For my sins, I read the lot when I was a kid - we had a very good second-hand bookshop near us where I could pick up tat like that for between 10p and 50p a book. I preferred the Hardy Boys though, but I'd read anything that would stay still long enough - my sister got all the Mallory Towers books and crap like that (does some series about a trilingual boarding school in Austria who move to Britain at the start of WW2 ring any bells with anyone?), and I read those too.

Actually, the best books around then were the Arthur Ransome books, but there weren't enough of those to last long. "If not duffers won't drown. If duffers better drowned."

Graham.