fifty true stories stranger than fiction

fifty true  stories stranger than fiction is one of the anthologies published by Odhams press in the 1930s

 fifty memoirs from hard as nails Cape Horner's,  gold rush prospectors , foreign legionnaires, soldiers of fortune .bandits, gun runners,  early motorists gangstes and  white hunters  aware as one  author comments "that they have lived  into a softer age"

 

belonging to the genre of ripping yarns  no greater amount of tobacco has ever before been  chewed in  one volume

here is "life as I lived it two fisted " with authors names such as Dare du Bois Philips, ex legionnaire 1384,  or Pousse Cailloux

 

my favourites are:

Thrills On A Windjammer

Lynch Law In The West

Mysteries  In The South Seas

The Man Who Snatched A Throne

Ambush

Dead Men Tell No Tales

Log Of A Hell Ship

The Death Valley  -The Gates Of Hell

 

 illustrated is  the scene from  mysteries in the south sea's   by  captain Ragnar Nyberg  " Captain Nyberg    encounters   the Austrian born " king of the cannibal islands" and his dead companion   locked in  cages during a  period of tabu"

 

 The stories may lack  what we call an  awareness of   in present norms equality and diversity they  and assume contemporary attitudes to race and animal rights

 As a British publication it is course full of Empire memoirs   tales of wild Canada, the South Seas  Africa and the far  East

 Natives from Banayoro to Cork are part of the empire "it was nine years since   the death  of queen Victoria  yet they still talked of the great white queen   and  still do for all i know today" and  happy  under the flag  unless  they drank whiskey or listened to a  German

 but  more of the content is  set   in  the    frontier of California, or  Alaska  where a early motor  car(Haynes marque) can be held up by bandits outside Santa Barbara  " i was in the act of letting out the clutch  when we heard a series of shots"  or  in "dead men tell no tales " one  Klondike prospector recollected  in the company of a native American and canoe he and  his buddy  had commandeered to get to Dawson that on journeys end  fumbling in his jacket  his  buddy Sacramento   "  "empties all six chambers into the Indian's body,  the man was staring at him with  his usual contemptuous  expression when he fired "

 

 

 however each story  often blatantly  violent   is it is should be seen  as historical documents   with   now out of print first hand accounts of earthquakes ,  sailing ships ,attacks on pirates , treasure hunts    lion taming acts   and big game /man hunting  -although modern readers may feel disgusted by the   contemporary belief that" a Rhinoceros is a veritable El  Dorado " or that one safari client a Philadelphia lawyer  can "acquire a very decent bag including besides  his lion, rhinos  buffalo eland , leopard  kooodoo  and other  heads  and skins all of them very good stuff"