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 one might venture to say that he has gone on telling the same story ever since…. [The book includes] mutiny, shipwreck, jungle trekking, a slave-market and a great trial scene. The ingredients are all conventional enough. It is the author's expert chemistry—appropriately he is a biochemist by calling—which makes the unpromising materials react to produce tension and atmosphere.

Jack Holborn is sustained through great physical ordeals by the hope that he will discover his identity…. When the truth is made known … it is unspectacular. Jack's mother is not a duchess but a treasure of a housekeeper to a foolish Sussex knight. In Devil-in-the-Fog … the situation is reversed. George Treet, one of a travelling showman's brood, discovers early on that he...