Jeremy Strong, who has died aged 74 of bone cancer, was the author of some of the funniest contemporary books for children, including two bestselling series, The Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog and My Brother’s Famous Bottom. He was also the figurehead of the Booktrust’s Read for My School campaign and a long-term champion of children’s reading. He claimed the ideas for his stories came from what made him laugh rather than from trying to guess what would amuse children, and the books were marketed with the invitation to “Laugh your Socks Off With Jeremy Strong”. They gave simple and boundless fun to readers of all levels.
His first success came with There’s a Viking in My Bed! (1990) which was adapted for television by the BBC. Two more Viking books and other stories followed before his career really took off with The-Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog (1995), illustrated by Nick Sharratt, about a boy called Trevor who agrees to look after Streaker the dog in the school holidays, and the increasingly riotous and ludicrous situations that he has to navigate. The Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog was the overall winner of the Children’s Book award in 1997, and was followed by a number of sequels and by a second bestselling series that began with My Brother’s Famous Bottom (2007).
Some of Jeremy’s stories had a historical twist, such as There’s a Pharaoh in Our Bath! (2007) and Romans on the Rampage! (2015). He also wrote Nellie Choc-Ice, Penguin Explorer (2017) and sequels, a series about climate change specifically for children with reading difficulties.
Still for a young audience but in a completely different style, Jeremy wrote Armadillo & Hare (2020), a touching short novel about a very special friendship, and its two sequels, Armadillo & Hare and the Very Noisy Bear (2021) and Armadillo & Hare and the Flamingo Affair (2022). They showed that his gift for storytelling was just as engaging without humour as with it.
His most recent book, Fox Goes North, is due to be published in September. Knowing that it would be his last book he described it as “not only a summing-up of my belief in the importance of the arts and keeping an open mind but also, in the writing, the story has accompanied me on my own personal journey through terminal cancer”.
Born in New Eltham, south London, Jeremy was the second of the four children of Charles Strong, a pharmacist who had wanted to be an author but needed to support his family, and Una (nee Shaw-Kyd), a primary school teacher. Growing up in a house full of books, Jeremy wrote his first stories while he was still at Wyborne primary school, including a retelling of the story of Jason and the Argonauts when he was six. A teacher who disliked him put him off reading temporarily, but fortunately, his interest in English revived while he was at Haberdashers’ Aske’s grammar school, New Cross, and flourished at York University, where he switched courses from music to English.
After he graduated, his ambitions to be a writer met with limited success, so he became a primary school teacher instead. His first job was in Sevenoaks, Kent, in 1976 and he then had spells as a deputy head teacher at Birchwood primary, Swanley and headteacher of Culverstone Green primary. Steven Butler, the author of funny books including The Wrong Pong and the Dennis the Menace Diaries, was a pupil at Culverstone Green, and described Jeremy as “an impish and terribly mischievous person. I remember him leaping into the school hall with a guitar on his back and before we knew it, we were singing rock songs in assembly. It was like have Willy Wonka as our headteacher.”
Jeremy began his writing career with a picture book, Smith’s Tail (1978). His first novel, The Karate Princess (1986), tapped into the then popular strand of feisty girls in unusual roles. After the success of There’s a Viking in My Bed!, in 1991 he became a full-time writer, but he always acknowledged his years as a teacher as being an invaluable preparation and source of inspiration for his stories.
Confident in his knowledge of contemporary children and the details of their lives, he frequently grounded his stories in an everyday situation. From that familiar starting point he would then add a funny twist to take the story in an unexpected direction. Telling stories that children find funny and that make adults laugh, too, is notoriously difficult, but Jeremy carried it off with style and charm.
He made light of his imaginative process, saying that ideas sometimes came to him in a mashed-up form in the night. He would write them down at the time but often found them to be useless when he looked at them in the morning. But he never diminished the challenge of writing humour and he summed up how he kept unruly stories in check, saying: “When you are writing off-the-wall comedy you can be as crazy as you like, but it still has to make some kind of inner sense.”
I first met Jeremy in 1997 when he so deservedly won the Children’s Book award. His warmth and generosity were contagious and life-affirming.
Speaking to huge audiences at festivals and in schools, he projected a deep liking for and interest in children.
He is survived by his second wife, Gillie (nee Pietsch), whom he married in 2008; by a son, Daniel, and daughter, Jessica, from his first marriage, to Susan Noot, which ended in divorce; and by six grandchildren and two stepdaughters, Rosa and Isobel.
• Jeremy James Strong, writer, born 18 November 1949; died 4 August 2024
