8:29am Monday 24th August 2009
By Jim Greenhalf
Best-selling children’s author Peter J Murray has high hopes for his new, seventh, spooky adventure.
Scabbajack, due out early next year, is partly set in the house where Peter and his wife Kath live in Steeton.
Jack Craddock is a 12-year-old part-timer in a textile mill in the 1920s. There is a strike, which Jack works through because his sister has consumption.
His family sneaks him through the pickets, but Jack’s overlooker is a nasty piece of work called Murdoch, and he kills the boy.
The story fast-forwards to the present and the Murray house in School Street, Steeton. Enter Zak Freeman who is the hero of the book.
He senses a presence in the old house, the house that used to belong to the murdering Murdoch, the house with butcher’s hooks in the ceiling of the cellar.
In an attempt to change history, Jack Craddock’s ghost takes Zak back in time to the mill.
“Zak is mad on writing and keeps a journal. There are extracts from the journal throughout the book,” Peter says.
He estimates that the six books he has published – the three Mokee Joe books, plus Bonebreaker, Dawn Demons and Moonwailer – have worldwide sales in the region of 500,000.
“Mokee Joe is still selling because I am visiting 100 schools a year. There is no publicity or marketing. I just go into schools and do my act and the books sell by the hundred,” he said.
Peter, a former teacher, is living proof of three things: firstly, that the value of marketing is hugely exaggerated; secondly, children of primary school age and above will read, providing somebody takes the trouble to excite their imagination; and thirdly, self-publishing works if you put yourself about.
Recently, he was invited to do readings in five schools in the United States by Renaissance Learning, a private company set up to encourage children to read.
“They are doing work in the UK. I went to their conference in March, at which I did two performances of my Mokee Joe act. I got a year’s work out of that, including these schools in Manhattan, Harlem and Washington Heights.
“Before I got there, they had bought 1,500 Mokee Joe books for the schools, and they got the children to read them. They liked the quirky English northern-ness. When I got there the children knew the books inside out.
“Kath and I are going back in May to visit five more schools. They’ve ordered another 1,500 books. Renaissance Learning want us to go down to Louisiana and do some work in Connecticut.
One of the things Peter has enjoyed doing is writing The Tuff Nuts for Sheffield’s Bluebell Wood hospice. It’s a commission for which he will ask for no payment.
“It’s a funny book, full of Yorkshire humour, about five animals under threat from a fox. There is going to be a competition in Yorkshire schools to come up with names for the animals, before the book is published.
“I am really keen to get the actor and singer Michael Crawford involved, because of his interest in reading in children’s hospitals.
“I don’t want any money from it. I just want it to sell like hot cakes for the hospice.”
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