Juliet Townsend

Action man and teller of tales

The other day I came on an old exercise book dating from the early 1940s in which my brother, then aged nine, had embarked on one of his many unfinished novels.

The missionary looked out of the window of his little hut deep in the African jungle. ‘The savidges are attacking, Mary,’ he cried. ‘Quick, pass me the Martini Henry rifle and then the elephant gun. I will show them what happens when they attack the servant of the true God!’

Ever the muscular Christian, he then pumps the advancing hordes full of lead, but he and his wife are eventually slaughtered and their baby son taken to be raised by the ‘savidges’, whereupon the influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs abruptly takes over from that of Rider Haggard

It was not only schoolboys who fell under the spell of this extraordinary storyteller. Haggard’s books have been loved by such disparate writers as Graham Greene, C. S. Lewis and Wilbur Smith, who wrote, ‘Rider Haggard was able to weave the magic carpet and I was swept along by it … there are echoes of King Solomon’s Mines in a lot of my own books.’ Yet Haggard fell into his career as a writer of tales of adventure almost by accident, as a result of a shilling bet with his brother, challenging him to write a story ‘half as good as Treasure Island’. King Solomon’s Mines was the result, written in six weeks and widely rejected before being spotted by Andrew Lang and published by Cassell. In his perceptive introduction to Hunter Quatermain’s Story, Peter Haining describes the moment at Cassells when Haggard first met his publisher and was offered the choice of £100 for the whole copyright or 10 per cent royalty on the sales.

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