Was there really an author called Allen Sharp?

Question

"Allen Sharp" 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 Agatha Christie. 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 Allen Sharp? A search finds nothing. 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 Allen Sharp. 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 - Allen Sharp 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).

Answer 1

Allen Sharp is listed in various locations as Allen W. Sharp and flourished as an author in the 1970s and 1980s. At that same time, another (possibly the same) Allen W. Sharp (b.1928?) was writing books about English Literature and working at San Francisco State College as an Associate Professor of English, alongside his frequent co-author, Patricia A. Porter.

We have confirmation on the address of the American Mr Allen W. Sharp from some correspondence that he entered into with another educator and a quick glance at the bibliography of Allen Sharp shows that several of his books, published by Cambridge University Press, were set in San Francisco, which suggests a strong familiarity with the city.

I also found this scholarly reference;

Unfortunately the sole author of the Storytrails series, Allen Sharp, died before I could contact him, and this limited my analysis of that series.

_{^{Making a Choice: The Melete Effect and Establishing a Poetics for Choice-Based Narratives - December, 2017}}

Answer 2

Hi Snack_Food_Termite,

I just randomly found this thread on Allen Sharp. I am Nicholas Peter Velissaris and I did my PhD on Choice-Based Narratives at RMIT. I'm based in Australia and during my research, I reached out to the Cambridge Press Offices here in Melbourne to find out more information about the genesis of the Storytrails series.

I was particularly interested as the final book in the series To Catch A Bunyip was set in Melbourne and in the Victorian goldfields and features an extremely accurate period map of the city. Something that would have been difficult to source in the pre-internet 1980s without good research. The staff at Cambridge Press Melbourne put me in touch with a lady at the UK offices. She had worked at Cambridge Press since the 1980s and had known Allen Sharp and advised that this was his real name (I too thought it was a pseudonym) and that he had passed away in the early 2000s. I think he died in 2002 if I remember correctly. From the information that I was given by this editor, she informed me that Sharp wrote all of the books in the series by himself but that they had no copies of the manuscripts (which I was looking to analyse) or any way to get in touch with his surviving family, so I didn't pursue this any further.

I have always assumed that the different offices of the Cambridge Press helped Sharp to write and research his books, which is why he had such good information in his books. I might be wrong on this, but that's as far as I was able to get in researching the series

So many of these authors have vanished into the ether without so much as a biography or photo. If you know anything about John Allen and Kenneth James (authors of the Tracker Books series - and I also suspect pseudonyms )

I hope this helps,

Thanks Nic Velissaris