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 tempted to go on and say that his stories are the tallest, the deepest, the wildest, the most spine-chilling, the most humorous, the most energetic, the most extravagant, the most searching, the most everything. Superlatives sit as naturally on them as a silk hat on T. S. Eliot's Bradford millionaire. They are vastly larger, livelier and more vivid than life. They are intensely individual: it would be impossible to mistake a page of Garfield for a page written by anybody else. They are full of outward and visible action, but they are not just chains of events, for everything that happens on the surface has its powerful motivation beneath. And they create their own probabilities. Wildly unlikely it may be that the waif Smith should be rewarded with ten thousand guineas by the not-conspicuously-generous heirs to a fortune, but like many farther-fetched events this is entirely acceptable because nothing less would have matched the size of the story.

Although Garfield is endlessly versatile within his range, the range itself is narrow. His novels so far are all set in the eighteenth century, mostly in London and southern England. His themes are few and recurrent: mysteries of origin and identity; the deceptive appearances of good and evil; contrasts of true and false feeling; the precarious survival of compassion and charity in a tempestuous world. His characters, though never cardboard, are seldom of great psychological complexity as we understand the phrase these days, and often themselves appear to represent underlying forces or passions or even humours.

The choice of the eighteenth century is an unexplained mystery of the Garfield writing personality. It could be that it allows release from the realistic inhibitions that increasingly gathered round the novel from mid-Victorian times onwards. Garfield's is a lawless world; or, more precisely, a world in which the rule of law is itself a contender, is trying to assert itself but is not to be relied on for protection. Men are greatly dependent on their own quickness of hand, of foot, of eye, of wit. The world is one in which great and small rogues are forever busy and the Devil is there to take the hindmost. The author seems steeped in his period: even when writing in the third person he commonly puts 'mistook' or 'forsook' or 'forgot' for 'mistaken' or 'forsaken' or 'forgotten', and he will write 'twenty pound' rather than 'twenty pounds'. But this is not the eighteenth century that might be reconstructed by an historical novelist. It is original, organic, springing straight from the Garfield imagination; though I believe that the work of other writers, and artists, has provided an essential compost. You may well discern something of Stevenson in Garfield's first book, Jack Holborn (1964), and something of Dickens everywhere. You may be sure that Garfield knows the work of Fielding and Hogarth, among much else from the eighteenth century itself. There are less obvious writers whose work can fruitfully be considered in relation to his: the great Russian novelists, especially Dostoievsky: even Jane Austen; even Emily Brontë. A rich literary soil is not simply constituted.

The first novel, Jack Holborn, showed many of its author's qualities already strongly developed, and immediately appeared remarkable when it first came out. In comparison with later books it has several weaknesses. On the surface it is a tale of piracy, murder, treasure, treachery, shipwreck and ultimate fortune, all in the best tradition of the sea adventure story. And so it will be read by children and by most other readers. There are also two separate questions of identity. One is simple: just who is the hero-narrator, the foundling Jack Holborn, so named from the parish in which he was abandoned? The other is disconcerting: how can it be that identical faces cover such different personalities as those of the distinguished Judge and the wicked pirate captain? Confusion between real and apparent good and evil is a recurrent Garfield theme; but the device used in Jack Holborn—the introduction of identical twins of opposite character—is crude in comparison with, for instance, the moral complexity of The Drummer Boy five years later. And Jack Holborn has other flaws. The story, of which the first three quarters are gripping, falls away in the final quarter; the narrator is brave, generous and well-meaning, but he is not interesting. Yet the Garfield style and vision are already unmistakable, and although the writing is not yet fully ablaze with metaphor in the later Garfield manner it rises at times to a staccato poetry.

Devil-in-the-Fog (1966), the second novel, again revolves at length around questions of identity. The narrator George Treet, from being a member of a family of travelling players, is translated suddenly to the position of heir apparent to Sir John Dexter, baronet. In the misty grounds of the great house lurks Sir John's unloving brother, newly cut out of the succession. But who is the true villain, and is George really gentleman or player? The book shows one clear advance on Jack Holborn: the difficulty of making the narrator into an effective character in his own right is overcome. The artless George, in telling his story, allows us to see more of him than he can see of himself; we perceive, for instance, the honest vulgarity that makes him unacceptable to Sir John as an heir. And here enters another Garfield theme, that of true and false feeling; for we can contrast and appraise at their proper values the simple vanity of the Treets and the chilly pride of Sir John. But the story, although straightforward in theme and feeling, is complicated in terms of actual incident; and not even the Garfield energy is quite enough to drive it successfully through its own convolutions and lengthy denouement…. Devil-in-the-Fog still seems to me to display outstanding promise rather than outstanding achievement.

