THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

The Super Six is a series of young adult adventure novels written by Ingrid Sprule.  Sprule devised the stories as an antidote to Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, declaring: “The teenagers I know do not spend their days conjuring wholesome escapades over cucumber sandwiches: they swear, lust, steal and lose interest.”  Sprule wrote scores of Super Six novels, claiming to complete them at a rate of more than one per week, and many of her manuscripts remained unpublished.  Recurring characters included the head-strong Dolores (also known as Goldie), the broodingly mysterious Caleb, semi-feral Levi, tomboy Delia, Gem, a midget, and Gem’s pet polecat, Dot.  Plots involved rape, incest, pregnancy and abortion, murder, arson, kidnap, torture, robbery and sheep-rustling.  They were often left unresolved, and seldom made reference to previous escapades; Delia, for example, dies on at least a dozen occasions.  While most of the early stories were set in semi-fictional Fryupdale, later adventures sent the Super Six around the world, stranding them on a desert island in Six Survive a Plane Wreck, and even into space in the sci-fi sub-series Six Trek, in which they were beamed up by aliens and taken to a distant planet.

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