Described by John Rowe Townsend as "the richest and strangest" talent to emerge in British children's writing in the 1960s, Leon Garfield writes books that are simultaneously traditional and distincti...
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Critical Essay by Margaret Sherwood Libby
Jack Holborn [is] a taut, tough and exciting story, complicated but so well-told that it held me to the last page. The old cliches [about pirate tales] are gi...
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Critical Essay by Ruth Hill Viguers
An outstanding English writer of the sixties is Leon Garfield, whose books have pace, humor, and unusually good characterizations. In each of his books mystery is f...
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Critical Essay by Sheila Egoff
The rising star in [the field of the British historical novel] is Leon Garfield, who has called forth comparions with Fielding, Hogarth, and Dickens. Not merely concerne...
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Critical Essay by Margery Fisher
Leon Garfield's imagination is disciplined so that the surprises and bizarre events in his stories are properly related to the whole. He makes it seem natural, ...
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Critical Essay by Ted Hughes
There have been many retellings of Greek myths for children but this interweaving of about twenty of them [in The God Beneath the Sea] must be among the best. It is diffic...
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Critical Essay by Alan Garner
With so many books published annually, and so little space available to a critic, it seems extravagant to pay attention to rubbish, but in this case there may be a lesson...
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Critical Essay by Clive Pemberton
There is a type of book which operates both on an adult and a juvenile level. I am not thinking of books like Robinson Crusoe or Gulliver's Travels, which prob...
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Critical Essay by Catherine Storr
[A] writer who ridicules villainy, though the tone of most of his books is not comic but deeply serious and moving, is Leon Garfield. He involves his readers in a sit...
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Critical Essay by Richard Camp
Karl Kraus said: "There are two kinds of writers, those who are and those who aren't. With the first, content and form belong together like soul and body; ...
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Critical Essay by Barbara Wersba
A re-creation of myriad Greek legends, this long and detailed book ["The God Beneath the Sea"] quivers with excitement. Its language is like a mosaic of ...
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Critical Essay by Peter Geoffrey Townsend
In an Afterword the co-authors [of The God Beneath the Sea] explain that their aim in re-telling the Greek myths to the young is to avoid 'A haphazard ...
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Critical Essay by Geoffrey Trease
Devil-in-the-Fog is 18th-century—not history, but luscious melodrama, complete with wicked baronet, missing heir, convenient recognition scar, the lot. And muc...
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Critical Essay by Margery Fisher
What is a children's book? What is a young adult? What pigeon-hole is big enough for Garfield? The answers to these questions must depend finally on each reader...
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Critical Essay by Frank Eyre
Leon Garfield is one author who has invented what is almost a new category of his own…. His books are not historical novels—though they are set in the past&#...
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Critical Essay by John Rowe Townsend
Of all the talents that emerged in the field of British writing for children in the 1960s, that of Leon Garfield seems to me to be the richest and strangest. I am ...
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Critical Essay by Gladys Williams
Leon Garfield's latest, The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris, is a glorious, non-sensible frolic, with carefully erudite period roots, that will charm and ref...
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Critical Essay by Brian W. Alderson
It is Bostock and Harris who are responsible for 'the affair' [in The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris], they (or at least Harris) having decided to ...
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Critical Essay by Eleanor Cameron
Devotees of Leon Garfield's distinctive way of expressing himself will take pleasure in [The Ghost Downstairs]…. A tale whose meaning dances full circle...
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Critical Essay by J. Allan Morrison
[Sir John Theophilus Lee is portrayed in Child O'War] as an ingratiating nonentity…. His one substantial claim on the regard of posterity, apart from ...
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Critical Essay by Gillian Tindall
Splendidly logical is Leon Garfield's The Ghost Downstairs …, with the spooky originality one expects from this writer. I'm not sure how old a ch...
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Critical Essay by Margery Fisher
The ghost downstairs tantalises with fleeting likenesses—among them Bosch and Breughel, Coleridge and M. R. James; the last not only because "a ghost in ...
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Critical Essay by Rhodri Jones
Leon Garfield dislikes being described as a writer for children. He regards this as a publisher's convenience—a slot into which his books can be easily put...
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Critical Essay by Jean C. Thomson
If readers of Stevenson delighted in "Jack Holborn," Garfield's first book, "Devil-in-the-Fog" will suit devotees of Dickens. Such ...
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Critical Essay by Marcus Crouch
Leon Garfield seems to have had no 'prentice period. His first book, Jack Holborn …, has all his characteristic qualities; indeed if one were to be unkind...
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Critical Essay by Myles Mcdowell
What is one to say … of the view of life expressed in, for example, Smith, by Leon Garfield: is that simplistic? The word hardly seems an apt description for a ...
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Critical Essay by Gerard Benson
In The Golden Shadow [Garfield and Blishen] have combined a number of stories from disparate sources into a literary whole. Gods, demi-gods and god-like humans strive, ...
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Critical Essay by Judith Vidal-hall
[The Golden Shadow] is in no way a conventional retelling of the deeds of a strong-arm bully whose heroism is measured in monsters slain and enemies lying dead in h...