Smith (1967), the first of Leon Garfield's third-person narrations, was a stronger and more straightforward story than either of its predecessors. (pp. 97-100)

In Smith, it seems to me that the forward progress of the story is no longer hindered by entanglement in complications; it knows where it is going and drives steadily towards its powerful climax. It is more unified, more of a novel than its two predecessors or its successor; it is not Garfield's richest book but it is the most obviously successful of his first four.

Black Jack (1968) is a more complex book than Smith, and, in its beginning and end, more powerful. It is however less satisfactory in structure. (pp. 100-01)

[The] structure is perhaps more like that of a symphony—one with powerful opening and closing movements and quieter ones in between—than that of a novel, in which one might wish for a more continuous progress, a build-up of tension towards the climax.

Garfield's latest novel so far, The Drummer Boy (1970), is the most ambitious of all and the most complex in ideas and feeling although not in plot. Its hero Charlie Samson is everyone's golden lad, the embodiment of all unfulfilled dreams and lost ideals. With Charlie the story moves from the field of battle, in which ten thousand scarlet soldiers have been mown down, to London, where the responsible General is trying to save his skin. In thrall to the General's beautiful and apparently dying daughter Sophia, Charlie is ready to perjure himself and shift the General's guilt to a haunted wretch of a scapegoat. He is brought to his senses by the cowardly, fat, pansy surgeon Mister Shaw and the common servant-girl Charity.

Clearly the book is concerned with the evils of false romanticism. The brief and doubtful glory of the battlefield is a poor exchange for the slow ripening of a lifetime which we see awaiting Charlie in the story's happy ending. The brief and doubtful glory of serving belle-dame-sans-merci Sophia and her exalted, hollow father is nothing in comparison with the warmth of an honest wench with twenty pounds in the bank and a loving nature. Again there is the bewildering interchange of good and evil; for the apparently natural love of Charlie for Sophia turns out to be a deadly menace, while the seemingly unnatural love of Mister Shaw for Charlie, though it is hopeless, pathetic, incapable of fruition, is beneficent. It would be possible to see Mister Shaw as the ambiguous hero of this story: himself the battlefield, with his healing gift at war with half a dozen ignoble purposes. Charlie as hero is so much a receptacle for the hopes and dreams of others that in himself he is an empty vessel. But at last he loses his drum, the symbol of his virginity of mind and body, and returns with Charity on his arm to the New Forest where he began. The real story of Charlie Samson starts where the book leaves off.

I do not think The Drummer Boy is quite the major triumph that Garfield has been promising ever since Jack Holborn, but I am sure it will come. In the meantime, he has one small but perfect work to his credit in Mister Corbett's Ghost, which was published in England in 1969 as part of a triptych with two other stories. It is the tale of an apothecary's apprentice, Benjamin, who wishes his harsh master dead, and on New Year's Eve finds an old man who can grant the wish, at a price. But the ghost of Mister Corbett lingers with Benjamin and is more pitiable, more human even, than Mister Corbett was in life; and the boy is happy, in the end, to undo his bargain. Whether this is a story of the supernatural or an externalizing of inner processes is a matter of interpretation, or perhaps of the reader's own development. The themes are those of responsibility for one's actions and of the dreadful destructiveness of revenge; and in his dealings with Mister Corbett as corpse and then as ghost Benjamin goes through the stages of guilt: fear, shame, remorse, compassion. This is a tale told with total command; its temperature goes down, down, far below zero before returning all the more effectively to the warmth of living flesh. I would say, and not lightly, that it can be compared to [Dickens's] A Christmas Carol.

The most obvious characteristic of Leon Garfield I have left until the end. He treats the English language with a mastery that sometimes verges on outrage. Effortlessly, page after page and line after line, he creates his individual and vivid images. 'He jerked the candle down, thereby causing banisters and certain pieces of respectable mahogany furniture to take fright and crouch in their own shadows.'…. Garfield's metaphors tend to be strongly visual. But he does not only see; he touches, tastes and smells. (An analysis of the smells in his novels might be curiously illuminating.) As a man with medical knowledge he is well aware of the perishable human body, the too too solid, or sullied, flesh. In treating of life as it comes, more rough than smooth, he is not unduly fastidious. Yet he can be gentle, as in the love of Belle and Tolly in Black Jack…. Leon Garfield can do anything with words and his touch is very sure…. I do not believe in singling out a writer as 'the best'; books and their authors are only to a limited extent comparable, and should not be seen as competing against each other. But I have livelier expectations from Leon Garfield than from anyone else whose work is being published on a children's list in England today. (pp. 101-04)