Condition - Acceptable with dust jacket
Hardback 
 
The Ds return to Norfolk, hoping to enjoy a holiday with their friends of the Coot Club. Unfortunately, they find the Death and Glories (Pete, Bill and Joe) coming under a gathering cloud of suspicion of setting moored boats adrift.
Everywhere they go, boats seem to be cast adrift; and they are threatened with being forbidden to sail, for fear of their fathers being disgraced and possibly losing their jobs. Things get worse when new shackles are stolen from a boatbuilder after one of the casting off episodes and some of them are found aboard the Death and Glory. At the same time, the boys seem to be flush with cash, but they won't say where they got it. However, their silence is not from fear or guilt, and their funds had not come from fencing stolen property or committing any other crimes; rather, they had accepted a tow from the Cachalot, owned by a keen pike fisherman, and by chance and courage had hooked a colossal pike while the owner was at the local pub. The fisherman swore them to silence about this exploit, but, being an honourable man, had given them the money that the landlord of the pub had promised him for the fish, since he himself had done nothing towards landing the fish.
 
The Big Six is the ninth book of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series of children's books, published in 1940. The book returns Dick and Dorothea Callum, known as the Ds, to the Norfolk Broads where they renew their friendship with the members of the Coot Club. This book is more of a detective story as the Ds and Coot Club try to unravel a mystery that threatens the Death and Glories' freedom to sail the river.Dorothea names the group of amateur detectives "The Big Six", an allusion to the "Big Five" group of murder detectives at Scotland Yard.