The Cave of Time by, the first book in the series Cover artist Paul Granger Language Genre Gamebook Publisher Bantam Books Published 1979–1998 (original series) Media type Print No. Of books 184 (original series) () Choose Your Own Adventure is a series of children's where each story is written from a point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character's actions and the plot's outcome.
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The series was based upon a concept created by and originally published by Constance Cappel's and 's Vermont Crossroads Press as the 'Adventures of You' series, starting with Packard's Sugarcane Island in 1976. Choose Your Own Adventure, as published by, was one of the most popular children's series during the 1980s and 1990s, selling more than 250 million copies between 1979 and 1998. When Bantam, now owned by, allowed the Choose Your Own Adventure trademark to lapse, the series was relaunched by, which now owns the trademark. Chooseco does not reissue titles by Packard, who has started his own imprint, U-Ventures. Contents • • • • • Format [ ] Originally created for 7- to 14-year-olds, the books are written in the second person.
The protagonist—that is, the reader—takes on a role relevant to the adventure; for example, private investigator, mountain climber, race car driver, doctor, or spy. Stories are generally gender and race neutral, though in some cases, particularly in illustrations, presumption of a male reader (the target demographic group) do appear. In some stories, the protagonist is implied to be a child, whereas in other stories, they are an adult.
The stories are formatted so that, after a couple of pages of reading, the protagonist faces two or three options, each of which leads to more options, and then to one of many endings. The number of endings is not set, and varies from as many as 44 in the early titles, to as few as 8 in later adventures.
Likewise, there is no clear pattern among the various titles regarding the number of pages per ending, the ratio of good to bad endings, or the reader's progression backwards and forwards through the pages of the book. This allows for a realistic sense of unpredictability, and leads to the possibility of repeat readings, which is one of the distinguishing features of the books. As the series progressed, both Packard and Montgomery experimented with the gamebook format, sometimes introducing unexpected twists such as endless page loops or trick endings. Examples include the 'paradise planet' ending in Inside UFO 54-40, which can only be reached by cheating or turning to the wrong page by accident, and the potentially endless storyline in Race Forever. History [ ] According to Packard, the core idea for the series emerged from bedtime stories that he told to his daughters, revolving around a character named Pete and his adventures.
Packard stated, 'I had a character named Pete and I usually had him encountering all these different adventures on an isolated island. But that night I was running out of things for Pete to do, so I just asked what they would do.' His two daughters came up with different paths for the story to take and Packard thought up an ending for each of the paths. 'What really struck me was the natural enthusiasm they had for the idea.
And I thought: 'Could I write this down?' ' Packard soon developed this basic premise into a manuscript titled The Adventures of You on Sugar Cane Island. He set out in 1970 to find a publisher but was rejected by nine publishing companies, causing him to shelve the idea. In 1975, he was able to convince Ray Montgomery, co-owner of Vermont Crossroads Press, to publish the book and it sold 8,000 copies, a large amount for a small local publishing house. The series was later marketed to, where it also sold well, but Montgomery believed that it would sell better if a bigger publisher could be found. After some discussion, Montgomery was able to make a contract for the series with. Packard and Montgomery were selected to write books for the series, including the contracting out of titles to additional authors.
The series was highly successful after it began printing with Bantam Books. It prompted the creation of three other series by authors with Bantam Books that worked with the same format. Nineteen other series of the same format began being published by rival publishing houses. The large popularity of the concept led to the titling of a new genre of writing for the format, which was called.
[ ] See also [ ].
What follows is a list of two hundred of my favorite adventure novels published before the Eighties (1984–93). They’re organized not qualitatively — that would be impossible — but chronologically. I’ve also listed another two hundred fifty second-tier favorite adventures, which you can peruse via the following posts: (1805–1903)| (1904–13)| (1914–23)| (1924–33)| (1934–43)| (1944–53)| (1954–63)| (1964–73)| (1974–83). Here’s a list of the; and the; and also (in progress) the.
Also, please check out these additional lists.. THE OUGHTS (1904–13):||| 1908|||| 1913. THE TEENS (1914–23):||| 1918|||| 1923. THE TWENTIES (1924–33):||| 1928|||| 1933. THE THIRTIES (1934–43):||| 1938|||| 1943.
THE FORTIES (1944–53):||| 1948|||| 1953. THE FIFTIES (1954–63):||| 1958|||| 1963. THE SIXTIES (1964–73):|||| 1968|||| 1973. THE SEVENTIES (1974–83):||| 1978|||| 1983. The goal, eventually, is to publish a Top 10 Adventures list for every year of the 20th century.
Finally, I’ve broken out the overall list of four hundred fifty top adventures into the following sub-genre lists:||||||||||. And please let me know what I’ve overlooked. NOTE: This page received 50,000 unique visitors in 2014. That’s a lot of adventure fans! UPDATE: As of February 2017, this page has been viewed over 175,000 times.
