Carnegie Medal Award". 2007(?). Curriculum Lab. Elihu Burritt Library. Central Connecticut State University ( CCSU). Retrieved 2012-08-10. The story was dramatised by Southern Television with reference to the marvellous Pat Marriott illustrations, here showing the deadly carpet making machinery, and a haunting theme tune which set the central song to music originally composed by Joan Aiken’s son – prophetically named John Sebastian Brown – who provided songs for many Aiken plays and productions. The authoress' French isn't up to much, but that's OK, it's fictional French and I doubt many of her child readers know more than a few words anyway. P.S. To Ms. Aiken: You kindly invited my children to write with their thoughts about the villains of the Wolves Chronicles – my daughter still plans to write and has already started, but dance, running, piano and school have consumed her time and she’s a notorious third, fourth and fifth draft writer. She doesn’t want to send a letter to you until it’s perfect! Maybe before the holidays…

I think Joan did not include Midnight is a Place as a ‘Wolves’ story, even though the Blastburn setting occurs in the series; I would say it is in quite a different time, maybe much earlier than Wolves of Willoughby? Aiken produced more than 100 books, including more than a dozen collections of fantasy stories, plays and poems, and modern and historical novels for adults and children. She was a lifelong fan of ghost stories, particularly those of M. R. James, Fitz James O'Brien and Nugent Barker. [ citation needed] As well as writing under her own name, she used the pen name Nicholas Dee for several short stories. Some of her books focus on spine-chilling or supernatural events, including The Windscreen Weepers (stories, 1969), The Shadow Guests (novel, 1980), A Whisper in the Night (stories, 1982), and A Creepy Company (stories, 1993, with variant contents in its US and UK editions). She set her adult supernatural novel The Haunting of Lamb House at Lamb House in Rye (now a National Trust property). This ghost story recounts in fictional form an alleged haunting experienced by two former residents of the house, Henry James and E. F. Benson, both of whom also wrote ghost stories. So why, you ask, do I read Erskine and write this (waaaaaaaay too long) review of a book 15 years old??Eccleshare, Julia. "Aiken, Joan Delano (1924–2004)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (onlineed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) My copy of this wonderful book was bought from the Glebe Library years ago, and still has its yellow cardboard filing card in an envelope glued inside the front cover. She was born in Rye, East Sussex, into a family of writers, including her father, Conrad Aiken (who won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry), and her sister, Jane Aiken Hodge. She worked for the United Nations Information Office during the second world war, and then as an editor and freelance on Argosy magazine before she started writing full time, mainly children's books and thrillers. For her books she received the Guardian Award (1969) and the Edgar Allan Poe Award (1972).

Cano, Marina. Jane Austen and Performance. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Chapter 7, "Women's Rewritings", looks at Aiken's Austen sequels. ISBN 978-3-319-43987-7. A dark tale of unspoken secrets and kind words, sharp practices and generosity, bravery and steadfastness, all set in a grim manufacturing town may not sound ideal fare for young readers, and yet Joan Aiken to my mind has carried it off. While there is no "Jerusalem builded here among those dark satanic mills" there is hope and optimism amongst the tragedy and a determination that creativity can counteract the bleaker side of human contradictions. It tells the story of a lonely boy named Lucas, who lives at Midnight Court, next to a smoggy industrial town called Blastburn. His guardian is a foul-tempered, brandy-drinking eccentric who won the great house in a card-game many years before. Tymn, Marshall B.; Zahorski, Kenneth J.; Boyer, Robert H. (1979). Fantasy Literature: A Core Collection and Reference Guide. New York: R.R. Bowker Co. p.39. ISBN 0-8352-1431-1. Joan Delano Aiken MBE (4 September 1924 – 4 January 2004) was an English writer specialising in supernatural fiction and children's alternative history novels. In 1999 she was awarded an MBE for her services to children's literature. [2] For The Whispering Mountain, published by Jonathan Cape in 1968, she won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a book award judged by a panel of British children's writers, [3] and she was a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British writer. [4] [a] She won an Edgar Allan Poe Award (1972) for Night Fall.Robot Roz undertakes an unusual ocean journey to save her adopted island home in this third series entry. Aiken was born in Mermaid Street in Rye, Sussex, on 4 September 1924. [1] Her father was the American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Conrad Aiken (1889–1973). Her older brother was the writer and research chemist [5] John Aiken (1913–1990), and her older sister was the writer Jane Aiken Hodge (1917–2009). Their mother, Canadian-born Jessie MacDonald (1889–1970), was a Master's graduate from Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jessie and Conrad's marriage was dissolved in 1929, and Jessie married the English writer Martin Armstrong in 1930. Conrad Aiken went on to marry twice more. Together with her brother John and her sister Jane, Joan Aiken wrote Conrad Aiken Remembered (1989), a short appreciation of their father.

