Enid Blyton every year in addition to many other novels, short stories and books. In 1946 Blyton launched the first in the Malory Towers series of six books based around the schoolgirl Darrell Rivers, "First Term at Malory Towers", which became extremely popular, particularly with girls. The first book in Blyton's Barney Mysteries series, "The Rockingdown Mystery", was published in 1949, as was the first of her fifteen Secret Seven novels. The Secret Seven Society consists of Peter, his sister Janet, and their friends Colin, George, Jack, Pam and Barbara, who meet regularly in a shed in the garden to discuss peculiar
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