*** Why does my Top Adventures List project stop in 1983? I figure that adventure fans already know which adventure novels from the Eighties, Nineties, and Twenty-Oughts are worth reading; so I’m interested in directing attention to older, sometimes obscure or forgotten adventures. Also, I have friends who’ve published adventures since 1983 — and I don’t want these lists to be biased! In chronological order: • 1814. Walter Scott’s 18th c. Frontier adventure Waverley. The novel — which sends a young Englishman adventuring in the highlands of Scotland, during the Jacobite uprising which sought to put Bonnie Prince Charlie on the British throne — is regarded as the first historical novel.
Note that Scotland, that savage tribal land just across the border from hyper-civilized England, was the original adventure frontier. Mary Shelley’s Gothic science fiction adventure Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.
From multiple points of view, we read about a brilliant scientist and his creation: a dehumanized creature who longs for love and friendship and, eventually, revenge. PS: There are two editions of the book; the 1831 “popular” edition was heavily revised and tends to be the one most widely read; scholars tend to prefer the 1818. Walter Scott’s 12th c. Knightly adventure Ivanhoe, the protagonist of which makes his first appearance at a tourney in disguise, known only as The Disinherited Knight. (Also at that tourney is a mysterious archer named Locksley.
Who can it be?) This popular book was single-handedly responsible for the medievalist craze in early 19th-century England. James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier adventure The Last of the Mohicans. Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales were popular and influential (esp.
In France!), and therefore deserve a mention here — despite the fact that. Despite its flaws — there are many! — this novel features an epic pursuit, and for that alone it deserves a place on this list. Charles Dickens’s crime adventure Oliver Twist. A great adventure, and the Artful Dodger is such a memorable character. ’s Gothic sea adventure The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Poe’s only complete novel — about a teenager who stows away on a ship, is kidnapped by mutineers and pirates, encounters cannibals, and explores the Antarctic before discovering the key to all Western mystical traditions — has been described as “at once a mock nonfictional exploration narrative, adventure saga, bildungsroman, hoax, largely plagiarized travelogue, and spiritual allegory.” • 1844.
Alexandre Dumas’s 17th c. Swashbuckling adventure The Three Musketeers introduces us to three unforgettable characters: the distinguished, highly educated Musketeer Athos; the religious and scholarly yet womanizing younger Musketeer Aramis; and the Falstaffian Musketeer Porthos.
It is their sanguine companion D’Artagnan who coins the classic phrase “All for one, and one for all!” • 1844–45. Alexandre Dumas’s avenger-type adventure The Count of Monte Cristo. It’s all here: a wronged man seeking revenge, a jailbreak, poisonings, smugglers, a sex slave (spoiler: she’s freed), and a treasure cave. Serialized in 117 installments, it’s on the long side; still, according to Luc Sante, this story is today as “immediately identifiable as Mickey Mouse, Noah’s flood, and the story of Little Red Riding Hood.” • 1847. James Fenimore Cooper’s sea-going adventure The Crater. Fun fact: Adventure aficionados consider this one much superior to his Leatherstocking tales!
’s sea-going adventure Moby-Dick is, we all know, much more than it appears to be on the surface. It is an allegory of (maybe) man’s gnostic rage against the occluded world in which he lives, separated from real reality. Perhaps more than you want to know about how whaling works, but one of the all-time great yarns. Lewis Carroll’s fantasy adventure Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. ’s detective adventure The Moonstone. Generally considered the first English-language detective novel. Jules Verne’s science-fiction adventure Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea introduces us to Captain Nemo, a scientific genius who roams the depths of the sea in his submarine — in quest of treasure, knowledge, and revenge.
NB: The book inspired Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Le Beateau Ivre.” • 1874. Jules Verne’s science-fiction Robinsonade The Mysterious Island. An engineer, a sailor, a young boy, a journalist, and an African American butler escape a Civil War prison in a hot air balloon and crash land on a Lost-type island in the South Pacific. Who is observing them, helping them? Marred by didactic lessons of all sorts. Jules Verne’s espionage adventure Michael Strogoff, considered one of Verne’s best books.
When the Tartar Khan incites a rebellion and separates the Russian Far East from the mainland, Michael Strogoff, courier for Tsar Alexander II, is sent to Irkutsk on a crucial mission. Robert Louis Stevenson’s 18th c. Treasure-hunt adventure Treasure Island, which led to the popular perception of pirates as we know them today: e.g., peg-legged, one-eyed.
Note that the castaway character Ben Gunn is a parody of Daniel Defoe’s character Robinson Crusoe! Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — note that Twain, who scorned Walter Scott-type romances, uses the term “adventure” sardonically. He was poking holes in the prevailing sentimental and Romantic ethos of the literary establishment. Still, Twain’s novel is a fun romp through the American South in its grotesquerie, and it offers authentic thrills along the way.
