In the space of a few weeks, I managed to gobble up Jack Holborn, and Smith, and Mr Corbett’s Ghost, and The Drummer Boy, and The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris. As soon as I got back to school on Monday, I went to look in the library, to see if there were any other books by this extraordinary author. Early and black on a Monday morning, she was up at the Tree, all in a tragical flutter, waiting to be bereaved.įlung headlong into the strange, funny, terrifying, vivid world of seedy 18th century London from those first sentences, I could not put the book down all that night, even after stern paternal injunctions to turn the light off, this instant! I begged Mum to take me back to the library on Saturday, and snapped up Devil in the Fog, the only other Garfield that hadn’t been taken out, and read it too within a few hours, heart racing.

There are many queer ways of earning a living but none so quaint as Mrs Gorgandy’s. The cover was evocatively spooky, the blurb tasty, and as I ever judged books by their covers and blurbs at that age–I was willing to give it a go.įrom the first sardonic, intriguing sentences, I was hooked: The Garners I’d wanted were out but browsing idly on the same shelf, I came across a title that looked good.

It was a Friday afternoon, I was about twelve or thirteen, and I was looking for something juicy to read at the local library for the weekend. I remember the first time I met Leon Garfield’s work. The first of these I’m republishing, is on Leon Garfield and first appeared in Magpies Magazine some years ago.

These articles have been first published in a number of different places. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be republishing on my blog a number of articles I’ve written over the years, about writers, especially writers for young people, whose work I’ve loved and been inspired by, both as a child and into adulthood.

Leon garfield jack holborn