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's discretion. Certainly [The strange affair of Adelaide Harris] is a book for all to read—all, that is, from a reasonably sophisticated eleven years upwards, for an intricate plot, a devastating mock-heroic tone demand some such starting point of age. As for the top limit, this is a comedy, a superb comedy whose slapstick, irony and farce may be readily accepted by adults on its own terms. All the same, there is one respect at least in which this book is within the particular reach of young people; to use [Edward] Blishen's phrase, there really is 'a child's eye in the centre'.

Imbroglio is the only word for the swift, bewilderingly intricate plot. (p. 1817)

What I want to stress is that though this is a mature and extremely cultivated book, with a humour as sharp as a scalpel and as entertaining as the Marx Brothers, it is all the time subtly keyed to the boys [Bostock and Harris]. The animal passions evinced by Ralph Bunnion and the egregious Sir Walter, the monstrous drunkenness of Mrs. Bonney, are hilarious rather than sordid partly because we see them through the eyes of the two boys, naturally coarse and self-centered, who find the grown-ups splendid if inexplicable fun to watch. Even when the boys are not present their attitude still colours the story. When you have into the bargain a mock-heroic style worthy of Tom Jones that mitigates near-seduction and greed and stupidity just through ribaldry, you have a book which can be called 'for the young' or 'for the general reader' with equal truth.

Certainly Leon Garfield's talent in word-spinning and word-choosing are here exercised to the full. The book must be read slowly and often for the full richness of its flavour to be appreciated, and for the last ramification of the cunning plot to be properly noted. I doubt whether we shall see such a shrewd comedy for many years. (pp. 1817-18)

Intrigued delight takes hold of one with the very first sentence of Leon Garfield's The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris and never lets go till the hapless plottings of those old friends Bostock and Harris, having tangled themselves into a positive cat's cradle of complication, pull finally clear. It is a fourfold delight, deriving as much from the invention which can place at all the string-pulling vantage points such a variety of entertaining characters as from the author's dry comments on their thoughts and motives; as much from the ingenuity that twitches them round Brighton and its countryside in a dance of such fascinating intricacy as from the never-failing brilliance of Mr. Garfield's style. Lighter and more pointed than ever, now deliciously witty too, it is a constant joy, and … this new story gives the impression of being a contemporary engraving, first exquisitely drawn and then coloured vividly by hand….

For good measure there is a host of lesser characters, resting somewhere between Dickens and Jane Austen…. The whole book sparkles with richness and to try and quote from it would be useless, for in searching for one felicity another yet more delightful would appear and so one would never stop.

Yet—and in spite of all these superlatives there is still a reservation, faint as a breath of wind across the downs, but persistent nevertheless—in the very way that one praises is implicit a faint regret. One talks of period prints rather than actuality, of characters that are skilfully manipulated rather than moving with their own life; one seems to see the whole story through a bioscope, or as though it were a picture in a frame and the characters at one remove. This new story of Leon Garfield's touches most delectably the fancy but not, as his earlier stories so notably have done, the heart. Perhaps it isn't meant to; after the white-hot intensity of The Drummer Boy he may well have needed the relief of a change, but one hopes that the change may be only temporary.

One final, very small carp, a skirmish in a private war. Do the page or two of Sir William's bawdry, of Harris's crude assessment of Bosty's awakening dreams, add anything to the story; are they really necessary to art or literature? (p. 1509)

The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1971; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), December 3, 1971.