Leon Garfield - Life

Life

Garfield attended Brighton Grammar School (1932-1938) and went on to study art at Regent Street Polytechnic, but his studies were interrupted first by lack of funds for fees, then by the outbreak of World War II. He married Lena Leah Davies in April, 1941, at Golders Green Synagogue but they separated after only a few months. For his service in the war he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. While posted in Belgium he met Vivien Alcock, then an ambulance driver, who would go on to become his second wife (in 1948) and a well-known children's author. She would also greatly influence Garfield's writing, giving him suggestions for his writing, including the original idea for Smith. After the war Garfield worked as a biochemical laboratory technician at the Whittington Hospital in Islington, writing in his spare time until the 1960s, when he was successful enough to write full time. In 1964, the couple adopted a baby girl, called Jane after Jane Austen, a favourite writer of both parents.

Garfield wrote his first book, the pirate novel Jack Holborn, for adult readers but a Constable & Co. editor saw its potential as a children's novel and persuaded him to adapt it for a younger audience. In that form it was published by Constable in 1964. His second book, Devil-in-the-Fog (1966), won the first annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and was serialised for television, as were several later works (below). Devil was the first of several historical adventure novels, typically set late in the eighteenth century and featuring a character of humble origins (in this case a boy from a family of traveling actors) pushed into the midst of a threatening intrigue. Another was Smith (1967), with the eponymous hero a young pickpocket accepted into a wealthy household. It won the Phoenix Award in 1987, recognised by the Children's Literature Association as the best children's book published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award. Yet another was Black Jack (1968), in which a young apprentice is forced by accident and his conscience to accompany a murderous criminal.

In 1970, Garfield's work started to move in new directions with The God Beneath the Sea, a re-telling of numerous Greek myths in one narrative, by Garfield and Edward Blishen and illustrated by Charles Keeping. It won the Carnegie Medal in Literature from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject. Garfield, Blishen, and Keeping collaborated again on a sequel, The Golden Shadow (1973). The Drummer Boy (1970) was another adventure story, but concerned more with a central moral problem, and apparently aimed at somewhat older readers, a trend continued in The Prisoners of September (1975), The Pleasure Garden (1976) and The Confidence Man (1978). The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris (1972) was a black comedy in which two boys decide to test the plausibility of Romulus and Remus using one of the boys' baby sister. Most notable at the time was a series of linked long short stories about apprentices, published separately between 1976 and 1978, and then as a collection, The Apprentices. The more adult themed books of the mid-1970s met with a mixed reception and Garfield returned to the model of his earlier books with John Diamond, which won the Whitbread Award for best children's book in 1980, and The December Rose (1986). He also in 1980 wrote a completion to the unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Dickens, who had been a major influence on his own style.

He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1985. On June 2, 1996 he died of cancer at the Whittington Hospital, where he had once worked.