Happy birthday to Malcolm Saville

Malcolm Saville, my favourite author when I was a boy, was born on 21 February 1901.

As I once argued in the Guardian (or at least on its website) he was a better writer than Enid Blyton, the writer he is inevitably compared to:

For a couple of decades after he published his first story in 1943, Malcolm Saville represented the strongest challenge to the Blyton supremacy.

Mystery at Witchend tells how the young members of the Lone Pine Club bring to justice a gang of saboteurs hoping, perhaps optimistically, to cripple the Allied war effort by blowing up a dam in the Shropshire hills.

Though he wrote other series and set books in other places, it is the Lone Pine stories and their Shropshire landscapes for which Saville is best remembered. Quite why so many criminals used this backwater as their base for operations was never wholly clear, but one of the best things about his books was that they were set in "real places you can explore for yourself", as he always said in his forewords.

Many readers did just that, discovering Bishop's Castle, the Long Mynd and the Stiperstones for themselves. Saville voted Labour in 1945, but was essentially a one-nation Conservative and his politics were more civilised than Blyton's. Their very different treatment of gypsies shows this. They are villains in her books: in Saville's, not only are the gypsies good characters, but people who are prejudiced against them generally turn out to be no good. As they were writing only a few years after gypsies had been victims of an attempted genocide, this is no trivial point.

And, unlike the Famous Five – stranded for ever in a sexless world of buns and fizzy pop – the Lone Piners were allowed to grow up. Two even get engaged in the final book.

You can still find cheap copies of his books - and pay a fortune for first editions with their dust jackets. Be aware, though, that the Armada paperback editions are edited versions of the original hardbacks and that a lot of the character development and period detail was lost in cutting them down.

The Malcom Saville Society has a spiffy new website and I can recommend the blog posts on each of the books in Saville's major series by Martin Crookall.

Even more valuable in understanding these books and the background to them are the collected papers of Stephen Bigger - I published some of these in the Saville society's newsletter in its early years.

Finally, if you don't mind the tangential, there is the Malcolm Saville label on this blog.