Take Five

Lucy Vickery presents the winners of Competition No. 2528

In Competition No. 2528 you were invited to submit an extract from an imaginary story in the Famous Five series written in the style of hard-boiled crime fiction. So it’s Blyton meets Hammett; the upper-middle-class crime-busting quintet, whose adventures are played out in a 1950s rural idyll punctuated by picnics and bicycle rides, filtered through the prism of gritty 1930s urban America, what Raymond Chandler calls ‘a world gone wrong’.