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Critical Essay by Shulamith Oppenheim
"There is no doubt about it," wrote Thomas Mann in 1936, "the moment when the story-teller acquires the mythical way of looking at things &#x...
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Critical Essay by C. S. Hannabuss
The richly styled atmospherics of Leon Garfield form one of the salient literary features in the landscape of the last decade and a half of children's books&#x...
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Critical Essay by Ethel L. Heins
A favorite Garfield theme—the mystery of the hero's identity—forms the backbone of [The Sound of coaches]; and a few lines quoted from The Beggar&...
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Critical Essay by C. E. J. Smith
[The Prisoners of September is a] real reader's book. The plot is as nicely convoluted and ironically involved as one has come to expect; the characters have a ...
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Critical Essay by Margery Fisher
This splendidly unclassifiable novel [The Prisoners of September] opens in a mood of exuberant mock-Gothic comedy, with a hero as gullible, though hardly as winning, a...
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Critical Essay by Gordon Parsons
Leon Garfield has said that we are all the ghosts of what we were. Unfortunately, if we are to afford Garfield the level of critical response his remarkable achievemen...
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Critical Essay by Margery Fisher
The dead little gentleman—what a title that would have been for [Devil-in-the-fog, a] strange compound of mystery, violence and Dickensian humour. Did the infan...
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Critical Essay by Russell Hoban
Leon Garfield is an example of what talent can do to a children's book writer: it can drive him out of children's books as he follows the development of h...
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Critical Essay by Anne Wood
All [Garfield's] books deal in some way with an atmosphere of concentrated evil shot through with possibilities for good. Perhaps his wartime experiences have had so...
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Critical Essay by Margery Fisher
"Garfield's Apprentices" opens with two stories—Mirror, Mirror and The Lamplighter's Funeral—which offer examples of cruelty ...
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Critical Essay by Peter Hunt
[With The Pleasure Garden] Leon Garfield has produced another rich meal from his sub-Smollett/Hogarth/Dickens recipe, and as a heavily decorated thriller it is very impres...
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Critical Essay by Paul Langford
[The House of Hanover] takes the form of a stroll through the Hanoverian portions of the National Portrait Gallery, with a running commentary on the principal personali...
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Critical Essay by Margery Fisher
I would hesitate to offer The House of Hanover to anyone who did not already possess a reasonably good idea of the sequence of events in the eighteenth century and the...
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Critical Essay by C. S. Hannabuss
The Lamplighter's Funeral and Mirror, Mirror [are] … very much in the style of books like The Ghost Downstairs and Black Jack. The misanthropic lampligh...
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Critical Essay by J. Allan Morrison
[There] is too much of Garfield [in The House of Hanover: England in the Eighteenth Century] and he is showing-off like mad. The first person singular may have appe...
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Critical Essay by Julia Briggs
Leon Garfield [presents] his simple people simply as they are [in Moss and Blister], in a comic view that surprisingly avoids being patronizing while delighting in absur...
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Critical Essay by Margery Fisher
Leon Garfield's "Apprentice" stories are not for a young reading age, despite the somewhat misleading format and plentiful illustration. In these ...
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Critical Essay by Naomi Lewis
Smith crosses the line into brilliance.
Smith himself [is] a pickpocket by trade…. After he has taken—something—from a troubled-looking old gentleman...
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Critical Essay by Rhodri Jones
Leon Garfield's five early novels—Jack Holborn, Devil-in-the-Fog, Smith, Black Jack, and The Drummer Boy—established very clearly the kind of world ...
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Critical Essay by Philip Holland
Garfield's novels appeal to young readers for reasons which should become clear in looking at them individually. All his work has a strong narrative line and hi...
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Critical Essay by Ann A. Flowers
[Leon Garfield], noted for his Dickensian novels about London, has written [with The Apprentices] an ingeniously linked series of twelve tales about apprentices set in...
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Critical Essay by Roni Natov
Leon Garfield has been hailed as one of the best contemporary writers for adolescents for his lively and unmistakable style, his ability to weave a series of endlessly fas...
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Critical Essay by Gordon Parsons
The final two stories in Leon Garfield's 'Apprentices' series [The enemy and the filthy beast] introduce respectively the love-lorn Hobby, apprent...
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Critical Essay by Margery Fisher
Smith is an outstanding book on many counts. Set in the author's favoured period, the mid-eighteenth century, the story owes its unerring sense of period partly...
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Critical Essay by Geoffrey Trease
Leon Garfield has quickly established himself by general acclamation as one of the most gifted and individual writers for the older child. He has staked out a special...
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Critical Essay by Virginia Haviland
[Black Jack is another] graphic eighteenth-century story from this master of prose [which] suggests his earlier macabre situations and characters, but also possesse...
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Critical Essay by Margery Fisher
The separation of mind and feeling is the theme of Mr. Corbett's ghost, the first of three stories which confirm the pattern of Leon Garfield's language ...
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Leon Garfield
