Now there's always someone else in the back of your mind

[sovay]

Actually it appears that when younger I read several books by Leon Garfield without at any point committing his name to memory, which seems rude. I fell down a rabbit hole of recognition on the Internet Archive. I hadn't clicked with Black Jack (1968) because I expected more piracy from it, but the crash of affectionate recall prompted by The Stolen Watch (Blewcoat Boy, 1988) should have translated into a copy of my own even before it could read like a direct ancestor of Frances Hardinge. I remembered the ending of Devil-in-the-Fog (1966) without any of the twists the story took to get to it. I must not have had access to The God Beneath the Sea (1970) or I would have tried it on the strength of the title and almost certainly bounced. I had not read either the comedy of misapprehensions that comprises The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris (1971) or the sweetly macabre triangle of The Valentine (1977), but highly enjoyed both. At this point my ability to read novels off a screen conked out, leaving dozens yet of historical titles for me to explore at some more library-convenient date—Garfield seems to have been fully as prolific as Dickens who left an imprint on him that can be seen from Carroll crater. His closest contemporary in Georgian-Victorian picaresque-grotesque looks like Joan Aiken, whom I discovered around the same time and have never lost track of. I was reminded also of Sid Fleischman and Ellen Raskin. I would feel worse about mislaying him if I had not famously had to re-find Vivien Alcock's The Haunting of Cassie Palmer (1980) from a single scene that terrified me as a child sans author, title, or any hint of the wider plot; the late eighteenth century origins of that novel's ghost now look like plausible bleedthrough from one writer in the household to the other, especially since it was her first, although marked already with her own concerns of children and ambiguous adults. For people who like morally messy mentors, Garfield is a must. Most of his novels seem not to be supernatural, but the kind that wouldn't surprise if they suddenly turned into it. I hope he still fetches up in used book stores.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Garfield is heavily influenced by Dickens which may be why he wrote an ending for Edwin Drood.

[landofnowhere]

I enjoyed Garfield's Shakespeare retellings, but never got into his historical fiction.

[landofnowhere]

Not to mention that I got into Shakespeare via his scripts for Shakespeare: the Animated Tales -- not so much the actual videos, but the books of abridged scripts for the plays illustrated with stills from the animation. I don't think my homeschool group friends and I would have gotten the idea that we could put on Shakespeare plays ourselves if we didn't have those abridgements, and this evolved into an amateur summer Shakespeare troupe that lasted until we went off to college. We used Garfield's abridgments for Midsummer and Tempest for our first two summers, and then took the initiative to abridge our own scripts.