Heron Carvic

Heron Carvic, real name Geoffrey Rupert William Harris was an English author and actor most popular as the creator of the Miss Seeton series of novels. He also got widespread fame for portraying “Gandalf” in the BBC reenactment of the Hobbit for radio. He also played the part of “Caiaphas the Priest” on the popular play “The Man Born to be King” on BBC Radio. As a young man, Heron Carvic would leave Eton and travel across the Channel to France to earn a living as an actor in France. It was in France that he took up his grandmother’s name to use as his stage name, which outraged his family back home. He would meet Phyllis Neilson-Terry, a woman 20 years older than him when he was 23, whom he proceeded to marry in 1958. As a writer, he created one of the most memorable of British characters in the retired art teacher Miss Emily D. Seeton. His character who was a caricature of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple proved very popular, leading to Carvic publishing five titles in the series. Ten years after Heron Carvic’s death, his novels were reissued as ebooks. The reissued titles were so well received that, the decision was made to engage Sarah J. Mason to write more titles in the series. After the death of the author in 1980, the author Hampton Charles would write three novels in the series that were published in 1990, before Sarah J. Mason came in to write the series starting from 1991 under the pseudonym Hamilton Crane.