Something Adventure

I'm not sure why no one I've asked in the last few days has heard of Willard Price. His books formed a major part of my childhood reading - my best friend had them, as did the local library. Even my school library in Delhi had Underwater Adventure. So it seems weird to me that most people never encountered them.
I've been hunting down books from my childhood over the past couple of years, and this month finally decided to get the Willard Price books. And so in the last week or so I've read Amazon Adventure, South Sea Adventure, Volcano Adventure, Safari Adventure, Gorilla Adventure, Diving Adventure, Cannibal Adventure and Arctic Adventure. It's glorious stuff. Some thoughts:

I'm not sure if it ever occurred to me how weird the premise of these books is. In Amazon Adventure, animal collector John Hunt takes his teenaged sons (Hal is 19, Roger is 14) who have little experience in the wild to unexplored parts of the Amazon. When he has to rush back to the USA, he leaves his sons behind to collect animals for him. Said animals include a Boa Constrictor, an Anaconda, and a Jaguar - my father worries when I travel by bus. They also anger some natives (headhunters, obviously) while stealing milk for their pet baby Tapir, and outwit a villain who steals their cargo by attacking him with an electric eel. Of course these successes mean that their father is quite willing to send them off to collect more dangerous animals (thus the rest of the series) .


My first reread this week was South Sea Adventure, the second book in the series. I'd forgotten large portions of the plot, so I winced at the introduction to John Hunt:

He was an animal collector. It was his business to bring them back alive from the ends of the earth, to keep them in his animal farm until called for, then sell them to zoos, menageries, circuses, motion-picture companies - anyone who might have use for any sort of wild creature from an African elephant to a titmouse.

I like to think that most authors writing today would think twice before writing a book about boys who collect animals for their dad to sell to zoos. It didn't occur to Price, and I think that shift is interesting. Of course, there probably are people writing today as well who wouldn't consider this aspect, and I suspect they would annoy me greatly. Price, not so much.

Price is a fascinating character himself. He seems to have travelled extensively, wrote lots of books for grown-ups (none of which I've ever actually seen, but oh well), knew far more about animals than practically anyone, and may or may not have been a spy. He also does seem to genuinely care about the animals he writes about at points - some of the sections on animals caught in poachers' traps in Safari Adventure (which I read ysterday) are gut-wrenching.

The race thing. It's...interesting, and I'll probably write a separate post about it (and about the Chalet School quote I posted a couple of entries below) tomorrow, so I'm not going into it here.

When I was 7 I thought Hal (who is strong, steady, has obscene amounts of knowledge about animals and is 19) far preferable to Roger (who is 14, impulsive, immature, and loves animals). I have changed my mind. When I was 7 I had terrible taste in men.

Also, when I was 7 I apparently thought it perfectly understandable that Hal and Roger should share a house with a man who had tried to kill them in the past because he said he'd reformed. I also found it perfectly sensible that they would hide the fact that he had attempted to kill them from anyone else because it would be unsporting if he had reformed. Unsurprisingly, the man in question...tries to kill them. Ah youth.