IN THE gladsome days at Penguin Books, when Kaye Webb was queen of the Puffins, a bold decision was made to publish John Masefield’s historical romances Dead Ned and Live and Kicking Ned as Puffin Story Books. The second of them was too long, and was abridged by Vivien Garfield, the wife of Leon, whose spirited extravaganzas, set in past times, were among the chief adornments of postwar English children’s literature.

Work on Masefield’s finely crafted text may have been one of the things that prompted Vivien Garfield’s decision to write children’s books on her own account, along with her close understanding of the work of her husband and her pleasure in telling stories to their daughter. In 1980 she published her first fiction under her maiden name of Alcock: The Haunting of Cassie Palmer, dedicated “To Leon and Jane”.

The book encapsulated several elements evident in much of her future work. She was born in 1924 and had a difficult childhood. With her mother beset by illness, Alcock and her two sisters were eventually farmed out to relatives. Reflecting this, the growing girls in her stories were confronted by mysterious or disruptive events, resolution of which brought a new understanding across generations.

“I certainly didn’t understand my parents, any more than they understood me,” says Mrs Carter in A Kind of Thief (1991), summing up a constant in Alcock’s two dozen published works — which included several stories for younger readers, such as Othergran (1993), and a remarkable venture into Greece’s mythological past, Singer to the Sea God (1992).

Yet whether she was writing ghost stories, such as her first book or its successor, The Stonewalkers (1981), or stories in which uncomfortable decisions must be made, or children are puzzled by events (such as the return of a snatched sibling in The Cuckoo Sister), she always sought a consoling denouement — and this sometimes undermined a powerful premise. (Her tale of a girl’s involvement in a school secret society in The Trial of Anna Cotman feels mawkish when set beside Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War.)

Nevertheless, her reputation was high in Britain and America during the final decades of the last century, her gift for well-paced, single-strand narratives and engaging characters being especially remarked. (She was very good at fierce old ladies and good-hearted children who were just a mite rebellious.) Several of her novels were adapted for television, including Cassie Palmer and Travellers by Night, and at least five books were on the threshold of gaining literary awards: in 1988 she was shortlisted but unsuccessful four times with The Monster Garden, which tells of a geneticist’s daughter — Frankie Stein — accidentally creating a chimera out of grey goo.

Leon Garfield died in 1996 and Alcock did much to sustain his memory in a publishing world where even recent achievements (hers included) are too quickly passed over. She continued her own writing, publishing at least one book almost every year until 2001 when she produced The Boy Who Swallowed a Ghost.

She is survived by her daughter.

Vivien Alcock, children’s writer, was born on September 23, 1924. She died on October 12, 2003, aged 79.