Rider Haggard’s frontier adventure King Solomon’s Mines, which set a new standard for thrills — thanks to the author’s illiberal belief that denizens of England are so coddled that they’ve forgotten their own savage nature. The first novel written in English that was based on the African continent, and the first “Lost World” adventure. NB: Haggard would write 18 books featuring Allan Quatermain, the hero of King Solomon’s Mines. Robert Louis Stevenson’s 18th c. Avenger-type adventure Kidnapped, in which young David Balfour is sold into servitude by his wicked uncle.
With the help of Alan Breck, a daring Jacobite, David escapes and travels across Scotland by night — hiding from government soldiers by day. Rider Haggard’s treasure hunt/occult adventure She. Weird fun, particularly if you like reincarnation stuff. Spoiler: In a later novel, She and Quatermain will cross paths! Rudyard Kipling’s Haggard-esque frontier adventure The Man Who Would Be King. Two British adventurers become kings of a remote part of Afghanistan, because — it turns out — the Kafirs there practice a form of Masonic ritual and the adventurers know Masonic secrets.
’s knightly adventure The White Company. Perhaps more of an ironic homage to than a sardonic inversion of the genre. Actually one of his best adventures!
Rider Haggard’s Viking adventure Eric Brighteyes. Considered one of his best books. Anthony Hope’s swashbuckling adventure The Prisoner of Zenda, which takes place in the fictional central European country of Ruritania, and which concerns a political decoy restoring the rightful king to the throne, was so influential that its genre is now called Ruritanian. Perhaps the first political thriller.
Wells’s science fiction adventure The Island of Doctor Moreau. Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked man, is left on the island home of Doctor Moreau, who creates human-like beings from animals. After Moreau is killed, the Beast Folk begin to revert to their original animal instincts. Bram Stoker’s supernatural horror adventure Dracula, whose readers know what kind of monster the protagonists seek before they do. Described by Neil Gaiman as a “Victorian high-tech thriller,” the book’s use of cutting-edge technology — and true-crime story telling, from newspaper clippings to phonograph-recorded notes — creates an eerily realistic vibe. ’s ’pataphysical adventure Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll, Pataphysicien. Faustroll and his monkey butler travel around Paris — on a mythical register — in a high-tech boat/vehicle.
Published posthumously, in 1911. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the protagonist of which is sent up a river in Africa to seek the European manager of a remote ivory station who has turned into a charismatic monster, is a sardonic inversion of yarns by adventure authors who didn’t give much thought to the colonialist and racist context within which their civilization- vs.-savagery narratives played out. The horror!” • 1900–01. Rudyard Kipling’s espionage adventure Kim, in which an Irish orphan in India not only becomes the disciple of a Tibetan lama, but is recruited by the British secret service to spy on Russian agents participating in the Great Game.
In the process, he races across India; Kipling — an imperialist, but a keen observer of India all the same — brilliantly captures the essence of that country under the British Raj. ’s detective mystery adventure The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Mystery adventures don’t have a large place on these lists of mine because although they’re fun exercises in ratiocination and puzzle-solving, they’re often not particularly thrilling. Conan Doyle, however, is a great adventure writer. And this novel is not your typical Sherlock Holmes story; it is jam-packed with thrills and chills. ’s espionage adventure The Riddle of the Sands can be a demanding read for those with no interest in sailing or timetables. But it’s a thrilling yarn nevertheless, one which sought to alert British readers to the danger of German invasion. Its protagonists are archetypes of the amateur adventure hero, the likes of whom would later appear so memorably in the novels of John Buchan. ’s Klondike adventure The Call of the Wild, which expresses the author’s notion that because the veneer of civilization is fragile, humans revert to a state of primitivism with ease.
PS: Note that London’s White Fang shows the flipside of this trajectory. ’s sea-going adventure The Sea Wolf. A clash of opposing philosophies, one of which — quasi-Nietzschean; more accurately Social Darwinist — is embodied by Wolf Larsen, a brutal yet enigmatic sea captain.
’s Radium Age science fiction adventure The Napoleon of Notting Hill, in which battles rage between neighboring boroughs of London. Joseph Conrad’s treasure-hunt (sort of) adventure Nostromo. An ambitious longshoreman thwarts a worker revolution in a South American mining town and attempts to enrich himself in the process. Baroness Emma Orczy’s historical (18th c.) adventure The Scarlet Pimpernel is set during France’s post-Revolution Terror.
Sir Percy Blakeney, the effete aristocrat who is secretly the daring Scarlet Pimpernel (or vice-versa), would inspire characters such as Zorro and Batman. “Is he in heaven, or is he in hell, that damned elusive Pimpernel?” • 1905. Rudyard Kipling’s Radium Age science fiction adventure With the Night Mail follows the exploits of an intercontinental mail dirigible battling a storm. Also, we learn that a planet-wide Aerial Board of Control (A.B.C.) now enforces a technocratic system of command and control in world affairs.
