William Mayne obituary
• William James Carter Mayne, children's writer, born 16 March 1928; died 24 March 2010 


Julia Eccleshare, guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 April 2010

William Mayne's books had a powerful sense of place. Photograph: Joanna Carey

William Mayne, who has died aged 82, was one of the most highly regarded writers of the postwar "golden age" of children's literature. His output was huge – well over 100 titles, encompassing novels and latterly picture books, rich in a sense of place and feel for the magical, and beautifully written. He wrote several books a year in a career that spanned more than half a century and won him the Carnegie medal and the Guardian children's fiction prize. Although never widely popular and sometimes thought of as inaccessible for his young readers, his distinctive, allusive and spare writing had considerable influence and, despite being sometimes out of fashion, his books were often thought due for a comeback. That was never to happen. Instead, Mayne's books were largely deliberately removed from shelves from 2004 onwards following his conviction and prison sentence for indecent assault on children.

The originality of Mayne's writing and his talents for telling original stories, often based on the search for something hidden or elusive, were obvious from A Swarm in May (1955), the first and most outstanding of his quartet of choir-school stories evocatively illustrated by C Walter Hodges. Swiftly followed by Choristers' Cake (1956), it weaves the revival of an old tradition into a contemporary school story, showing how the past can influence and give strength in the present. Mayne captures the delicate balance between the mundane, temporal demands of everyday boarding-school life and the almost magical qualities of the music and the space of cathedral life.
William Mayne's Hob and the Goblins Hob and the Goblins featured a creature who lived in a cupboard under the stairs whom only children could see.

Deftly humorous in ways that lifted it well beyond the run of school stories, Mayne's hallmark elliptical style, dotted with jokes (Latin puns in the case of the choir school stories), was already evident. Although he left school at 17 and later claimed, "I gave up thinking school was any good at 14, though social pressures didn't allow one to abandon it", the books are based on his own experiences as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral from 1937 until 1942, the only part of his education he valued.
The full obituary at The Guardian online.