Matt Dickinson, our Guest Editor for January 2013 -
Ah! It is probably just a teeny bit dated by now but (predictably given my later wanderings as a film maker) the Willard Price adventure series ticked all my twelve-year-old boxes for adrenaline, mystery and wild places long before I ever held a compass in my hand. Hal and Roger are the stars of these books, teenagers lucky enough to travel the world as zoologists, and unfortunate enough (hooray from the reader’s point of view!) to rub up against smugglers and voodoo practitioners and murderers and evil-doers every time they step off the beaten track. The wildlife is gratifyingly wild. The peril is so vividly drawn it will have children quivering under their quilts (well I did!).
The books are still going strong and I’m not surprised.
One of Willard Price's adventure books featuring Hal and Roger Hunt. On safari in Africa, the pair find that the bogus Colonel Bigg is hindering their attempts to capture a man-eating tiger. Worse is to come in the shape of an evil witch-doctor, who is determined to kill the boys.
Willard DeMille Price (28 July 1887 – 14 October 1983) was a Canadian-born American natural historian and author of children's fiction.
Price was born in Peterborough, Ontario, and his family subsequently moved to the United States when he was four. He acquired his MA and Litt.D from Columbia University, before going on to edit the journals Survey and World Outlook. He travelled on many expeditions for the National Geographic Society and the American Museum of Natural History, in particular to Japan. He documented his travels in a series of non-fiction books and also used them as inspiration for his Adventure series of novels for young readers, which depict the exploits of teenage zoologists Hal and Roger Hunt.
Shortly before his death, in 1983, Price commented that:
My aim in writing the Adventure series for young people was to lead them to read by making reading exciting and full of adventure. At the same time I want to inspire an interest in wild animals and their behavior. Judging from the letters I have received from boys and girls around the world, I believe I have helped open to them the worlds of books and natural history.
In 2006, the Price family sold the copyrights and related legal rights for the fourteen Adventure series titles, plus the right to use Price's name, to London-based Fleming Literary Management
