The final two stories in Leon Garfield's 'Apprentices' series [The enemy and the filthy beast] introduce respectively the love-lorn Hobby, apprenticed to a modeller of plaster statuettes, and Shag, the trainee house painter who spends most of his life venting his earthy humour from his precarious scaffolding perch on those who pass below. These apprentices like their predecessors are, however, first and foremost apprentices to the business of life. (pp. 349-50)

I have not yet read all twelve 'Apprentices' but I suspect that the characteristic Garfield style, with its distinctive imagery and knowing, gentle irony, while weighing a little too heavily in the context of a single short volume, may well work effectively to bind together the separate tales into a coherent pattern, offering something different but as satisfying as the full-length novels.

It is the unique colouring of Garfield's style that tends to obscure that he is above all a moralist—and none the worse for that! Like all his fiction, the 'Apprentices' communicate the need for human beings, despite all their individual quirks and eccentricities, to recognise their shared vulnerability and homogeneity of feeling. (p. 350)

Even at this late stage in his career Leon Garfield still has a surprise or two left. [The Confidence Man] is one of them. It is, too, perhaps his most mature and consistent novel to date.

The scene, for half the story, and the theme are new to him. He has found—in history or in his head?—the record of an emigrant community from Southern Germany who pulled up their roots and went to America in the eighteenth century. They are Protestants in a Catholic town—unnamed—and subject to the intermittent and mindless persecution of the majority…. The Captain is one of Mr. Garfield's finest creations, a wonderfully enigmatic character. Is he just a professional 'con' man, or is he moved by more complicated motives? Even at the end of the story we cannot quite be sure. Moving among his host, encouraging, cheering the despondent, he is a moving and magnificent figure who inspires confidence as well as fear….

Admirable as Mr. Garfield is as storyteller, he is even better at evoking atmosphere. His picture of life in a Protestant ghetto is beautifully done; that of London with its pharisees passing the abandoned refugees by on the other side is even better. And for a portrait to match that of the Captain for complexity, he produces Geneva Brown, the cockney kid whose ambition is to be 'advertised' at Billingsgate and so find a worthy mate. There are memorable smaller sketches, of which that of Zipfel the pot-boy is outstanding. Altogether a most exciting book, written with all this master's exuberance and gift for the vivid image…. There is material here for a dozen books, spilled out with the utmost prodigality. Let us once again salute one of the contemporary masters of this fine art. (p. 115)

The Junior Bookshelf, April, 1979.