A daunting corpse, Black Jack alive is menace incarnate. He compels Dorking to remove the pipe from his throat, stuffed there to cheat death. During this lonely vigil, the supposedly dead Black Jack rises. Such is the case with young Bartholomew Dorking, whom the "widow" importunes to sit in her parlor with the executed murderer Black Jack, while she, unbeknownst to the boy, steps out to negotiate a price for such a promisingly large corpse. Only country folk in town for the day are duped into aiding her. There, a woman, pretending to be a widow, collects the bodies of her faux relatives and sells them to local surgeons for dissection. If the hairs on your head respond to Smith, turn to Black Jack (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, paper $ 6.95, 197 pp., ages 9 and up) which opens at the Tyburn gallows where Smith so feared he would meet his end. Along the way, big themes are sounded: the search for fathers social deprivation the mystery of inequity and the difference, as articulated in the climax, between "justice and compassion." It’s a tribute to Garfield’s mastery and furtive wit that when Smith’s protector proves to be a literally blind magistrate readers don’t feel bludgeoned by an important symbol. Concealed in the shadows, but not unobserved, Smith lingers long enough to learn that this is not a random killing: the murderers expected to find a document now held by the illiterate boy.
Moments after he snatches the wallet, the old man is murdered. The book opens with Smith’s capable pursuit of a disoriented country gentleman. Of the four novels republished this year, start with Smith (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, paper $6.95, 195 pp., ages 9 and up) whose title character is a young London pickpocket. Garfield’s vision is moral, shaped by the questions of the age in which he lived.
In him the architectural structures of eighteenth-century literature blend well with the Romantic hyperbole of the nineteenth. But not entirely helpful: the talents are different.
And then, as it happens, I heard about the jubilation in the children’s book community: Garfield is back in print!Īlthough he wrote in the 1960s, Garfield’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century settings, and his plots charting the intersection of England’s poor and her rising middle class, have made comparisons with Dickens inevitable. As I browsed a local children’s bookstore, my eye was attracted to a cover, and then a stunning first sentence.
Is there anything lovelier than discovering a really talented, even famous writer by chance? That just happened to me with the British novelist Leon Garfield.
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