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Lone Pine #6
The Elusive Grasshopper
The sixth Lone Pine book.Jon and Penny spot an old enemy in Paris.Back in Rye, they spot him again and invite the Mortons to join them in tracking him down.
Paperback
First published January 1, 1951
About the author
Malcolm Saville
194 books34 followersLeonard Malcolm Saville was an English author best known for the Lone Pine series of children's books, many of which are set in Shropshire. His work emphasises location; the books include many vivid descriptions of English countryside, villages and sometimes towns.
(wikipedia)
(wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 4, 2023
So I am three deep into the batch of Lone Pine books I found at a boot sale - and somehow I am well and truly hooked.
This is similar to the other books, with a "Famous Five" kind of vibe and an unwavering quaintness that only England of the period can manage.
This is set in Dungeness (a place I have visited) and is centred around the Hythe contingent of the Lone Pine club so I would recommend reading "The Gay Dolphin" first.
But now we have the addition of a young French girl with Allo-Allo type accent.
A lot of the book is about cycling around Kent and eating sandwiches, the mystery is very simple to say the least, but this seems to be my pace at the moment.
This is set in a time where kids spent the day exploring the countryside, wandering around cliff tops, accepting lifts off kindly men in sports cars or inviting themselves to dinner at strangers' remote farm houses, before catching the bus home in time for tea and crumpets.
This is great fun with Penny puffing her cheeks out, Jon exclaiming how rum everything is and Arlette gushing how “zee littl puppy is zer, zer lovealy, no?”
If I wasn't such an objective stick-in-the-mud I would give this four stars but it really is quite simple.
This is similar to the other books, with a "Famous Five" kind of vibe and an unwavering quaintness that only England of the period can manage.
This is set in Dungeness (a place I have visited) and is centred around the Hythe contingent of the Lone Pine club so I would recommend reading "The Gay Dolphin" first.
But now we have the addition of a young French girl with Allo-Allo type accent.
A lot of the book is about cycling around Kent and eating sandwiches, the mystery is very simple to say the least, but this seems to be my pace at the moment.
This is set in a time where kids spent the day exploring the countryside, wandering around cliff tops, accepting lifts off kindly men in sports cars or inviting themselves to dinner at strangers' remote farm houses, before catching the bus home in time for tea and crumpets.
This is great fun with Penny puffing her cheeks out, Jon exclaiming how rum everything is and Arlette gushing how “zee littl puppy is zer, zer lovealy, no?”
If I wasn't such an objective stick-in-the-mud I would give this four stars but it really is quite simple.
January 29, 2021
Sixth in the 'Lone Pine' series about a group of teenagers who have some exciting adventures. This one is set in Rye, and involves some new friends as well as old 'enemies' from a previous book. As always, danger abounds... but all ends well.
The characterisation and the character interactions are what lift Malcolm Saville's books out of the run-of-the-mill teenage adventure fiction of the 1950s. The people feel real, and there were one or two quite moving sections of this book. Having the full 'Girls Gone By' edition makes it all the more enjoyable than the Armada abridged one, but it's a good story even in the shorter version.
Not, perhaps, the greatest of fiction, but enjoyable for a few hours' relaxation.
Latest longer review here: https://suesbookreviews.blogspot.com/...
The characterisation and the character interactions are what lift Malcolm Saville's books out of the run-of-the-mill teenage adventure fiction of the 1950s. The people feel real, and there were one or two quite moving sections of this book. Having the full 'Girls Gone By' edition makes it all the more enjoyable than the Armada abridged one, but it's a good story even in the shorter version.
Not, perhaps, the greatest of fiction, but enjoyable for a few hours' relaxation.
Latest longer review here: https://suesbookreviews.blogspot.com/...
August 4, 2018
Another well plotted Lone Pine story. I do wonder sometimes where Malcolm Saville gleaned his ideas from but whatever the source, they make for some great reading - even if they were intended for a younger audience.
I have personally visited quite a number of the locations mentioned in this book and have to say that Saville's descriptions are spot on, even all these years later. Some things never change. Thanks to everyone who helps to keep it that way.
I have personally visited quite a number of the locations mentioned in this book and have to say that Saville's descriptions are spot on, even all these years later. Some things never change. Thanks to everyone who helps to keep it that way.
June 16, 2026
I think this must be the first time I’ve found out about a book from a little plaque on a wooden bench.
The bench in question was on the platform at Dungeness station where the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway loops through the wilderness of seagrass and shingle on the edge of the world that is Romney Marsh.
It was from this plaque that I learned about the 1950s children’s author, Malcolm Saville, who set his adventure story, “The Elusive Grasshopper”, very specifically in this location. I thoroughly enjoyed his foreword to the story in which he explains how important it was to him to write about real-life places (and real children too, of course).
