And out of the Darkwood Mr Toppit comes, and he comes not for you, or for me, but for all of us...

When the author of The Hayseed Chronicles, Arthur Hayman, is mown down by a concrete truck in Soho, his legacy passes to his widow, Martha, and her children - the fragile Rachel, and Luke, reluctantly immortalised as Luke Hayseed, the central character of his father's books. But others want their share, particularly Laurie, who has a mysterious agenda of her own that changes all their lives. For buried deep in the books lie secrets which threaten to be revealed as the family begins to crumble under the heavy burden of their inheritance.

Spanning several decades, from the heyday of the British film industry after the war to the cut-throat world of show business in Los Angeles, Mr Toppit is a riveting tale of the unexpected effects of sudden fame and fortune. Not since Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up! has a novel managed to capture a family and a society to such wonderfully funny and painful effect.

» Read the first chapter of Mr Toppit by downloading the Penguin Taster here

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Luke

And out of the Darkwood Mr Toppit comes, and he comes not for you, or for me, but for all of us.

It had taken Mr Toppit a very long time to arrive, and while the wait was not a problem, the brevity of his appearance clearly was for the small coven of dissenters who felt, frankly, short-changed by the fact that when he did turn up, it was only in the last sentence of what turned out to be the last book of my father’s Hayseed Chronicles. But what I think is that the majority of the Hayseed faithful were secretly rather relieved not to have to face the almost certain anticlimax of a more definitive appearance by Mr Toppit. At any rate, there has never been any shortage of people telling me in numbing detail which side of this particular fence they sit, Mr Toppit-wise. In fact, I firmly believe that, throughout the world, wherever men gather to communicate and converse, from the Kaffeeklatschen of Vienna to the boardrooms of Wall Street to the rock churches of Ethiopia, someone somewhere will be discussing what the last sentence of the last book actually means. Personally, I have no idea.

If I could remember a time before Hayseed, I think it would seem so golden to me that I could only presume I had imagined it. The truth is that there is no Before. Although it was only some years after his death that my father was elected to the sainthood of children’s authors, the sales of the books had always been steady, though modest, and the name of Luke Hayseed not unknown among more progressive parents, who felt their children should not be shielded from the cruelties and uncertainties of life – the very cruelties and uncertainties that were the stock-in-trade of the Hayseed books. But what is undeniable is that I was not, at that time, accosted by complete strangers in restaurants or pinned up against walls during cocktail parties by people telling me how I had ruined their childhood or – much, much worse – how I had been an inspiration to them.

Our mother, Martha Hayman, always maintained that anybody could have known something extraordinary was going to happen. While the efficacy of Martha’s dark powers was never in question, I doubt whether even she could have predicted that Laurie’s spontaneous decision to add the ‘Hayseed Half-hour’ to her radio broadcasts in Modesto, California, would have been the catalyst for what subsequently happened.

But by the time Laurie had graduated from radio to television – still talking about The Hayseed Chronicles – not only the books themselves were all over the place but also a book about the books. By the time Hayseed Karma, originally published by a small press in Modesto whose biggest seller to date had been a guide to the bicycle trails of Stanislaus County, had sat on the New York Times bestseller list for forty-seven weeks, it was clear that it was time for the extant members of the Hayman family to acknowledge that something extraordinary had indeed happened.

I don’t keep a complete set – why would I? I was there at the beginning. I was the beginning – but if you trawl book shops and gift shops and computer shops and duty-free shops and mail-order catalogues, and ads in this magazine or that magazine, and special offers on the back of certain cereal packets, you will find some of the following: the original five paperbacks (of course), the boxed set of the original five paperbacks, the activity book for older readers, the hardback deluxe compendium edition with the coloured (or colourized – the originals were black-and-white) illustrations, the board game (‘A throw of the dice decides which entrance you take into the Darkwood’), the PlayStation Hayseed game (‘Do you dare to be Mr Toppit?’), the Royal Doulton cereal-bowl set, the eggcups, the porcelain figurines of Luke, the DayGlo rucksacks, the pencil boxes, the notepaper, the Christmas cards, the T-shirts with ‘My brother went to the Darkwood and all Mr Toppit allowed him to bring back was this lousy T-shirt’ emblazoned on the back (unauthorized, I suspect – I’ll get the lawyers on to it), the baseball caps and the keyrings.

For me, it is a slow descent into merchandise hell, and whenever I find myself there, I think of Lila, for it was her drawings that had trapped me in it, those simple pen drawings she had done for love. The publishers had paid her a flat fee and, in signing whatever contract they had flashed before her, she had passed the copyright to them. It was a small price to pay to secure her position in the Hayseed Hall of Fame and, though I still find it hard to believe, she appears to feel no resentment even though so much money has been made by everyone other than her. What she feels, as she tells everyone she meets – now mostly television repair men as she’s waiting for her second hip – is simple happiness that she could be ‘a small part of it all’, ein kleiner Teil des Ganzen.

The Hayseed drawings and her life with the Hayman family are all the fuel she needs to keep her warm at night, to get her through the day. Her flat, which my sister Rachel and I called ‘the shrine’, does contain every piece of merchandise, jostling alongside scrapbooks of press clippings and photographs in silver frames. She should break and tear and grind into dust every single one for what the books did to her. Now I can almost forgive her for pinning me down like a fly in aspic, trapping me on the page (on the mug, on the teacup, on the pencil box), dressed in those ridiculous pantaloons, secured almost up to my armpits with the cord from Mr Toppit’s dressing-gown, the gardener’s boots on my feet and a battered straw hat on my head.

She only added those details later – the drawings for the first book were much simpler, before my father had really created the world of the Darkwood. At the beginning, she kept me still on the chair in the kitchen with her legendary child-skills: ‘If you do not stop fidgeting, I shall draw you with only one eye and no hair, and when you wake up in the morning that is what you shall look like.’ I kept still. Her pen scratched, her eyes darted back and forth from the sketchpad to me. From behind me Rachel would shout, ‘Is it my turn next? Is it me now?’

And Lila never let me look. When I leaned over, she cupped her hands over the paper. I only knew the next morning how she had drawn me as I stared at myself in the mirror, touching my eyes, counting my fingers.

After the first book, she needed me less and less. She had created the template and she spun Luke Hayseed off in a direction of her own, taking him away from me (taking me away from me) and creating the likeness of a boy who would stride manfully up the path to the Darkwood. He would always be eager to return to his quest to find Mr Toppit, to flush him out, even though – as Luke knew to his cost – Mr Toppit could be cruel and capricious, and never really did, despite the last sentence of the book, reveal himself, and even though the Darkwood, every leaf and branch and stone of which Mr T inhabited, was a dank, terrifying place.

You wouldn’t have caught me dead doing that.