Fire and Hemlock is a modern fantasy by British author Diana Wynne Jones, based largely on the Anglo-Scottish Border ballads "Tam Lin" and "Thomas the Rhymer".

As Polly thinks back to this "second set" of memories, the point where they seem to diverge is when she stumbled into a funeral in an old mansion, Hunsdon House, when she was ten and playing with her best friend, Nina.

He takes her back inside to help him select six pictures from a large pile, his share of the estate of the deceased; one of them is a photograph called "Fire and Hemlock" (hence the name of the novel), which he gave to her.

An invented town and hardware store later turn out to be real, the proprietor being the spitting image of Tom, and his nephew Leslie falling into the story much later as a possible victim of Laurel's.

This friendship develops against the background of Polly's growing up in her own disintegrating family life: her father Reg leaves, and a new lodger moves in and begins a relationship with her mother, Ivy.

Using the information in the ballads as an instruction, she arrives at the ceremony over which Laurel is presiding, and manages to outwit her and secure Tom's life, and, depending on the way you interpret the strange happenings of the ending, his love.

Feminism – The original story of Tam Lin is one of a resourceful and brave young girl named Janet who rescues her lover from the faeries.

When Jones was writing this novel, she knew that she needed "a narrative structure which did not simply put a female in a male's place".

Diana Wynne Jones wrote that her goal was "to write a book in which modern life and heroic mythical events approached one another so closely that they were nearly impossible to separate.

Eliot's Four Quartets, which in Jones' words "combines static meditation with movement in an extraordinary way, to become a quest of the mind away from the Nothing of spiritual death (Hemlock), towards the Fire which is imagination and redemption – the Nowhere.

[8] These include The Golden Bough, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and The Oxford Book of Ballads (which contains both Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin).

After reading The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, Polly refers to herself as Porthos (her favourite character) in the clandestine letters she mails to Tom.

Dave Langford reviewed Fire and Hemlock for White Dwarf #96, and stated that "There's almost too much complication in this ambitious book.

When the fireworks finally begin to erupt in earnest, the change of pace from earlier, leisurely enigmas is liable to leave you battered and baffled.