Edmund Wallace Hildick

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Edmund Wallace Hildick (1925–2001) was a prolific and innovative^[1] children's author, who wrote under the name E W Hildick. He wrote, amongst others, the Ghost Squad, Jim Starling, Birdy Jones, Jack McGurk and Lemon Kelly series.

He was born in Bradford, England in 1925. After two years service in the RAF he became a secondary school teacher, then a writer, before moving to the USA to become editor of a literary magazine. He was one of the very few British juvenile authors of his generation to achieve success in America.

He started writing while he was a teacher in a Secondary Modern school at Dewsbury in the West Riding of Yorkshire in England, his intended audience being "tough, modern kids similar to the ones I teach".^[2]

Here, in one of his Birdy Jones novels, Hildick describes a boy organising a stage-coach ambush:

They watched the resultant mêlée with a mixture of amusement and respect, for no-one could help admire Birdy's powers of imagination and stage management. A thin sharp-nosed boy, with cross-eyes and a black lens to his glasses, he didn't get on very well with boys of his own age and spent most of his time with youngsters, spellbinding them with his bright ideas for giving new life to old games.

Although he had emigrated to the U.S.A.^[3] in later life, he died in London England.[1]

Notes

1. ^ For example, the imaginative use of lists as a way of summarising the plot so far or outlining what was coming next (passim)
2. ^ Sleeve notes from Jim Starling and the Colonel, 1960 Heinemann (London)
3. ^ US influence first detected in Birdy Jones and the New York Heads (1974) Garden City, NY, Doubleday Publishing ISBN 0385075847