Frank Baum’s Oz fantasy adventure Ozma of Oz. My favorite Oz book — in which Dorothy Gale and a talking hen (Billina) wash up in the Land of Ev, where they encounter proto-steampunk Wheelers, the wicked Nome King, and Baum’s greatest character, Tik-Tok the mechanical man. ’s fantasy adventure The Man Who Was Thursday.
Subtitled A Nightmare, the book follows a Scotland Yard man as he infiltrates the local chapter of the European anarchist council only to discover that it has been interpenetrated entirely by detectives. Free-flowing, lyrical, trippy stuff. Kenneth Grahame’s children’s book The Wind in the Willows. Not an adventure in every particular, but Toad’s wild ride and prison break are amazing, as is the battle to reclaim Toad Hall from the weasels, stoats, and ferrets who’ve invaded from the Wild Wood. ’s comic adventure Mike, in which readers first meet the monocled, dandyish adventurer and idler Psmith (the “p” is silent, as in pshrimp). Here, he is a schoolboy who — having recently been expelled from Eton — helps the titular protagonist succeed in various boarding-school capers and escapades. ’s frontier adventure Prester John.
A young Scotsman seeking his fortune in South Africa runs afoul of Laputa, leader of a planned rising of the Zulu and Swazi peoples against British colonial rule. The first great yarn from my favorite adventure writer with the caveat that, as with most fiction of the time, it’s quite racist. Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s crime adventure Fantômas, concerning the adventures of a sadistic sociopath — the original charismatic serial killer. Inspired a generation of French highbrow litterateurs to incorporate adventure themes into their work. ’s atavistic adventure Tarzan of the Apes, serialized in All-Story Magazine. John Clayton, whose parents are marooned and killed in a jungle of equatorial Africa, is raised by apes — and becomes their king. Published in book form in 1914.
Burroughs would write 24 subsequent Tarzan adventures. ’s Radium Age science fiction adventure The Lost World. The brilliant Prof. Challenger and companions journey to a South American jungle, where they discover a plateau crawling with prehistoric monsters.
The first popular dinosaurs-still-live tale! Zane Grey’s Western adventure Riders of the Purple Sage. I’m not a huge fan of this particular adventure sub-genre, but if you’re going to read one Western, this is it. Set in southern Utah in 1871, its complex plot involves polygamous Mormons, a notorious gunman searching for his long-lost sister, and a mysterious masked rider. ’s Radium Age science fiction adventure A Princess of Mars. Inspired by the Mars-is-dying speculations of astronomer Percival Lowell (and perhaps by Edwin Lester Arnold’s 1905 Lieut. Gullivar Jones), this is a truly epic “planetary romance.” • 1912.
’s Radium Age science fiction adventure The Scarlet Plague. A former UC Berkeley professor recounts the chilling sequence of events — a gruesome pandemic (in 2013!) — which led to his current lowly state. Modern civilization has fallen, and a new race of barbarians, descended from the world’s brutalized workers, has assumed power. Rider Haggard’s Marie, first installment in Haggard’s excellent Zulu/Quatermain trilogy, in which his hero Allan Quatermain becomes ensnared in the vengeance of Zikali, a Zulu wizard known as “The-thing-that-should-never-have-been-born.” A prequel to King Solomon’s Mines, et al. This was a great era for prequels. ’s Radium Age science fiction adventure The Night Land is set on a frozen future Earth whose human inhabitants live in an underground redoubt surrounded by Watching Things, Ab-humans, and other monstrous invaders from another dimension. Praised by everyone from H.P.
Lovecraft to China Miéville but little-read now. Sax Rohmer’s espionage/science fiction adventure The Mystery of Dr. The first novel, assembled from earlier stories, about the insidious and brilliant Fu Manchu, who would inspire racist depictions of SF’s Asian villains from Ming the Merciless to Dr. Earl Derr Biggers’s crime adventure Seven Keys to Baldpate. The best-known work by the author of the 1920s Charlie Chan adventures. A group of strangers meet at a mountaintop inn and trouble follows.
Marie Belloc Lowndes’s psychological thriller The Lodger. Is the lodger whose rent keeps Ellen and Robert Bunting’s family from the poorhouse actually a Jack the Ripper-esque serial killer? ’s Radium Age science fiction adventure At the Earth’s Core. A mining engineer discovers — thanks to his “iron mole” machine, that the Earth is hollow; at its center is Pellucidar, a land (lit by a miniature Sun) in which stone-age humans are dominated by intelligent flying reptiles and in which prehistoric creatures roam freely.
Lovecraft was a fan; check out his 1931 adventure At the Mountains of Madness. ’s Les caves du Vatican (in English: Lafcadio’s Adventures, or The Vatican Cellars) is best described as an ironic homage to the adventure novel. Its protagonist, Lafcadio, a would-be Nietzschean superman who reads only adventures like Aladdin and Robinson Crusoe, stumbles upon a plot involving the Pope. ’s Sherlock Holmes adventure The Valley of Fear.
