Queen Rider combines school and ponies and is perhaps one of the best of the school-and-pony genre, with its spikily difficult teenage anti-heroine, Bonnie, and realistically drawn school.  As far as I know, this is the only pony book he has written.

Queen Rider is not at all a school or pony cures all book - it is doubtful right to the end whether Bonnie will actually decide she is going to become a slightly more conventional member of school society, and the twists and turns of the plot keep taking you by surprise.

The book was first published under the pseudonym A D Langholm, but its more recent reprints have been under the name Alan Davidson.  Alan Davidson is the husband of writer Anne Digby.

Finding the book:  the book is not hard to find in any of its guises, or hugely expensive.

Queen Rider
W H Allen, London, 1979, 120pp.  Cover photo Pictor International.
Magnet, pb, 1980
Methuen Children’s Books, 1980
Straw Hat, Cambridge, 1993, cover art Lorna Cowan, 160 pp.

Bonnie Wyndham is proud of having been thrown out of three schools, and is now
on her first day at Almonside, a school with a proud tradition of sporting excellence,
and which has its own stables.  Bonnie’s mother is desperate for her to succeed at
this school, but Bonnie is even more determined not to.  The riding teacher at
Almonside, Miss Caradon, is unphased by Bonnie’s awful bolshiness, and slowly,
very slowly, Bonnie does come round.

 

Bibliography - pony books only