The Lewis Barnavelt series of adventures was created by John Bellairs, starting with the award-winning 1973 book The House with a Clock in its Walls. Bellairs quickly followed up with two adventures in the series starring Lewis (The Figure in the Shadows; 1975) and his friend Rose Rita Pottinger (The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring; 1976).
The series was dormant during the 1980s as Bellairs focused his books on the escapades of Johnny Dixon but was on the verge of a comeback when Bellairs died in 1991. Author Brad Strickland was commissioned to complete the two book Bellairs had begun prior to his death – The Ghost in the Mirror and The Vengeance of the Witch-finder – as well as construct a novel from Bellairs’ scant notes, which would evolve into The Doom of the Haunted Opera.
In 1998 Dial published The Specter from the Magician's Museum, the first in the Barnavelt series to have been written entirely by Strickland. As of 2008, the 12-book series is still in production with The Sign of the Sinister Sorcerer the most recent title.
When the Barnavelt series was translated into French in 2001, the publisher changed Lewis’s name to Kévin and Rose Rita’s to Emily – "to give the books a more American feel to French readers," according to French illustrator Lalex.