I try to avoid mysteries on these lists, because in most cases they’re not adventures, but the fourth and final Sherlock Holmes novel fits the bill. A coded message, Professor Moriarty, and a backstory based on the supposedly real-life exploits of the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania! ’s Richard Hannay adventure The Thirty-Nine Steps. The best hunted-man thriller (or “shocker,” to use the author’s term) ever, at least until Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male.
When mining engineer Richard Hannay discovers the existence of a ring of German spies who have stolen British plans for the outbreak of war, he is framed for murder. Fleeing to Scotland, he must elude not only spies but the police.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian Radium Age science fiction novel Herland. A utopian novel describing an all-female society (with reproduction by parthenogenesis) in which women’s essential quality of nurturing creates a peaceful and rationally ordered world. Mostly exposition, but there are one or two chase scenes — in which the women capture the rogue males. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s YA adventure The Lost Prince.
The author of the sentimental children’s classics Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden also wrote one of the best Ruritanian-type yarns ever. Young Marco Loristan and his crippled urchin friend “The Rat” are entrusted with a secret mission: traveling across Europe with a message for exiled Samavian revolutionaries. Rafael Sabatini’s sea-going historical adventure The Sea Hawk is set in the late 16th century. Sold into slavery by his fiancée’s villainous brother, Cornish gentleman Oliver Tressilian is liberated by Barbary pirates — i.e., Muslim corsairs — among whom he makes a name for himself as Sakr-el-Bahr, the Hawk of the Sea.
Tressilian then returns to England for revenge. NB: The Errol Flynn movie was supposed to be an adaption of this novel but it’s quite different. ’s Richard Hannay adventure Greenmantle is set during WWI. Continuing his undercover work against the Germans and their allies the Turks, Hannay investigates rumors of an uprising in the Muslim world — cf. His 1910 adventure Prester John. Here we meet for the first time Hannay’s great characters Sandy Arbuthnot (master of disguise), Peter Pienaar (South African hunter), and John Blenkiron (dyspeptic, anti-fascist American industrialist). Chases, clues, and battles galore.
James Branch Cabell’s comical fantasy adventure Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice. In search of courtly love, the protagonist — a poet, who is allowed to relive a year of his youth — journeys through fantastic realms. The novel’s sexual content caused a storm of controversy. Aleister Crowley was a fan, and Robert Heinlein patterned Stranger in a Strange Land after it. ’s Richard Hannay adventure Mr. Near the end of WWI, Hannay is recalled from active duty on the Western Front to go undercover — as a pacifist! — in search of a German agent at large in Britain.
John Blenkiron and Peter Pienaar (now an ace pilot) reappear; and we meet their beautiful, brave comrade Mary Lamington. Max Brand’s (Frederick Faust) Western adventure The Untamed relates the story of archetypal western hero Whistling Dan Barry’s evolution from innocence to experience. Considered a classic in the genre, the book is Max Brand’s first important Western.
The author eventually wrote more than 500 novels, usually at a breakneck pace. Rider Haggard’s Radium Age science fiction adventure When the World Shook. When adventurers Bastin, Bickley, and Arbuthnot are marooned on a South Sea island, they discover two Atlanteans in a state of suspended animation. One of the awakened sleepers, Lord Oro, is a superman. The other is Oro’s sexy daughter, Yva. Using astral projection, Lord Oro determines whether or not he should once again employ an infernal chthonic machine to drown the worthless human race! (.) • 1920/1921.
’s Radium Age science fiction play R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots expressed the Czech litterateur’s fear of social disaster and the unlimited power of corporations — and gave the world the term “robot,” which the author’s brother, Joseph, coined (from the Czech for “corvée labor”) to describe manufactured, exploited humanoids. ’s WWI adventure Three Soldiers, in which an Italian American, an Indiana farm boy, and a Harvard graduate become disillusioned in different ways. According to H.L. Mencken: “At one blast it disposed of oceans of romance and blather.
It changed the whole tone of American opinion about the war; it even changed the recollections of actual veterans of the war.” Very un-romantic, but a terrific read. Ben Hecht’s comical adventure Erik Dorn. Before he became the Hollywood screenwriter famous for Scarface, The Front Page, Some Like it Hot, and His Girl Friday, Hecht wrote a popular novel in which a cynical journalist abandons his wife (and mistress) for the excitement of revolutionary Europe!
Call it an ironic homage to the genre. ’s Radium Age science fiction adventure We. Circulated in samizdat for years — in which form it influenced George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four — this dystopian novel extrapolates from the rhetoric of communists who advocated extending Taylorism, Fordism, and other (capitalist) scientific-management techniques beyond the factory into all spheres of life.
It’s set in a totalized social order whose citizens eat, sleep, work, and even make love like clockwork. ’s Radium Age science fiction adventure Theodore Savage. When war breaks out in Europe, British civilization collapses overnight. The ironically named protagonist must learn to survive by his wits in a new Britain one where science and technology swiftly come to be regarded with superstitious awe and terror. (.) • 1922/1926. ’s posthumously published Das Schloss ( The Castle).
