be read in any other order and still make sense.

I also enjoyed the Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander, the Animals of Farthing Wood series by Colin Dann, the Dragon King Saga by Stephen Lawhead and the Redwall series by Brian Jacques... you see fantasy adventures or talking animals — or even better, both — are always a winning formula with me!

Also at one stage in my early teens, I was quite into the multiple fantasy sagas by David Eddings, but went right off him when, in the preface to one of his later spin-off books, he made really disparaging remarks about Tolkien. Fair enough that Tolkien's actual works aren't to everyone's taste, but when I read that from Eddings, I felt like saying "Mate, if it wasn't for the fact that "Papa Tolkien" (as you so condescendingly call him) practically INVENTED the epic fantasy genre as we know it — and devoted his entire life to doing so, too — you wouldn't be writing any of what you're writing today, let alone making money out of it."

Slightly later, I read most of Anne McCaffrey's Pern series — an interesting cross between fantasy and sci-fi, set in the future on another planet that humans have colonised, which has flying, fire-breathing creatures a lot like the legendary dragons of Earth. That series started out well and I enjoyed it for quite a while, but felt the later books dragged increasingly and I eventually went off it.

A few years ago I discovered a recent series aimed at young readers — the Foxcraft trilogy by Inbali Iserles — that I enjoyed hugely... yes, once again the animals-and-fantasy combination. (I DO read other kinds of books, honestly — it's just that most of the series I've got into have been about animals and/or magic worlds.) This series is implicitly set in our world, but is about foxes who have magic powers, of the sort you might expect a fox to have — shape-shifting, near-invisibility, mind-reading and so on. Very well written and just as good to read as an adult as it would have been as a child!

(I could give an honourable (?) mention to Harry Potter, too, but although I read and enjoyed all the books as they came out, I was never obsessed with them and I think they're a bit overrated. So there. )

[Anita Bensoussane]

It's fun hearing which series people recommend.

The Three Investigators books have been mentioned more than once. I read the first ten Three Investigators titles as an adult and enjoyed them, The Mystery of the Screaming Clock being a favourite. The characterisation, structure, pace and wonderfully quirky elements make them superior to the Nancy Drew mysteries my sister and I read as children.

Geoffrey Trease's Bannerdale books also seem popular. I read the first two or three about a decade ago and didn't find them very engaging or exciting, to be honest, but maybe I should give them another try one of these days.

I would have loved to have read more of the Violet Needham individual books and series, as the 'Prisoner of Zenda' -style adventures there in medieval and early C20th Central Europe reflected the same 'Ruritanian' world as Enid's 'Castle of Adventure'.

Do you mean The Circus of Adventure, Tim? The Secret of Spiggy Holes and The Secret of Killimooin are worth a read as well, for anyone who likes 'Ruritanian' fiction.

My favourite non-Blyton series are:
The Jillies books by Malcolm Saville, followed by his Lone Pine series...

I too prefer the Jillies series to the Lone Pine series, John. The best titles are extremely tense and full of atmosphere, and I like the characters.

[Barnard]

When I was about seven, I was reading a series of books by a Dutch lady called Willy Schermelé. These books were commonly known as the Winkie books and they involved elves, gnomes and brownies. I was reading these in the early 1960s so don’t remember the details very well. The other books I was reading at the time were the Toby Twirl books of Sheila Hodgetts. Toby Twirl was a talking pig and his two friends were Pete the Penguin and Eli Phant the Elephant. Their adventures were rather surreal. The met a marzipan man in one story and a dragon that couldn’t stop crying in another. I have ordered from Amazon some Toby Twirl books and I’m quite tempted to see if any Winkie books are available.

[timv]

Yes, Anita, I mean 'Circus of Adventure'. It's the central role of Borken Castle in the book that gets me muddled up!
The 'middle-class UK boarding-school children get mixed up with a Central/ East European prince(ss) and end up in an exotic country in the middle of a plot' storyline seems to have started with the 1900s - 1930s girls' school story author Angela Brazil , in 'St Catherine's College' (1927) where a disguised European princess is at a UK boarding-school pretending to be Our Heroine's mystery cousin and both girls get taken off to the Mystery Royal's country for a 'holiday'. A plot is underway to out the princess on the throne but goes wrong, and the UK girl helps her to escape across the border disguised as an English girl, hoodwinking the baddies' soldiers when they stop and interrogate the girls. I wonder if Enid had come across this?

The Buchan-style 'East European royal gets kidnapped to be used in a coup' theme seems to have transferred to books with British children involved with Elinor Brent Dyer's 'Princess of the Chalet School' in the late 1920s, where the princess in question is at the eponymous school in Austria and is grabbed by her villainous adult cousin in order to blackmail her father into abdicating his rights to the throne. Our heroine (Joey Bettany aged c. 13) then rescues her, aided by her huge St Bernard dog. Violet Needham's stories were later, beginning in 1937, and featured English teens visiting Central Europe/ the Balkans not any UK settings; but her 'travelling boy rescuer', in Jack Trent's role, was a local Central European. His 'mystery man pedlar' mentor, linked to international Intelligence groups, may have been a source for Bill's role in Circus of Adventure; the role of a circus as the means of rescuing kidnapped heroes seems to come from John Buchan, who had his kidnapped hero rescued from dastardly Communists by an MI6 agent with an elephant that could pluck him out of an upstairs winddow!

[Anita Bensoussane]

Another early novel with "Ruritanian" elements is Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Lost Prince (1915). Some young boys from London play a part in trying to overthrow a dictator who has taken over the European kingdom of Samavia, and there's at least one member of the deposed royal family in hiding in England.

When I was about seven, I was reading a series of books by a Dutch lady called Willy Schermelé.

I've come across Willy Schermelé but had always thought she was male until just now, Barnard! On reading your post, I looked her up and discovered that Willy is short for Wilhelmina!

[Barnard]

I have only just noticed that Willy Schermele illustrated some Enid Blyton books in the 1950s, namely My Enid Blyton Story Book, dated 1954 and Enid Blyton’s Good Morning Book. There may have been a lot more. Is this generally known?

[dsr]

Antonia Forest stands out for me. Most definitely.

For anyone who likes Narnia, you may or may like a vast continuation fanfic collection by rthstewart. She has basically two worlds, the Narnia Golden Age (two really long novels and a lorryload of shorter stuff) and a parallel series of what happened to the children when they came back from Narnia the first time (Apostolic Way series). There's another parallel alternate universe set in later life after assuming that Last Battle didn't happen. It's all on Archive Of Our Own.

As for series, although not particularly "series" books, Nancy Breary was IMO the best of the first half of the century school story writers, with Christine Chaundler second. Chaundler especially specialised in dramatic rescues, even more so than Elinor Brent Dyer!

Dorothea Moore does similarly heroic rescue acts but set (mostly) in the Civil War. All the good guys, naturally, are Cavaliers. All were for the King, none were for the State.

The best boys' school writer was Talbot Baines Reed. (Other than PG Wodehouse, of course, who was only an occasional school story writer, but the ones he did write were crackers.)

[dsr]

Another early novel with "Ruritanian" elements is Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Lost Prince (1915). Some young boys from London play a part in trying to overthrow a dictator who has taken over the European kingdom of Samavia, and there's at least one member of the deposed royal family in hiding in England.

Philip Pullman wrote one of those - "The Tin Princess". It's sort-of the fourth part of the "Tiger in the Smoke" trilogy, in that a couple of the character overlap. That series is far better than his Golden Compass series IMO.