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Trevor, Elleston

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

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Initially the most famous pseudonym and latterly the legal name of the UK author born Trevor Dudley-Smith (1920-1995), in the US from 1973. Other early pseudonyms include Mansell Black, Trevor Burgess, Roger Fitzalan, Howard North, Simon Rattray, Warwick Scott, Caesar Smith and Lesley Stone; later, he became best known under the name Adam Hall for the Quiller series, a long sequence of powerfully pared-down espionage tales, one or two of them – including the first, The Berlin Memorandum (1965; vt The Quiller Memorandum 1965) – being Technothrillers. The distance from Trevor's first books to Quiller was considerable, his early career having been dominated by the radically un-Quiller-like Happy Glade/Deep Wood sequence of children's fantasies beginning with Into the Happy Glade (1943) [for titles see Checklist], some under his original name. As Beast Fables [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], early volumes in the long sequence read as soft imitations of the vast and rather more austere Mother West Wind sequence of stories by Thornton W Burgess (1874-1965). Some later volumes, set specifically in the Deep Wood, are of greater interest; those properly describable as Children's SF include The Wizard of the Wood (1948), about the Invention of a flying machine, and Badger's Moon (1949), which takes its cast to the Moon in a Spaceship. Of his other work for children, Ant's Castle (1949) is a non-series tale in which warring societies of ants act out a war; the language easily evokes Arthurian romance. The Crystal City (1959), set deep Under the Sea, depicts a magic City in similar language.

After the fantasy and horror assembled in Miscellany (coll 1944), Trevor's first work of genre interest, The Immortal Error (1946), a fantasy, tells of an accident survivor who wakes up with the wrong soul in residence. His later sf tends to the desultory: The Domesday Story (1952 as by Warwick Scott; 1972 as Trevor; vt Doomsday 1953) tells of fears that an H-bomb test in Australia will bring about the end of the world; Forbidden Kingdom (1955) is a children's Lost-World story about a high-Technology enclave in the Kalahari desert; The Pillars of Midnight (1957) depicts the effects of a devastating disease; The Mind of Max Duvine (1960) introduces Telepathy as a releaser of horror; The Shoot (1966), a Technothriller, returns to weapons-testing, this time depicting the launching of a missile whose fuel is dangerously unstable; The Sibling (1979) as by Adam Hall is horror; The Theta Syndrome (1977) makes some play with Psi Powers as a comatose hospital patient expresses her fears via a kind of Telepathy, and later Telekinesis; Death Watch (1984) focuses on the Near-Future accidental creation of a fatal virus by Genetic Engineering and its subsequent use by rogue Soviet hardliners to cause a decimating Pandemic in the West. Trevor was a fluent and conspicuously able writer; his lack of serious interest in sf is demonstrated by the degree to which none of his sf sounds in the slightest like Quiller. [JC]

Elleston Trevor

born Bromley, Kent [now London]: 17 February 1920

died Cave Creek, Arizona: 21 July 1995

works

series

Happy Glade/Deep Wood

  • Into the Happy Glade (London: Gerald G Swan, 1943) as Trevor Dudley-Smith [Happy Glade/Deep Wood: illus/hb/W A Ward]
  • By a Silver Stream: Sequel to Into the Happy Glade (London: Gerald G Swan, 1944) as Trevor Dudley-Smith [Happy Glade/Deep Wood: illus/hb/W A Ward]
  • Deep Wood (London: Gerald G Swan, 1945) [Happy Glade/Deep Wood: illus/hb/]
  • Heather Hill (London: Gerald G Swan, 1946) [Happy Glade/Deep Wood: illus/hb/David Williams]
  • Secret Travellers (London: Gerald G Swan, 1947) [Happy Glade/Deep Wood: illus/hb/David Williams]
  • The Island of the Pines (London: Gerald G Swan, 1948) [Happy Glade/Deep Wood: illus/hb/David Williams]
  • Badger's Beech (London: The Falcon Press, 1948) [Happy Glade/Deep Wood: illus/hb/Leslie Atkinson]
  • The Chipmunks of Willow Wood (London: Findon Publications, 1948) [Happy Glade/Deep Wood: illus/hb/J Thorn]
  • The Wizard of the Wood (London: The Falcon Press, 1948) [Happy Glade/Deep Wood: illus/hb/Leslie Atkinson]
  • Badger's Moon (London: The Falcon Press, 1949) [Happy Glade/Deep Wood: illus/hb/Leslie Atkinson]
  • Mole's Castle (London: The Falcon Press, 1951) [Happy Glade/Deep Wood: illus/hb/Leslie Atkinson]
  • Sweethallow Valley (London: The Falcon Press, 1951) [Happy Glade/Deep Wood: illus/hb/Leslie Atkinson]
  • Badger's Wood (London: Macmillan, 1958) [Happy Glade/Deep Wood: illus/hb/Leslie Atkinson]
  • Green Glade (London: Gerald G Swan, 1959) [Happy Glade/Deep Wood: illus/hb/David Williams]
  • Squirrel's Island (London: Gerald G Swan, 1963) [Happy Glade/Deep Wood: illus/hb/]

Animal Life Stories

Wumpus

  • Wumpus (London: Gerald G Swan, 1945) [Wumpus: illus/hb/J McCail]
  • More About Wumpus (London: Gerald G Swan, 1947) [Wumpus: illus/hb/J McCail]
  • Where's Wumpus? (London: Gerald G Swan, 1948) [Wumpus: illus/hb/J McCail]

Quiller (highly selected)

individual titles (selected)

links

previous versions of this entry



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