The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage

The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage is the first of the Five Find-Outers series of children's mystery novels by the English writer Enid Blyton. It was initially published in 1943 and has been reissued frequently since.

The mystery concerns who could have set fire to Mr Hick's cottage, and the children who take it on are Larry and Daisy Daykin, Pip and Bets Hilton, and Frederick Algernon Trotteville, the newcomer whose initials give him the nickname Fatty. They meet at the scene of the fire and solve the case between them, working through suspects who include an old tramp, a dismissed servant, a hostile colleague and the cook. The clues they collect are ordinary and physical: broken-down nettles in a ditch, a footprint in a grassy field, and the presence of Hawker Tempest aircraft, which Mr Hick mentions having seen fly over. The detail that does not fit is his account of being on the London train when the cottage burned, and the village policeman, Mr Goon, is working the same case from the other side.

Blyton wrote the series across the 1940s and 1950s, and the Find-Outers are a group of children in a village setting rather than the travelling adventurers of some of her other books.