The protagonist, K., struggles for unknown reasons to gain access to the mysterious authorities of a castle who govern the village. Sardonic inversion of an adventure — the protagonist can’t get started. Brian Aldiss writes, of Kafka’s oeuvre: “the baffling atmosphere, the paranoid complexities, the alien motives of others, make the novels a sort of haute sf.” • 1922. ’s adventure Huntingtower, published between the third and fourth Richard Hannay novels, is the first of several adventures featuring one of the most unlikely heroes ever, retired Scottish grocer Dickson McCunn. When an exiled Russian noblewoman is imprisoned — in a Scottish tower — by Bolshevik agents, McCunn and unsuccessful poet John Heritage, aided by a troupe of Glasgow slum children, ride to her rescue. ’s Radium Age science fiction adventure The Absolute at Large describes how a near-future Greatest War (during which worldwide civilization collapses) is sparked by the manufacture of an atomic reactor whose unintended byproduct is the spiritual essence that permeates every particle of matter: i.e., God. An absurdist tour-de-force.
Odle’s Radium Age science fiction adventure The Clockwork Man. Years from now, advanced beings will implant devices into our heads. At the cost of a certain amount of agency, this technology will permit us to move unhindered through time and space, and to live perfectly regulated lives (hello, Singularity). However, if one of these devices should ever go awry, a being from the future might turn up in the 1920s. Johnston McCulley’s historical swashbuckling adventure The Mark of Zorro.
The first novella featuring Don Diego de la Vega, a Californio nobleman who, wearing a black mask, defends the people of the land against tyrannical officials. Batman and The Lone Ranger were inspired in part by Zorro, and McCulley’s other pulp inventions were influential too. Wren’s French Foreign Legion adventure Beau Geste, in which three brothers, each of whom is convinced that he is saving the other two from prison (a precious jewel has gone missing) by doing so — flee Britain and join the Foreign Legion. In French North Africa, a sadistic officer attempts to discover which of them (if any) possesses the jewel; meanwhile, bloodthirsty Tuaregs besiege their little garrison at Fort Zinderneuf. ’s Richard Hannay adventure The Three Hostages. In his fourth outing, Hannay must rescue the kidnapped children of three prominent people. Also, it seems that a sinister criminal organization is tapping into the psychic disorder caused by the Great War!
Hannay’s wife, Mary, and his comrade Sandy Arbuthnot, master of disguise, join him in his quest. Richard Connell’s adventure story “The Most Dangerous Game.” One of the greatest examples of the hunted-man sub-genre. It’s so iconic that I’m breaking the rule against including stories (as opposed to novels) on these lists of mine. Collected in the definitive 1945 collection The Pocket Book of Adventure Stories, ed. Philip Van Doren Stern.
Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan mystery/detective adventure The House Without a Key. The first in a series of six novels. The character of Charlie Chan was in part designed to counteract the British adventure’s tradition of the sinister, untrustworthy Oriental. Muriel Jaeger’s Radium Age science fiction adventure The Man with Six Senses. When Hilda, a beautiful young member of England’s cynical postwar generation, meets Michael, a hapless mutant capable of perceiving the ever-shifting patterns of electromagnetic fields, she becomes his apostle.
Leslie Charteris’s light-hearted mystery/crime adventure Meet the Tiger. Here, for the first time, we meet the wealthy adventurer Simon Templar (known as The Saint), his manservant ’Orace, and young socialite Patricia Holm. Templar, a thief who steals from thieves, aims to settle an old score with a mysterious individual known as “The Tiger.” • 1928. Somerset Maugham’s espionage adventure story collection Ashenden. Partly based on the author’s WWI experience as a member of British Intelligence in Europe. Again breaking my rule against including stories — as opposed to novels — on these lists. ’s hardboiled WWI adventure A Farewell to Arms.
“I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it” The section on the Caporetto retreat is one of the greatest fictional depictions of warfare. Erich Kästner’s YA adventure Emil and the Detectives. En route to Berlin from the provinces, schoolboy Emil Tischbein is robbed of his mother’s salary, which he was bringing to his grandmother. Emil’s cousin, a tomboy named Pony, helps him gather a posse of Berlin street urchins; together they set a trap for the thief.
’s Radium Age science fiction adventure Gladiator, in which a young man who is nearly invulnerable and can leap trees fights in WWI — as a member of the Foreign Legion. Later, he plans to adopt a secret identity in order to fight crime in New York. A major influence on Siegel and Shuster’s 1938 Superman comic. Arthur Ransome’s YA adventure novel Swallows and Amazons.
