Described by John Rowe Townsend as "the richest and strangest" talent to emerge in British children's writing in the 1960s, Leon Garfield writes books that are simultaneously traditional and distinctive. Garfield claims that his goal is "to write the old-fashioned thing, the family novel, accessible to the twelve-year-old and readable by his elders." His novels relate page-turning adventures, often with wildly improbable action and eccentric characters. Their settings, appropriate to such old-fashioned narrative, are either eighteenth-century or Victorian England. Nevertheless, Garfield is neither a derivative writer nor an anachronism. Although frequently compared to Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Henry Fielding, Garfield has his own flamboyant style and a sharp sense of the thematic possibilities of romantic adventure.

Leon Garfield was born on 16 July 1921 in Brighton, England, which, in an interview with Justin Wintle, the author described as "a very eighteenth-century town," and he was educated at Brighton...