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Special
Offer !
While
stocks last, the Joslin de Lay Mysteries,
the Hare Trilogy and Out of the Mouths of
Babes are sold as new, signed by the author and
personally dedicated to the buyer if specified
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You can purchase all my current books at Amazon, and you can even get the older ones from Amazon marketplace.

Now available from OUP
The paperback edition of Mystery Stories
- click on the picture. From creepy school computers to bungling bank robbers; from lost villages to
deadly Christmas presents :
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THE HARE TRILOGY
Hare�s Choice, Badger�s
Fate, Hawk�s Vision
Click here for the
critics reaction
Click here for the publishing
history
Or read on for an article
I wrote telling how I first
thought of them, what went
into their making and some
idea of what they are about.

About Hare�s Choice
Hare�s Choice is a children�s story and
must be judged as such. For most young
readers the important section is the communal
story and the process which creates it.
The story�s composition springs
from the disparate suggestions thrown in
by the children, each of which is consistent
with the character of the child who makes
it. The final story is in part
a fusion, a synthesis, of these elements
into a unity and the whole progression is
intended as a dramatisation of the process
which underlines all art. Each
episode, however, is still an illustration
of how the child who makes it thinks, so
there is room for the individuality of each
one to be expressed. Nevertheless,
I have tried to depict how the sheer act
of creation and pride in that act not only
identifies the children within the class
but also unites them so at the end they
become almost a single character.
It�s true that most readers, and indeed
most reviewers, have seen the novel in this
light. However, I meant more
than this, and to express it adequately
I must go back to how the novel started.
In 1984, when I was still County English
Adviser for Hertfordshire, our primary colleagues
set up an in-service day for the rest of
us to discuss pre-11 education. This
was before the days of Key Stages. During
the day, several headteachers addressed
us on particular aspects of work in their
schools. One headteacher, talking
about writing in his rural and rather isolated
school, told how one morning some children
brought in a dead fox that they had found
by the road. This excited great
interest in these country children inured
to such sights. At first, they did the sort
of things primary schools do - weighed it,
measured it and drew it. Then
the head suggested they each write a story
about the fox�s probable life before a car
hit it. He brought some of the
results in: they were very, very good and
I was deeply impressed.
A question came to me which I couldn�t
get out of my head. In
future, to these children, which of these
foxes was the real fox? Was
it the dead creature they only knew after
its death or the make-believe fox they had
written about, for indeed they were completely
separate entities even though they were
meant to be the same? The twenty or so separate
imaginative creations could not possibly
be identified with the one real fox even
though an object of the stories was to do
just that � and, of course, in a sense did.
This led me to consider the notion of
truth and reality in fiction and a paradox
which has always struck � and even amused
� me. Let�s take the Cob at
Lyme Regis, a famous enough landmark. What
does everyone know about it? Well,
we all know what it is. But
what specifically happened there? Unless
we�re local, nothing. But if
we�re not, there are two. A
girl called Louisa once fell off it and
a woman called Sara Woodroffe once waited
on it in vain for her lover to return. That�s
what the Cob means to me and, I suspect,
to many people. The odd thing is that
these events never happened. The
first is from Jane Austen�s Persuasion:
the second from John Fowles�s The French
Lieutenant�s Woman. Yet they
stick in my mind � and in other people�s
- as actual events because they are so persuasive
and archetypal, like myth. They
become, in a real sense, true.
So the first motivation to write Hare�s
Choice was to make a meditation on the nature
of truth, both actual and fictional, to
try to answer the question thus posed. The
image of the children composing a story
around a significant object like the fox
seemed a good starting point. I
had some years before been given The Leaping
Hare by David Thomson, a remarkable book
which told me everything there is to know
about hares, including some things I�d rather
not, and brought this wonderful, fascinating
animal to life in a way which occasional
sightings of it could not do. A
