The Wailing Lighthouse Game

Book Five in the Famous Five Adventure Games Series

Author: Enid Blyton

Illustrator: Gary Rees

Condition: Very good condition. Paperback. Used. Creases to cover corners.

About the Book

Based on Enid Blyton's - Five go to Demon's Rocks

You have often read about The Famous Five's adventures...now here's your chance to take part in one!

This time YOU are in charge. YOU have to work out the clues, read the maps, crack the codes. Whether The Five solve the mystery or not is in your hands.

You will not necessarily solve the mystery on your first attempt. It may well take several goes. Keep trying, though, and you will eventually be successful.

Even when you have solved the mystery, the game can still be played again. For there are many different routes to the solution - and each route involves different clues and adventures.

So the game can be played over and over. As many times as you like!

About Enid Blyton

In her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1952), Enid Blyton says that, from an early age, she "liked making up stories better than I liked doing anything else." As a child she would go to bed at night and stories would flood into her mind "all mixed-up, rather like dreams are, but yet each story had its own definite thread—its beginning and middle and ending." Enid Blyton did not realise at the time that that was unusual, remarking in a letter to psychologist Peter McKellar on 15th February 1953: "I thought all children had the same 'night stories' and was amazed when one day I found they hadn't." She described her "night stories" as "all kinds of imaginings in story form," saying: "Because of this imagining I wanted to write—to put down what I had seen and felt and heard in my imagination."

The young Enid was keen to develop her writing and story-telling skills. She told stories to her brothers, made up her own rhymes based on the rhythm and rhyme-scheme of popular nursery-rhymes, kept a diary, wrote letters to real and imaginary recipients, entered literary competitions and paid great attention in English lessons at school. She also read widely. As well as fiction and poetry, she read biographies of famous authors and borrowed books from the library on the Art of Writing.

The advice Enid Blyton gives in The Story of My Life to children who want to write is: "Fill your mind with all kinds of interesting things—the more you have in it, the more will come out of it. Nothing ever comes out of your mind that hasn't already been put into it in some form or other. It may come out changed, re-arranged, polished, shining, almost unrecognizable—but nevertheless it was you who put it there first of all. Your thoughts, your actions, your reading, your sense of humour, everything gets packed into your mind, and if you have an imagination, what a wonderful assortment it will have to choose from!"

Enid began submitting her work to publishers when she was in her teens, but at that stage she received countless rejection slips. However, that only made her all the more determined to persevere with her writing: "It is partly the struggle that helps you so much, that gives you determination, character, self-reliance—all things that help in any profession or trade, and most certainly in writing." As we know, Enid Blyton went on to achieve phenomenal success, beginning with the publication of magazine articles and poetry when she was in her twenties.

From Where Did Enid Blyton Get Her Ideas For Her Stories?

Enid Blyton maintained that the gates of her imagination were always ready to swing open at the slightest touch. All the things she had experienced in her life provided her with material for her stories. These life experiences:

"... sank down into my 'under-mind' and simmered there, waiting for the time to come when they would be needed again for a book—changed, transmuted, made perfect, finely-wrought—quite different from when they were packed away.
 
And yet the essence of them was exactly the same. Something had been at work, adapting, altering, deleting here and there, polishing brightly—but still the heart, the essence of the original thing was there, and I could almost always recognize it."

In a letter to Peter McKellar on 26th February 1953 she elaborated on this, saying that things she had seen on holidays, such as islands, castles and caves, would pop up frequently in her stories as she wrote:

"These things come up time and again in my stories, changed, sometimes almost unrecognisable—and then I see a detail that makes me say—yes—that's one of the Cheddar Caves, surely! Characters also remind me of people I have met—I think my imagination contains all the things I have ever seen or heard, things my conscious mind has long forgotten—and they have all been jumbled about till a light penetrates into the mass, and a happening here or an object there is taken out, transmuted, or formed into something that takes a natural and rightful place in the story—or I may recognise it—or I may not—I don't think that I use anything I have not seen or experienced—I don't think I could. I don't think one can take out of one's mind more than one puts in... Our books are facets of ourselves."

Other Books in the Series

The Famous Five

Five On a Treasure Island
Five Go Adventuring Again
Five Run Away Together
Five Go To Smuggler's Top
Five Go Off in a Caravan
Five On Kirrin Island Again
Five Go Off to Camp
Five Get Into Trouble
Five Fall Into Adventure
Five On a Hike Together
Five Have a Wonderful Time
Five Go Down to the Sea
Five Go to Mystery Moor
Five Have Plenty of Fun
Five On a Secret Trail
Five Go to Billycock Hill
Five Get Into a Fix
Five on Finniston Farm
Five Go to Demln's Rocks
Five Have a Mystery to Solve
Five Are Together Again

The Famous Five Adventure Games

The Wreckers' Tower Game
The Haunted Railway Game
The Whispering Island Game
The Sinister Lake Game
The Wailing Lighthouse Game
The Secret Airfield Game
The Shuddering Mountain Game
The Missing Scientist Game

The Wailing Lighthouse Game