Help me find this book please!!!

[Whatthefunk]

So I read this book , when I was about 11. So about 40 years ago....I can hardly remember anything, but it's driving me nuts.... boy looking out of the window, and see a lorry and men acting strangely....think there is maybe a robbery. The lorry is referred to as a pantechnicon....this is all I have...help!

The pantechnicon is stirring up a vague memory. I want to say it's an Enid Blyton story, but one that was in a Famous Five annual or something rather than an actual book. I seem to remember a discussion about origin of the word "pantechnicon".

May be way off base though.

This sounds tantalisingly familiar. Would the boy have been called Geoff - which I read the whole way through in my head as Ghee-off, never having seen that name before

Definitely not Enid Blyton...and I don't remember the boys name. Just remember that there were grainy drawings of a lorry, and a sense that something bad was happening.....

Is it this?

Thanks, but no. Just to add, I got it from the school library, in about 1972, but of course it could have been written ages before....
It was definitely set in England, and the biy saw 'bad' men in a lorry....
God I need to let this go

Really long shot and I haven’t got the book to hand, but could it be The Battle Of St George Without by Janet McNeill? About a group of town children who outwit some thieves published 1966.

Thanks for that. I've had a look at the synopsis, and it's not that one.
I'm almost sure its about something going on next door...maybe a burglary

Any chance this could be a short story in an usborne set of books, one for each day of the week? The Sunday one had bible stories. I remember one about a boy who wrote down car ref numbers from his sickbed and ended up catching burglars.

I know you said you didn't think it was Enid Blyton, but it sounds like part of a plot in "Ring o bells mystery". I re read it a few years ago to DD, who was not enamoured with it particularly but knew i loved the series as a little girl so 'let me' read it to her

There's a Noel Streatfeild one about kids spotting a spy in wartime, any chance ot might be that?