Carol Schaal of the
Notre Dame Magazine has written a superb article about John Bellairs, "the wittiest guy in the class of '59", for the magazine's summer 2003 edition:
When the kids finish the latest Harry Potter, some fans of ghosts and spells and things that go creeeeak in the night have a suggestion: Check out the books by John Bellairs.
Bellairs, who graduated from Notre Dame in 1959, became the talk of juvenile fiction in the 1970s with the publication of The House with a Clock in Its Walls. The creepy doings in that book earned it a place as one of The New York Times Best Books in 1973.
He published three separate series of juvenile horror/mystery books until his death of cardiovascular disease in 1991 at age 53. His estate hired Brad Strickland to complete four books begun by Bellairs; Strickland has since continued the series under his own name.
