"Underwater Adventure" by Willard Price

 When I was a kid I loved the Adventure books by Willard Price and this was the first that I read, serialised in Look and Learn magazine. When my son Sam was learning to read I read these books to him every night, starting with the first, Amazon Adventure and progressing through the series as chronologically written: South Sea Adventure (where Hal and Roger Hunt first meet the Polynesian sailor Omo and Captain Ike), Underwater Adventure and Volcano Adventure (where they say goodbye to Omo and Ike) and then onto Whale Adventure, African Adventure (where they are reunited with their father John Hunt), Elephant Adventure, Safari Adventure and Lion Adventure. Somewhere around here, Sam would continue reading after I left off, so I started to miss out on bigger and bigger chunks of the books. They continue with Gorilla Adventure, Diving Adventure and Cannibal Adventure of which I only read the first chapter and he finished it. I never got to Tiger Adventure and Arctic Adventure.

The format is always the same. Big brother Hal and his mischievous younger brother Roger are collecting animals or zoos around the world. They face hardships and perils enough. Somehow they manage to catch animals that more experienced hunters have never snared. There are always opportunities for some wise person to give a mini-lecture on some marvel of the natural world. But, there is also always a villain. The villains are transparently bad but somehow, because the goodies are trusting to the point of absurd naivete, they get away with their wickedness until there is some final cataclysm, usually enhanced by a natural disaster, that enables right to prevail.

It is cracking boys' own adventure stuff. In this story they fight sharks, capture a giant moray eel and an oar fish, and collect a stonefish. They also discover gold in the wreck of a Spanish galleon. Villain Skink tries to kill Hal with a scorpion and Roger with a stonefish. He teams up with other villains in a submarine to steal the treasure salvaged from the wreck. The grand finale involves a typhoon and earthquake.  

It may be formulaic and the attitudes may be outdated but it still works as a story. September 2020; 223 pages