During holidays in northwestern England, the Walker siblings and tomboys Nancy and Peggy Blackett roam around in sailboats. Their imaginative, grownup-free adventures are influenced by their mutual love of Treasure Island. Which is to say, Ransome was writing meta-fictional adventure. ’s hardboiled crime/treasure-hunt adventure The Maltese Falcon.
Grittily realistic, morally ambiguous; considered by aficionados to be the standard by which all subsequent American mysteries must be judged. The only novel featuring the character Sam Spade. ’s bande dessinée adventure Tintin in America serialized. Sent to Chicago, young reporter-adventurer Tintin and his dog Snowy tackle Al Capone’s mob, pursue another gangster across the country, encounter a tribe of Blackfoot Indians (who get exploited), and also evade a lynch mob and a wildfire! Published as a color album in 1945. ’s Radium Age science fiction adventure At the Mountains of Madness.
A team of explorers from Miskatonic U. Arrive in Antarctica where they discover the frozen bodies of ancient monsters. They accidentally thaw one out. Plus, an abandoned city whose technologies reveal the true origins of intelligent life on Earth.
Spoiler: It was ancient astronauts. Aldous Huxley’s Radium Age science fiction adventure Brave New World. In the year 632 A.F.
(After Ford), extra-uterine babies are the norm and conspicuous consumption is the law. Everyone is content until a Shakespeare-quoting Savage questions whether all this progress is worth it. The one sf novel that everyone knows — and one whose predictions (unlike those of Nineteen Eighty-Four) are uncannily accurate. ’s bande dessinée Tintin adventure Cigars of the Pharaoh serialized. In Egypt, Tintin and Snowy discover a tomb crowded with mummified Egyptologists and stashes of opium-filled cigars.
They then pursue the Kih-Oskh drug smuggling cartel, whose members wear hoods and robes adorned with a sinister symbol — across the Arabian Peninsula and through India. Published as a color album in 1955. Edwin Balmer and ’s Radium Age science fiction adventure When Worlds Collide. Scientists rescue a group of men and women, and bear witness to the collapse of civilization, just before the Earth is destroyed. Guy Endore’s horror/historical adventure The Werewolf of Paris. In a city besieged by the Prussian Army, a young man — who might or might not be a werewolf — begins to feed upon the blood of his willing, perverted lover. James Hilton’s adventure Lost Horizon.
A kidnapped Englishman who is temperamentally — thanks to his WWI experience — a philosophical ironist (but not a cynic!) discovers, in a remote Tibetan valley, a quasi-monastic community for whom philosophical irony has been elevated to a noble Weltanschauung. James Hilton’s Buchan-esque espionage adventure Knight Without Armour. A British secret agent in Russia rescues the daughter of a Tsarist minister from Bolshevik revolutionaries. Adapted into a fun 1937 movie starring Robert Donat and Marlene Dietrich. ’s hardboiled crime adventure The Postman Always Rings Twice, in which a drifter conspires with his lover to kill her husband, the owner of a roadside sandwich stand.
The author’s first and most enduring book. ’s hardboiled adventure comic Terry and the Pirates. Terry and his tutor, Pat Ryan, arrive in China seeking a lost gold mine. Accompanied by their interpreter Connie, the two get into one scrape — complicated by a beautiful woman, including spoiled Normandie Drake, the thief Burma, and the bandit queen Dragon Lady — after another.
’s atavistic fantasy adventure Conan the Conqueror (aka The Hour of the Dragon), serialized in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, is the author’s only full-length novel about the Cimmerian who evolves from a barbarian to a mercenary and thief to conquering king. Published in book form (Gnome Press) in 1950. ’s science fiction adventure Odd John. Led by the titular teenage mutant “supernormal,” a group of evolved misfits form an island colony, where they experiment with telepathic communication and “individualistic communism.” Don’t kid yourself they belong to you / They’re the start of a coming race!
’s Richard Hannay novel The Island of Sheep, in which Hannay and his old comrade Sandy Arbuthnot — plus Hannay’s teenage son — must protect the heir to the secret of a great treasure from a sinister conspiracy. The action takes place in Scotland and the Faroe Islands.
The modern Scottish tradition of adventure romances draws to a close. ’s Tintin adventure The Black Island. Wait, here’s one more adventure romance set in Scotland! I’ve long suspected that The Black Island — in which Tintin escapes from an evil German doctor who runs a mental institution, then busts up a forgery racket in an abandoned castle on an island off the coast of Kiltoch (Scotland), is an homage to Buchan. Published as a color album in 1943. ’s fantasy adventure The Hobbit, in which stay-at-home halfling Bilbo Baggins is persuaded by the wizard Gandalf to travel across Middle Earth and burgle the dragon Smaug’s treasure hoard.
Along the way he and his dwarven companions encounter elves and trolls, goblins and wargs, talking spiders, and the twisted creature Gollum. Marquand’s Mr.
Moto espionage adventure Think Fast, Mr. Moto, by the Pulitzer-winning author of The Late George Apley. Sent from Boston to close down a Hawaiian casino run by a distant relation, who turns out to be a beautiful woman, hapless Wilson Hitchings stumbles upon a Manchurian money-laundering scheme.
