Was there really an author called <PERSON>?
"<PERSON>" was the author of a series of multiple choice fantasy and sci fi books in the 1980's such as The Stone of Badda and The Night of the Comet. The series of books was called "Storytrails". All the books had a beautiful clear, economical writing style that would have used a first class editor. The only other author who managed to achieve that level of word economy and style in my opinion was <PERSON>. Each book had the same layout, graphics style and format. Uniquely they were all written in the first person which is rare when death can and did occur in possible endings. I loved these books. Even now they are collectors items for people.
My question is for something so well written who was <PERSON>? A search finds nothing. 247
So it's surely a pseudonym. I don't have the books at hand now. But I did look in the foreword credits once and there was some Greek sounding name as the author. So it could be him saying he is <PERSON>. But I don't want to stop there; I've always had a theory:
Since it was published by Cambridge Press/Children's Press could it have been a group effort? Done by skilled, already published authors who wanted to be anonymous while having a go at writing a multiple choice series? I don't see that the homogenous writing style over the whole series precludes this; people that skilled could adjust their writing to be similar and then with good editing multiple authors would be indistinguishable.
For such a great series as well - a classic - <PERSON> never to my knowledge got interviewed or had any media articles. That again makes me think of the above theory as a skilled, anonymous group creative effort.
I have pondered the above theory for decades since I read these books. Yet my attempts to find sharp answers have all found very blunt results. I've been asked to provide links to the books. Here's The Stone of Badda and here's The Night of the Comet (that one for some reason doesn't show the front cover). 247