The Santa Trap

When I came across the cartoon again in 2005 it got me thinking about a story. What sort of a child – apart from Molesworth and myself – would try to trap Santa? How would they go about it? And why would they want to do such a thing? I decided that the child in my story would be a villainous brat, with the resources of a wealthy family and a long-standing grudge against Santa Claus.

When I mentioned the idea to my agent, Caroline Walsh, she thought it was terrific and made the unprecedented (for me at any rate) pronouncement that if I wrote it, she could sell it, so I set about writing it – and then came to an almost immediate stop. The problem was that if Bradley (as the boy in my story was now called) was to trap Santa, Santa would have to visit Bradley’s house. But if Bradley was as villainous as I wanted him to be, why was Santa visiting him? Surely such a bad child did not deserve any gifts? This seemed an insurmountable obstacle at the time, so I decided to put the story to one side until I had a way around it.

Over a year – and two Christmases later – I finally came up with a solution that I was happy with: Santa still visited Bradley because – as bad as Bradley was –  “Santa is such a kind old fellow that he believes, no child, even one as bad as Bradley, should go without a Christmas present.”

Now that I had Santa’s motivation sorted, I was able to write the whole story without any further delay. I sent it off to Caroline and – as she had predicted – she had no difficulty finding publishers who wanted to take it. We ended up with similar offers from three different publishers. All three were good publishers, but they all had different takes on the story. One of them was uncomfortable with a child being portrayed as irredeemably bad and wanted him to become Santa’s little helper at the end of the story. Another felt that some of the traps Bradley built, such as the guillotines, were a little too dangerous and should be replaced with something less life-threatening. Only the third publisher, Macmillan, were happy to accept Bradley for the black-hearted brat that he was and that’s one of the main reasons the book went to them.

Another reason for choosing Macmillan was that I had a particular illustrator in mind for the book and Macmillan editor, Suzanne Carnell, had proposed the same illustrator. The illustrator was interested and agreed to do a sample illustration for the book. However months went by and, despite prompting from Suzanne, the sample did not appear. After over a year of waiting we finally realised that it was never going to appear and I heard subsequently that the illustrator had emigrated to Canada without telling us!

Having been disappointed by the first illustrator, we set about finding an alternative, only to have a similar thing happen again — and again — and again! Part of the problem was that I had definite ideas on how the book should be illustrated – I wanted illustrations that would be strong on detail, but also had a touch of the dark humour evident in the Searle cartoon – and this narrowed down the choice of illustrator immensely. Nevertheless, every six months or so we’d find a suitable illustrator who seemed to be interested in doing the book, but they’d always back out before submitting an artwork sample.

After going for three years without securing a suitable illustrator, the book’s new editor, Emily Ford, told me that she thought she’d found another promising candidate and a couple of weeks later she sent me a colour sample from Argentinian illustrator Poly Bernatene. From the moment I set eyes on the sample I knew that not only was the search finally over, but that we had ended up with the ideal illustrator. It was clear from his first drawings that Poly had given Bradley just the right mix of menace and mischief and that his parents had just the right attitude of fearful apprehension.