There was lots of charming nostalgia for me in the story. For example:
- Penny drinking freshly-squeezed orange juice, sitting outside a cafe in Paris (p18), reminded me of drinking Orangina on holiday in France in the 1980s.
- The express train the children travel on from Paris to Calais, with closed compartments and doors opening into a corridor, is just like the train I remember going on as a child on a trip to Llandudno (there’s a charming picture of a very elegant railway compartment on page 37, drawn by the exquisitely named Bertram Prance).
- Arlette, the Frenchiest of French exchange students - with her Gallic Glamour and ‘Allo, ‘Allo accent - made me think of European pen-friends when I was a teenager, and how the responsibility for entertaining them on exchange visits soon became tedious (as Mrs Warrender points out on page 102).
Other vintage touches I enjoyed include:
- Fashionable women in Paris wearing elegant gloves which inspires Penny to do likewise (p16).
- Food’s still on ration in Britain which makes eating large French meals with ham, steak and cheese feel “actually wrong” (p29).
- The children sending telegrams from the post office (p48) where now, unglamorously, we’d just send a text with news.
- Men wearing brown boots with tweed suits - apparently a fashion faux pas (p67).
- Ernest young men like James Wilson self-consciously smoking pipes (p86).
- Phoning from a call box where you only have three minutes before the “pips go”, cutting you off unless you put in more coins (p120).
But some things from seventy-five years ago remind us just how much the past is indeed a foreign country, so that things that were entirely normal then would now probably raise eyebrows. For example:
- Fifteen-year old Penny is eyed up by a passing Frenchman who “smiles politely and instinctively at Penny from the pavement as he caught her eye” (p17).
- Men can be patronising and sexist towards women - for example, young newspaper reporter, James Wilson, acknowledging superciliously that “It’s true that women with their superior guile are sometimes useful” (p84).
- Mary and Dickie Morton, the creepily precocious ten-year old twins, cycle off together in a storm across the Marshes - entirely unsupervised and without a “responsible” adult, FindMe tracking devices or helmets and hi-viz.
- Sixteen-year olds “playing” outdoor adventure games (rather than indoors on TikTok). Jon, who is almost 17, is rather poignantly just now starting “to realise that something very precious and irreplaceable was slipping away from him … and now it would never be the same again” (p170).
It was the location that intrigued me most about this book. And that led me to ponder the strange coincidence of how many other books I’ve enjoyed that have similarly been set in the otherworldliness of the Romney Marshes - the strange Kentish wilderness of mist and salt marsh, sheep and dykes, vast skies and the ruins of long vanished villages and churches.
This is the bleak and sinister world of young Pip in “Great Expectations”, of course, and it’s ever present as an unyielding natural force in Shelia Kaye-Smith’s back-to-nature novel, “Joanna Godden” (one of my 5-star reviews on this site).
The Marshes are also ever present as something raw and ominous beneath the mannered sophistication of EF Benson’s Mapp & Lucia Rye-based comedies and the middle-class edifice of posh Hythe in LP Hartley’s “The Perfect Woman”.
And I’d forgotten until writing this review that the Romney Marshes provide the unsettling atmosphere of Sapper’s “Temple Tower”, where their bleakness and subversiveness form an essential part of the criminal plot.
As I said in my review of that novel, these salt marshes seem to have become such a feature in English literature that I think they’re like a character in their own right - damp, windswept, enigmatic and obstinate. So pretty English, then …
The bench in question was on the platform at Dungeness station where the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway loops through the wilderness of seagrass and shingle on the edge of the world that is Romney Marsh.
It was from this plaque that I learned about the 1950s children’s author, Malcolm Saville, who set his adventure story, “The Elusive Grasshopper”, very specifically in this location. I thoroughly enjoyed his foreword to the story in which he explains how important it was to him to write about real-life places (and real children too, of course).
There was lots of charming nostalgia for me in the story. For example:
- Penny drinking freshly-squeezed orange juice, sitting outside a cafe in Paris (p18), reminded me of drinking Orangina on holiday in France in the 1980s.
- The express train the children travel on from Paris to Calais, with closed compartments and doors opening into a corridor, is just like the train I remember going on as a child on a trip to Llandudno (there’s a charming picture of a very elegant railway compartment on page 37, drawn by the exquisitely named Bertram Prance).
- Arlette, the Frenchiest of French exchange students - with her Gallic Glamour and ‘Allo, ‘Allo accent - made me think of European pen-friends when I was a teenager, and how the responsibility for entertaining them on exchange visits soon became tedious (as Mrs Warrender points out on page 102).
Other vintage touches I enjoyed include:
- Fashionable women in Paris wearing elegant gloves which inspires Penny to do likewise (p16).
- Food’s still on ration in Britain which makes eating large French meals with ham, steak and cheese feel “actually wrong” (p29).