When Randolph sets fire to the mansion killing himself and seriously injuring Oakapple, the two children pool their resources to find work and shelter. Lucas ends up labouring in the sewers and Anne-Marie collects cigarette butts from the street.Joan Aiken was a much loved English writer who received the MBE for services to Children's Literature. She was known as a writer of wild fantasy, Gothic novels and short stories. The two main characters in the book, Lucas Bell and Anne-Marie, are orphans, left to a guardian who lives in the gloomy Gothic Midnight Court, which overlooks the town of Blastburn. Their guardian, however, the owner of the cotton mills and factories, is heavily in debt and in his alcoholic-fuelled madness decides to burn down his own mansion. As a result, the two orphans are left homeless and destitute, and have to learn to survive in the harsh world that is Blastburn. The book contains graphic descriptions of their work in both the cotton mills, and also down the sewers, where Lucas earns pennies looking for valuable dosh in the underground world of sewers and tunnels, filled with death and danger. This is a very far cry from the life Lucas had before, where he was educated by a tutor and wrote essays on the Industrial Revolution. Now he has come face to face with the reality of it all. I live for those moments in an Erskine book, and she delivers. Regardless of my frustration with her characters, regardless of my wasted time spent wandering the frozen Essex shoreline in search of a decent plot, and in spite of my book hurling spleen vented at the abrupt and lousy ending, I love it when a good Erskine sentence makes me glance surreptiously around the room in search of the shadow I thought I just saw out of the corner of my eye. There is one particular scene set in the carpet-making factory that I shall never forget – as a child, it burnt itself deep into my imagination.

In Lucas and Anna-Marie we have two distinctive protagonists, one creative and self-effacing, the other feisty and practical -- it's as though they represent twin aspects of the author herself. The journey from middleclass respectability to a hand-to-mouth penury working in sewers, in a textile mill, making cigars anew from discarded butts and so on is both heartbreaking and yet heartwarming, especially when friends are found in the most unlikely of places and in the direst of circumstances. But relationships between these four individuals is somewhat strained as suspicions sour the atmosphere, already fouled by the smoke and grime from nearby Blastburn. Something has to give and for Lucas and others they find it is a case of out of the frying pan, only to find themselves, almost literally, in the fire. Joan Aiken is one of my all-time favourite children’s writers. Her books were out-of-print for a while and I haunted second-hand bookshops in the hopes of building up my collection. His tutor, Oakapple (David Collings), takes him to Midnight Mill, which Sir Randolph owns. There Lucas gains an insight into the appalling conditions suffered by the working class. Bleiler, Richard, ed. (2003). Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons& Thomson/Gale. pp. 21–31 in Vol. 1 of 2. ISBN 0-684-31252-2.

After her husband's death, Aiken joined the magazine Argosy, where she worked in various editorial capacities and, she later said, learned her trade as a writer. The magazine was one of many in which she published short stories between 1955 and 1960. During this time she also published her first two collections of children's stories and began work on a children's novel, initially titled Bonnie Green, which was later published in 1962 as The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. By then she was able to write full-time from home, producing two or three books a year for the rest of her life, mainly children's books and thrillers, as well as many articles, introductions and talks on children's literature and on the work of Jane Austen.