The Ghost of Greville Lodge

I recently watched The Ghost of Greville Lodge, a film made in 2000. It's a moderately well-done ghost story centering on a young teen who goes to stay with his (previously unknown) great uncle at a country mansion.  Past events (of sixty years earlier) play out on the boy, centering on the ghost of another young boy. The film was interesting enough, so that I wondered if the source-book, a young-adult book by Nicholas Wilde called Down Came the Blackbird (1991), might be better. In short, it's not, but it makes for an interesting comparison.

The teen in the book is much more of a delinquent, and the "ghost" is not a ghost, but a series of shared dreams of the past. As reframed for the film, the plot works rather better with the ghost. Here, unusually, the translation from book to film seems to be for the better.

There is little available on the author Nicholas Wilde (on the web, his accomplishments are conflated with at least one other Nicholas Wilde, an American who worked as a location manager in the film industry in the 2000s). On the dust-wrapper of the US edition of Down Came a Blackbird he is described as "a teacher in Cambridgeshire, England." On the dust-wrapper of his first book it notes that he was educated at Cheltenham and Cambridge, that he is an avid collector of children's books and Victorian toys, and that he is a German scholar and obsessive Wagnerite.

Some bibliographical sleuthing reveals that he published some other children's books, three dealing with highly-charged friendships between two boys.  These include Into the Dark (1987), Death Knell (1990) and Eye of the Storm (1995; retitled in the US The Eye of the Storm). His first book was the comical Sir Bertie & the Wyvern: A Tale of Heraldry (1982), followed by Huffle (1984), the latter illustrated by the author.

Readers of Wormwoodiana will possibly find more interesting the fine press 1991 reprint, illustrated by Nicholas Wilde, of Edmund John's The Flute of Sardonyx (1913), a slim collection of Uranian verse. Here are a few illustrations. More can be seen at the Old Stile Press website here. 

 

Nicholas Wilde's last book was published in 1995, and after that I find no certain trace of him.