version of the incident of the fox, with
a hare instead, seemed the best vehicle
for my meditation, but I was not at all
clear how I could use it.
It was then that I remembered a short
story by EM Forster which had made a great
impression on me, The Celestial Omnibus.
In this story, the boy
one evening catches a horse-drawn omnibus
driven by an ominous driver to a destination
he does not know, but is told it is Heaven.
The journey takes him high into
the clouds to a strange and wonderful place
inhabited by fascinating people, Tom Jones,
Mrs Gamp, Ulysses. The bus driver
that night was Dante. The boy is so
sorry to leave, but soon is catching the
bus every night. The drivers change.
One night it�s Jane Austen.
But Mr Septimus Bons, a stern
man who keeps such characters locked between
covers of bound vellum on his library shelves,
has no truck with such nonsense. One
night he goes with the boy to show him such
things do not exist. But he
recognises the driver, this time Sir Thomas
Browne, and cries out in terror. Next
morning his body is found on the local common,
seemingly having fallen from a great height.
This notion of a heaven inhabited
by characters from literature appealed to
me (as it did to Woody Allen who once depicted
a heaven composed of jazz musicians). But
what about another heaven inhabited by animal
characters?
Soon after the in-service day, we Advisers
were called upon to make a full inspection
of all the small schools in the county,
those with rolls less than 100. We
knew there was a hidden agenda to this:
the County Council wanted to close
them and send the kids to big schools in
nearby towns. So we made
our inspection and came to a completely
different conclusion. Our final
report, far from recommending closure, insisted
on their retention and even wanted money
put into them because they offered children
a unique and remarkable educational experience.
It�s a measure of the wisdom
of those now far-off days that the Education
Committee accepted our report and no more
was heard about closing these schools, at
least, not in my time in the county.
The book�s structure seemed to develop
without any need for thought because it
seemed so natural. A section
about the hare as a hare, giving the reader
a privileged view of its animal life denied
to anyone-else in the book, secured Hare�s
actual life. The section of
Hare�s finding and the process of her story
followed naturally, as did the story itself.
But the final part was difficult.
The differences between actual
and fictional truth meant that Hare had
existed on two planes, both equally real
to the children. However, the fictional
truth was what affected them more because
it was a truth they had given her and, when
they buried her, their sorrow was more for
their creation that the actual animal they
never knew. That�s why their
memorial said RIP THE QUEEN OF THE HARES.
As it seemed to me, though, the real
question was not simply which of the two
truths was more valid, but which one was
truer to the hare, who now possessed two
different sorts of knowledge. This
is where the idea of the Choice came in.
The concept of the limbo in
which Hare meets the Overseer was a hard
one to make, but the views she is given
of the two possible destinations present
her with an almost impossible choice. Nevertheless,
she has to make it.
So
she does, but only she and the Overseer
know what it is. I did not, and could
not presume to, make the choice for her
(not then, anyway), so we leave the story
on a question mark, which seemed the only
conclusion possible. This story, it
seemed, had an ending but no closure. Nor
did I have an answer to my question.
The Hare Trilogy
After Hare�s Choice was finished I had
no intention whatever of writing anything
like it again. When asked, I
replied that the choice Hare made was to
us � and certainly to me � unknowable. I
stubbornly said this for three years. Then
I received a letter from a headteacher.
She told me that her pupils
had really loved the book but they were
�very distressed� at not knowing where Hare
finally went. Well, I
thought, I�m certainly not in the business
of distressing children, though I couldn�t
quite see what there was to be done about
it because I certainly not going to reply
with a glib solution.
Not long afterwards, Meg Rutherford,
who did the superb illustrations, rang me
up and said, �Dennis, I�ve got badgers digging
in the garden.� I asked her
what she thought I could do about it, shouldn�t
she get in touch with the Ministry of Agriculture
or someone, but she said, �No, I want to
draw them.� I said how pleased
I was and could I have one of the drawings,
but she persisted and said, �No, I want
you to write something about badgers for
me to illustrate.�
Well, I wrote her a poem, which went
in Meg Rutherford�s Book of Animal Poems
