Barbara Brooks Wallace, author of ‘Peppermints in the Parlor,’ dies

Barbara Brooks Wallace, a children’s author who summoned an aura of Victorian mystique in award-winning novels including “Peppermints in the Parlor,” died Nov. 27 at a hospice center in Arlington, Va. She was 95.

The cause was complications from pneumonia, said her son, Jim Wallace.

For decades, Wallace was a favorite of young readers for the enchanting mix of mystery, adventure and misadventure that she brought to her novels.

“I have a clear recollection of how I felt as a child about many things,” Wallace once told an interviewer, reflecting on her capacity to slip into the skin of a youngster. “Christmas, the terror of waking alone at night, having a friend, and an understanding, I believe, of why I felt as I did.”

She wrote a shelf full of books but was perhaps best known for the mystery series that began with “Peppermints in the Parlor” (1980), set in San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century.

The protagonist, Emily, is a young orphan sent to live with a rich aunt and uncle whose home, Sugar Hill Hall, has been overtaken by evil forces and turned into a Dickensian nursing home. Residents tempted by the titular peppermints are shunted off to the Remembrance Room.

Writing in the Horn Book magazine, a children’s librarian, Ann A. Flowers, described “Peppermints” as “an amusing Gothic romp with a shadowy, gaslit atmosphere, moving briskly and sweeping the reader along with it.” The volume, which became an audiobook recorded by actress Angela Lansbury, received a William Allen White award bestowed by Emporia State University in Kansas for excellence in children’s literature.

Wallace continued her mystery series with “The Twin in the Tavern” (1993), “Cousins in the Castle” (1996), “Sparrows in the Scullery” (1997) and “Ghosts in the Gallery” (2000). “The Twin” and “Sparrows” won Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America.