You know how I love disagreement! And I'm the Mars Bar of arguments - at least one a day.
Slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun! Hahahhhahhahahahhahaha. Genius. But I'm going to disagree with you on this one, on both Rowling and Blyton. Rowling's idea came at the right time in the right place (at the dawn of the internet age) and the idea she had was pretty much stolen from The Worst Witch and stretched over the plot line of Star Wars. In the same way that George Lucas is a terrible writer of dialogue, he's also a master of structure. Rowling is a master of blending the two things together.
The accusation you level at Blyton is fair - she did reuse the same plots and the same stock characters.... but she did so for an audience of children (and I was one of them). Children are often less discerning than adults and don't notice such things - I didn't at the time, but I do so now.
And it's interesting to note that I became a structuralist - Blyton's stories, however formulaic, do work as stories. They have a set up, a complexity and a decent pay off. They're a circle - a simple circle perhaps but a circle nevertheless. Compared with authors like Poe and Lovecraft, both on your list, their work is based around atmospheric use of language... it rarely satisfies my inner structure bunny. Lovecraft in particular is terrible at endings (so is Stephen King but that's for another day). Doyle is great at structure and I loved his work, but I found it inaccessible as a child, alas I never read Crompton and it didn't make it into my collection.
I think as a child I had simple tastes. Enid Blyton wasn't junk food, but she was probably something out of the literary equivalent of Jamie Oliver's Cook Book. She wasn't anything fancy, she wasn't anything Heston Blumenthal-esque. It was middling fare... but I had a voracious appetite and no parent to guide me further into classics. My Mum would eventually try and progress me onto her Agatha Christie collection (which I found meh) - and with the help of an Auntie, I would progress myself onto Pratchett and the next author in this series. :o)
