The Secret Series (Enid Blyton) has one or two narrow escapes from being detained by them. The novel was originally written as a serial and, in 1938, published as a full-length novel. It was one of Enid Blyton's earliest adventure novels, preceding The Famous Five, The Five Find-Outers, The Adventure Series, The Secret Seven, and school books which would appear in following years. The children, reunited with their parents again (and Jack now adopted as part of the family), go on holiday at the rugged Cornish coast with a family friend, Miss Dimity ("Dimmy", who would appear in several further books in the series), and
Enid Blyton for the London "Evening Standard". It was illustrated by van der Beek until his death in 1953. Blyton worked in a wide range of fictional genres, from fairy tales to animal, nature, detective, mystery, and circus stories, but she often "blurred the boundaries" in her books, and encompassed a range of genres even in her short stories. In a 1958 article published in "The Author", she wrote that there were a "dozen or more different types of stories for children", and she had tried them all, but her favourites were those with a family at their centre. In a letter