I gave a talk at the Sydney Writers Festival yesterday. It was on writing for young people, a fairly elastic topic, so I chose to talk about an author (of books for adults) whose work was very influential on my own writing, an author that I actually met briefly back in 1983. As his books are now extremely hard to get and he is largely forgotten, I thought I might write a short piece on him here, giving some key information about the man and his work. At the festival I told the story of how I actually came to visit Irskine Henry in his house in North Devon, but as I will probably be repeating that anecdote elsewhere I am only going to give a brief description here of what I know about the man and his work.

I first encountered his books when I was 12 or 13 (in the mid 1970s), and at that time you could still get his books from the library and they occasionally turned up in second-hand bookstores. Though none of Henry’s books were specifically written for children or teenagers, they were all eminently accessible adventure stories that also had additional layers of meaning, so that while I always wanted to read them in a single sitting, I would also think about them long afterwards as well, and they could easily be re-read, delivering a somewhat different experience each time. I still re-read my favourites every couple of years, particularly The Return of the Elephant, which is not about an animal but a ship called ‘The Elephant’.

Though I actually did meet Henry for about five minutes some twenty-three years ago, I have never been able to find out much about him. Most of the books of his that I own have no biographical information at all, anywhere. Only his last two books have a couple of lines on the inside back dustjacket flap, which simply read “Irskine Henry lives in North Devon. He is the author of a number of acclaimed novels.” The few established facts about Irskine Henry I have repeated below come almost entirely from a brief obituary that appeared in The Exeter Express-Herald on 26 May 1983 (without a byline) and from a reference work on British authors, the extremely useful One Thousand Writers, Four Thousand Books edited by Richard Beckfoot and published in paperback by Skua Books in 1971.

Irskine Henry was born Henryk Wojciech Bobrowski, in Ustka on the Baltic coast. Like Joseph Conrad, he was a Pole who joined the British merchant navy (though his years at sea were in the age of steam, from 1911 to 1926) and like Conrad when he began to write Bobrowski chose an English nom de plume – except that unlike Conrad he chose it when his English was still a bit shaky, so he spelt ‘Erskine’ with an initial ‘I”.

Henry’s first published works were travelogues and short guides to various obscure ports and close inland destinations, primarily on the west coast of Africa. Published in London magazines like The Pictorial Gaze and A Briton’s View, the articles were illustrated with Henry’s own sketches, for he was an accomplished if not inspired artist, particularly in architectural drawing. This led some later commentators on his life and work to speculate that his father or some relative was an architect or perhaps a shipbuilder. However this remains mere guesswork, as Henry never wrote or spoke about his family and no records are extant.

Irskine Henry’s first novel was published in 1929 by the firm Hoode & Carroll, who would go on to publish all but two of his nine novels. Most of the books were very successful in their time, and went through multiple printings. It is very rare to find a first edition of any of the pre-World War II books in good condition. In order of publication, the books are:

ALL QUIET AT MIDNIGHT, 1929

STORM-BIRDS IN SUMMER, 1930

THE RETURN OF THE ELEPHANT, 1933

THOSE CRUEL CARES, 1935

THE PRESERVED EAR OF ROBERT JENKINS, 1936

ONE STRAND TO CROSS, 1938

A RIDICULOUS NOTION, 1939

HOW BEATS THE DRUM? (ERWIN LTD), 1947

THE DREADBURG VASE (ERWIN LTD), 1949

I’ve read all of them and can recommend them all, but my three absolute favourites are The Return of the Elephant, All Quiet at Midnight and One Strand to Cross. Search them out – you’ll be glad you did.

© Garth Nix 2006