Watch the Wall, Miss Seeton is listed for publication on Thursday 13th December 2018, and I’ve just seen a draft of the cover design, so now it’s time for the first of the five new Miss Seeton quizzes I promised you. You can test your memory at https://www.goodreads.com/quizzes/112....

This quiz covers the original five Miss Seeton books, all written by Heron Carvic and published in hardcover between 1968 and 1975. The first three titles had separate American and British hardcover editions, and fifty years on it’s too late to find anyone who knows why they were different. Harper and Row published them with A Harper Novel of Suspense on the cover, so it may be that Heron Carvic was asked to make them less cozy than his initial submission. Rest assured that none of the quiz questions relies on your having read any particular edition.

An internet search shows that Popular Library issued at least three of the titles in paperback during the 1970s. I have their edition of Picture Miss Seeton, and it uses the American hardcover text, so I assume the others did too.

Heron Carvic died in 1980, and the books were not reissued until Berkley published them in 1988-89. A number of American readers of the Harper or Popular Library versions of Picture Miss Seeton were puzzled when the Berkley version seemed cozier than they remembered. Farrago’s eBooks appeared in 2016 and used Berkley’s text, so the question arose again. There were even suggestions that the story had been "made more cozy” to suit the Kindle generation. In fact, Berkley had used the British hardcover text for Picture Miss Seeton, although they used the American text for subsequent books.

I hope you’ll enjoy pitting your wits against this quiz, and I will post further quizzes every two weeks, taking the books five at a time in order of original publication date, keeping Miss Seeton fresh in your minds right up to publication of Watch the Wall, Miss Seeton.