Ghost stories,magic and fantasy
Introduction
Well, my first ever book was called White Magic, so that’s clearly a topic close to my heart. It was a teenage novel – a long one, set in Italy, so I’m at least consistent. I wrote it from 1970-1972 and it was published by Rex Collings as White Magic in 1975. Nothing has ever quite compared with the thrill of that first acceptance letter from Rex, but the book did nothing to set the world on fire. After two nice reviews that I remember – Nick Tucker in the New Statesman and Shirley Toulson in the TES – it disappeared without trace.
I started writing it when I left university for the second time in June 1970 and didn’t know what else to do as a career. I knew I didn’t want to teach or work in an office. So I went to live with an old lady in Belsize Park, who gave me a free flatlet in return for walking her cavalier King Charles spaniel and helping with the garden. I gave one-to-one tuition in English and Latin and wrote my novel. It took a year and a half and was then turned down by about a dozen London publishers.
By then I was doing some journalism for the TES myself and had to interview Richard Adams (who wrote Watership Down). He had recently won the Carnegie medal and graciously offered to read the typescript of White Magic. In fact he insisted on my going indoors to get it after he gave me a lift home. A few days later he phoned and said, “It’s not the greatest children’s book I’ve ever read but it’s perfectly publishable. Why don’t you send it to my publisher, Rex Collings?”
Now that was a magic moment!
I’m still writing about magic, years later, in the Stravaganza sequence.
Bump in the Night was a great opportunity to create eight mini-novels, each with a different hero or heroine and a ghost. Most of the ghosts are of things - a house, a car, a whole village, a haunted keyboard - though there is also the housemaid in "Reviving Ivy" and the vixen in "Foxy Lady". I am specially fond of this collection and would love to see it back in print.
The Second-hand Ghost was a short illustrated book, like a Banana Book but actually a “Topper” a series that had only six titles! It was about a girl who acquired a ghost at second hand, having found him stitched into the pocket of a jacket she got her mother to buy her at a charity shop.
The Four-legged Ghosts, A Vanishing Tail and Quantum Squeak are three stories about Alex, Carrie and their “magic mouse” Cedric. He is not very good at magic and gets them into a lot of trouble. In the first book, magic and ghosts come together as Cedric summoned up the phantoms of all the animals who have ever lived in Alex and Carrie’s house.
"How to Live Forever" in Stacks of Stories is another ghost story.
Titles.
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Special Powers
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