Like many, many of us, Duncan McLaren was a devoted and indiscriminate consumer of Enid Blyton’s books in his youth, which is a glorious and admirable condition for a child to exist in. It is markedly less glorious and admirable, however, in an adult, and In Looking for Enid (described on the flap as an “endeavour to reach the source of Blyton’s torrent of stories”) it can become downright disturbing. McLaren unblinkingly hails The Mystery of Holly Lane (1953) as “fabulous entertainment” and Blyton’s retelling of a Bible story as “a stunning literary achievement” that leaves him “emotionally drained”. Neither the sentiments nor the level of expression should pass the lips of anyone over 10 years old. Even the under-10s might think twice before asserting that, “If we were playing a word-association game right now and you came up with the name ‘Isaac Newton’, my response would be ‘Enid Blyton’. That’s how highly I rank her.”

As if this were not enough, McLaren announces that “there’ll be as much going on creatively as there will be of a critical and analytical nature” in his book. In other words he’s going to junk any significant questions: how Blyton holds a child’s attention despite her pedestrian prose, whether her reproductive problems fuelled her creative drive, how much impact the wartime need for comforting stories had on her initial popularity, or whether her continuing success says anything about the inherent instability of childhood or just about the power of catering to the lowest common denominator. Instead, he’s going to express himself “creatively”.

Thus we must plough through a pastiche of a Five Find-Outers mystery that is so turgid that the publisher has had to include a picture of Kiki the parrot (a character from a different series, but never mind) to signal spoofery. Meanwhile, the “normal” text is peppered with imaginary conversations between real and fictional characters that lead nowhere and don’t illuminate anything.

Perhaps McLaren’s most worthless exercise is to have worked out that Theophilus Goon, the idiot policeman in the Mystery series, is an anagram of O Let Hugh Poison and O Hugh Spoilt One. Blyton’s first husband was called Hugh Pollock, and Goon, McLaren reckons, was her literary revenge. O dear lord – so what? We know from Barbara Stoney’s thorough 1974 biography, and the autobiography of Blyton’s younger daughter, that the divorce was rancorous and that Blyton was not above pettiness. McLaren’s anagrams add nothing, though he takes five unremittingly dull pages to prove it.

The parts of the biography that are not overwrought fan letter or meaningless meanderings are largely taken up with McLaren recounting how it was written. He documents his activities in Bromley library and devotes an entire page to starting up his computer one morning. Occasionally, a point of interest emerges. For example, embedded in an interminable plot outline of Five on a Secret Trail is the comment, “She just used sentences to efficiently record the film she was watching on her own private cinema screen, if you see what I mean.” This is an oblique reference to the five-year correspondence between Blyton and Peter McKellar, a psychologist investigating writers’ creative processes. There, Blyton described “simply opening the sluice gates – and out it all pours with no effort or labour of my own. This is why I can write so much and so quickly – it’s all I can do to keep up with it, even typing at top speed on my typewriter”. It seems that, for 40 years, Blyton’s 600-odd books were dictated to her at the daily rate of 10,000 words – by her characters.

But McLaren does not expand on the correspondence with McKellar or follow the lines of inquiry that Blyton’s explanation suggests. (Should we count this possibly unique process as an amazing talent or an amazing stroke of luck? Was she at the mercy of this ever-playing “film”?) His critical faculties extend only as far as matching Blyton’s family members and holiday destinations with characters and locations in her books. This giant, frequently misguided game of pelmanism culminates in the deduction that Blyton’s second marriage must have been rewarding because it coincided with the publication of a Sunny Story featuring an eight-inch-long torch “which went on and off when he pushed the knob up and down”. Close those sluice gates. Please.

LOOKING FOR ENID: The Mysterious and Inventive Life of Enid Blyton by Duncan McLaren
Portobello £15.99 pp329

Lucy Mangan is a Guardian columnist

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