(Simon and Schuster) and then wished I had
a story about badgers for her. It
was then that the idea, in fact the need,
for a trilogy first dawned on me because
the glimmerings of an answer to the question
of the choice were dawning on me.
So I started Badger�s Fate, in which,
a year after the events in Hare�s Choice,
the children tell a new story, once again
brought about by something found by a pupil,
this time about Badger. Badger�s Fate
is a much darker story and this time I consider
another aspect of the first question, the
notion not of the nature of the two truths
but what the two truths actually are, whether
one must be �true� to the other and whether
telling stories, far from bringing us to
truth, can take us away from it. This
demanded examination of the nature of endings,
of closure.
The children�s story here has two endings,
one true to the whole thrust of the story
and the other not. One
ending is made by the children in the school,
except for one. Emma, who made the
first discovery of the badger, is profoundly
disturbed by the ending the others gave
because she knows it is not right. Composing
the ending she wants is a hard process
for her, but she must do it. I
remembered Hardy�s tart foootnote in Return
of the Native saying that the published
ending was what the publishers wanted, not
what he intended, and he wanted readers
with �a more austere aesthetic code� to
supply the real one for themselves. For
myself, I wish that the ending in the book
was �true� because it�s really �feel-good.�
But I know Hardy�s preferred
tragic ending is truer to the story.
For Badger though, the choice truly is
impossible, however much Hare tries to persuade
him, and the book ends on an even more pressing
question mark than the first.
The emphasis in the third, Hawk�s Vision,
is different again. This time
Hawk is not dead at the start and is still
flying at the end, untroubled by any such
doubts. The story now is more
about the children. Things in
the educational world had changed since
the days of our report, there was a cold
wind blowing and our small schools were
now fast being closed. So I
decided the school in the story must close
as well: the prospect for the children was
imminent upheaval and the end of their tight-knit
group. The story, though the
children talking about the hawk starts it,
after Jamila, who is Asian, has seen it
and been deeply affected by the sight �
is really about the children and the problem
they are grappling with.
In a sense, the choice between their
two possible lives (though this choice has
already been made for them) is the same
as the animals� choice between the two heavens.
Badger and Hare are waiting
for Hawk to join them one day, but for now
there is their own choice to consider �
or at least, Badger�s, for we left him undecided.
But now the choice is
finally made and what it really is should
have been obvious all the time: I cursed
myself for not having thought of it at once
because then the three parts of the trilogy
could have been written together instead
of with a three-year gap between Hare and
Badger.
In Hawk�s Vision, the last section is
about the children, not the animals. The
children have moved on, their own choice
is made, their stories have helped them
make it by enacting it for them and - I
hope - the whole trilogy now can have final
closure.

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Yule Logs now out !
Click on the cover to order from Amazon
UK

Christmas has always been and always
will be a special time of year, a time either
of great happiness or great sadness and
sometimes both. Here are eight stories
of different Christmases, all of which are
memorable in their different ways.
The stories are arranged in order of
age: the first for young children, the last
for adults.
There are two World War 2 stories, one
which refers to it and one which refers
to another war. There�s a football
story, a ghost story and two stories
with carols in them - and a lot more besides.
There�s a story about a really
weird Christmas guest and another about
a tumultuous family row. All
ordinary Christmases to start with, but
which turn into being anything but ordinary.
Each story has a postscript telling what
real memory lies behind it and how it came
to be written.

Many of my earlier books are back in print via the Back-to-Front
imprint of the Solidus Press. I have chosen some of my favourites to be rereleased by this new publisher. Here
are some that you can read now :
The Great Football Treble

All three books are now available. You can buy them by
clicking on the titles :
Haunted
United
Beautiful
Games
Death
Penalty
Two chilling ghost stories

You can buy them by
clicking on the titles :
The
Ghosts Who Waited
The
Railway Phantoms

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