- The children sending telegrams from the post office (p48) where now, unglamorously, we’d just send a text with news.
- Men wearing brown boots with tweed suits - apparently a fashion faux pas (p67).
- Ernest young men like James Wilson self-consciously smoking pipes (p86).
- Phoning from a call box where you only have three minutes before the “pips go”, cutting you off unless you put in more coins (p120).
But some things from seventy-five years ago remind us just how much the past is indeed a foreign country, so that things that were entirely normal then would now probably raise eyebrows. For example:
- Fifteen-year old Penny is eyed up by a passing Frenchman who “smiles politely and instinctively at Penny from the pavement as he caught her eye” (p17).
- Men can be patronising and sexist towards women - for example, young newspaper reporter, James Wilson, acknowledging superciliously that “It’s true that women with their superior guile are sometimes useful” (p84).
- Mary and Dickie Morton, the creepily precocious ten-year old twins, cycle off together in a storm across the Marshes - entirely unsupervised and without a “responsible” adult, FindMe tracking devices or helmets and hi-viz.
- Sixteen-year olds “playing” outdoor adventure games (rather than indoors on TikTok). Jon, who is almost 17, is rather poignantly just now starting “to realise that something very precious and irreplaceable was slipping away from him … and now it would never be the same again” (p170).
It was the location that intrigued me most about this book. And that led me to ponder the strange coincidence of how many other books I’ve enjoyed that have similarly been set in the otherworldliness of the Romney Marshes - the strange Kentish wilderness of mist and salt marsh, sheep and dykes, vast skies and the ruins of long vanished villages and churches.
This is the bleak and sinister world of young Pip in “Great Expectations”, of course, and it’s ever present as an unyielding natural force in Shelia Kaye-Smith’s back-to-nature novel, “Joanna Godden” (one of my 5-star reviews on this site).
The Marshes are also ever present as something raw and ominous beneath the mannered sophistication of EF Benson’s Mapp & Lucia Rye-based comedies and the middle-class edifice of posh Hythe in LP Hartley’s “The Perfect Woman”.
And I’d forgotten until writing this review that the Romney Marshes provide the unsettling atmosphere of Sapper’s “Temple Tower”, where their bleakness and subversiveness form an essential part of the criminal plot.
As I said in my review of that novel, these salt marshes seem to have become such a feature in English literature that I think they’re like a character in their own right - damp, windswept, enigmatic and obstinate. So pretty English, then …
May 28, 2017
One of my favourite Lone Pine stories. I grew up very close to where this is set and am familiar with all the locations. I'll probably re-read it before the end of this year.
September 8, 2016
One of my least-read Lone Pines, because it was one of the last I managed to collect.
In lots of ways, it's a good one - back at the Gay Dolphin, light relief in the form of Arlette, confident young journalist James Wilson, Inspector Rawlings letting the Lone Piners join in the action, and of course Slinky, Val and the Ballinger as the villains. The twins not only find themselves locked up, but (as it's the Ballinger) it's a genuinely worrying situation. And the mystery itself is fairly believable and the landscape well-drawn as usual - there's lots to like.
The banter, which I never really got on previous readings, is also starting to make sense. Possibly having Arlette in the role of baffled observer helped with this.
So I think what I don't like about this book is the title. Firstly the grasshopper isn't that elusive - they find it on the first attempt - and secondly, it only crops up as a mystery once or twice and nothing very much is made of it. I mean if they had found several grasshopper symbols, so it assumed some importance, I could understand the choice of title. As it is, it would be better called 'The mysterious bird-watcher' or 'The Ballinger Returns'.
And I always miss Peter when she's not there. It's ages before she gets to visit the Dolphin.
In lots of ways, it's a good one - back at the Gay Dolphin, light relief in the form of Arlette, confident young journalist James Wilson, Inspector Rawlings letting the Lone Piners join in the action, and of course Slinky, Val and the Ballinger as the villains. The twins not only find themselves locked up, but (as it's the Ballinger) it's a genuinely worrying situation. And the mystery itself is fairly believable and the landscape well-drawn as usual - there's lots to like.
The banter, which I never really got on previous readings, is also starting to make sense. Possibly having Arlette in the role of baffled observer helped with this.
So I think what I don't like about this book is the title. Firstly the grasshopper isn't that elusive - they find it on the first attempt - and secondly, it only crops up as a mystery once or twice and nothing very much is made of it. I mean if they had found several grasshopper symbols, so it assumed some importance, I could understand the choice of title. As it is, it would be better called 'The mysterious bird-watcher' or 'The Ballinger Returns'.
And I always miss Peter when she's not there. It's ages before she gets to visit the Dolphin.
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November 9, 2009I typeset this edition and copy-edited the new introductory articles.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews