In his Tellers of Tales (1965), Roger Lancelyn Green devotes a single sentence to one of the most prolific writers of British children's literature: "Popular exponents of the holiday adventure story are headed by Malcolm Saville, whose Mystery at Witchend (1943) began as a series of rather improbable but entertaining tales of children foiling spies and burglars with the greatest of ease." In a highly subjective book, this is a curiously detached sentence. The judgment seems mixed--"entertaining but improbable"--an illogical pairing perhaps. The last clause might be read as almost disdainful if it were not that the tone of the entire sentence seems so entirely factual.

Any assessment of Malcolm Saville must in the end be mixed. An extremely popular writer--he is said to have received three thousand letters a year from his readers--he wrote eighty works for children, principally mysteries in which a plucky group of children...