Devil was the first of several historical adventure novels, typically set late in the eighteenth century and featuring a character of humble origins (in this case a boy from a family of travelling actors) pushed into the midst of a threatening intrigue.
In 1970 Garfield's work started to move in new directions with The God Beneath the Sea, a re-telling of numerous Greek myths in one narrative, co-authored with Edward Blishen and illustrated by Charles Keeping.
The Drummer Boy (1970) was another adventure story, but concerned more with a central moral problem, and apparently aimed at somewhat older readers, a trend continued in The Prisoners of September (1975), republished in 1989 by Lions Tracks under the title Revolution!, The Pleasure Garden (1976) and The Confidence Man (1978).
In 1980 he also wrote an ending for The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished at the death in 1870 of Dickens, an author who had a major influence on Garfield's own style.
[7] They are not novels about major historical events, which are rarely depicted, or social conditions, which provide only starting points for the personal stories of the characters.
[12] Beyond these specific debts, Garfield shares Stevenson's fondness for binding a relatively conservative hero to a more forceful personality outside the bounds of conventional morality.
[6][b] From 1967 to 1970 Garfield was also a Commended runner up for the Carnegie Medal three times, for Smith, Black Jack, and Drummer Boy, the latter in competition with his Medal-winning work.
In The Guardian, Francis Spufford named The God Beneath the Sea one of the greatest children's books, calling it "visceral, overpowering, defiantly undomesticated", adding, "Read this as a child, and ever after you understand why Prometheus and Pandora are down there at the roots of the West's imagination.
[25] ‡ The God Beneath the Sea (1970) and The Golden Shadow (1973) were written by Garfield and Edward Blishen, illustrated by Charles Keeping, and published by Longman.