Older Kids’ Lit 1966 (7)

By: Joshua Glenn
January 16, 2016

One in a series of 10 posts surfacing Josh Glenn’s favorite 1966 adventures for intermediate readers. Happy 50th anniversary!

Leon Garfield’s historical adventure Devil-in-the-Fog. If Garfield’s first YA novel, Jack Holborn (1964), was an homage to Robert Louis Stevenson, then his second, Devil-In-The-Fog, pays obeisance to Charles Dickens. George is a member of the traveling Treet family, impoverished but happy thespians; twice a year, a mysterious stranger emerges from foggy London streets and delivers a sum of money to Mr. Treet. When George turns 14, he learns that he is actually the son of a nobleman, Sir John Dexter, with whom he must now live. But his father has been wounded in a duel with his brother, Richard. When Richard escapes from prison, someone tries to kill George. What devil lurks in the fog? To quote a recent Guardian write-up of Garfield’s third novel, Smith (1967): “Not an easy read if you are under eleven, but an enormously satisfying one. The vividness of Garfield’s writing puts the blandness of many modern writers’ prose in the shade.”

Fun fact: Devil-in-the-Fog won the inaugural, 1967 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize.

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Older Kids’ Lit 1966 (7)

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