Good Bye to Gumble's Yard

Gumble's Yard #2

by John Rowe Townsend

158 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

John Rowe Townsend (born 1922) is a British children's author and academic. His best-known children's novel is The Intruder, which won a 1971 Edgar Award, and his best-known academic work is Written for Children: An Outline of English Language Children's Literature (1965), the definitive work of its time on the subject.

He was born in Leeds, and studied at Leeds Grammar School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Among his popular works are Gumble's Yard (his debut novel, published in 1961), Widdershins Crescent (1965), and The Intruder (1969), which won a 1971 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Juvenile Mystery. In Britain, The Intruder was made into a children's TV series starring Milton Johns as the stranger. Noah's Castle was filmed by Southern television and transmitted in seven 25-minute episodes in 1980.

Reviews

[Janet Bird · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fabulous read loaned from Stretford Library in the 1960s. Real gritty stuff for back then, have always loved 'kitchen sink' and that kind of stuff. I often re-read books I read as a whippersnapper so read this again when I found a paperback on the carboot. I remembered most of it anyways, so good it stayed with me. I could relate!