Japanese super-spy Mr. Moto to the rescue! ’s fantasy adventure The Sword in the Stone. It may have been adapted into a Disney movie, but it’s not for kids. Merlin is weird and wise; Maid Marian is a leather-clad bad-ass; Colonel Cully (a hawk) is insane; King Pellinore is a bumbling fellow who can’t give up his search for the “Questin’ Beast.” From these and other marvelous characters, the Wart learns to be a great king. Eric Ambler’s espionage adventure Epitaph for a Spy, the simple declarative style of which — “I arrived in St. Gatien from Nice on Tuesday, the 14th of August.
I was arrested at 11:45 a.m. On Thursday, the 16th, by an agent de police and an inspector in plain clothes and taken to the Commissariat.” — signaled the genre’s break with cloak-and-dagger melodrama.
A teacher on vacation is coerced into assisting with a counter-espionage operation. ’s hardboiled crime adventure The Big Sleep, in which we first meet wisecracking PI Philip Marlowe. This complex, amusing, thrilling story — whose characters double-cross one another at every turn — is one of the best novels of the century. Plus, Howard Hawks’s is terrific. Eric Ambler’s espionage/crime adventure The Mask of Dimitrios; US title: A Coffin for Dimitrios.
On vacation in pre-WWII Turkey, crime novelist Charles Latimer begins researching a master criminal and spy who has recently died. As he enters his subject’s criminal underworld, Latimer realizes that his own life may be in jeopardy. Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, the most exciting hunted-man adventure since Buchan’s Thirty Nine Steps, is one of my favorite novels. A big-game hunter stalks a European dictator (presumably Hitler), gets caught then escapes back to England.
Thanks to top-notch fieldcraft, he eludes his pursuers by going to ground like an animal. Michael Innes’s espionage adventure The Secret Vanguard, a sardonic inversion of John Buchan-style stories, complete with German spies, a chase through Oxford’s Bodleian Library, and a heroine on the run (in Scotland, of course). This might be a controversial pick, on my part, because many Innes fans dislike it. But it was a turning point in the author’s career, a transition from whodunnits to thrillers; and it was a key influence on Graham Greene. Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp’s fantasy adventure Land of Unreason. An American diplomat is wounded during a WWII air raid in England; while recuperating in Yorkshire, he is transported to the land of Faerie.
There, he is recruited by Titania and Oberon, who send him on a secret mission to the totalitarian Kobold Hills (i.e., Germany). Bengtsson’s atavistic adventure The Long Ships (or Red Orm; original Swedish: Röde Orm), which is perhaps the definitive Viking novel. Set in the 10th century, the tale follows the adventures of Red Orm and traces Scandinavia’s transformation from a pagan to a Christian civilization. Reissued by the New York Review of Books! Helen MacInnes’s espionage adventure Above Suspicion.
A British spy working covertly in Germany is missing, so a young British couple are asked to turn their summer vacation into an undercover mission. Considered exemplary because of the author’s nuanced understanding of history, politics, culture, and geography, this is MacInnes’s first novel.
Agatha Christie’s espionage adventure N or M?, which features a hunt for two of Hitler’s top secret spy agents in Britain. Fun fact: MI5 investigated Agatha Christie because a character called Major Bletchley appeared in her N or M?
MI5 was afraid that Christie had learned of Britain’s top-secret codebreaking center, Bletchley Park. Helen MacInnes’s WWII adventure Assignment in Brittany. In this story about a Francophone British soldier sent to spy as part of the resistance to the Nazi occupation of northern France — because he looks just like an injured Breton soldier — MacInnes strikes a dynamic balance between Buchan-style romance and Ambler’s hardboiled style.
PS: The book was required reading for Allied intelligence agents sent to work with the French underground. Graham Greene’s espionage adventure The Ministry of Fear, which Fritz Lang adapted for the screen in 1944. At a charity fête held in wartime London, Arthur Rowe wins a cake that contains a secret message. As German bombs rain down on the city, Rowe is pursed by Nazi spies.
NB: Greene credited Michael Innes’s The Secret Vanguard as his inspiration. Carl Barks’s 10-page Donald Duck comics are among the greatest achievements in the history of the medium.
Barks didn’t invent the character, but he placed Donald in the city of Duckburg, which he populated with Uncle Scrooge McDuck, the sinister Beagle Boys, Gyro Gearloose, and many others. Plus, Barks sent Donald (and Donald’s nephews, armed with their Junior Woodchucks Guidebook) on great adventures — often treasure hunts.
Helen MacInnes’s WWII espionage adventure The Unconquerable (aka While We Still Live). A British woman in Warsaw becomes a double agent — working for Germany while passing along secrets to the brave Polish resistance. Neither side trusts her, so when she is pursued by a German officer through the forests of Poland, she’s on her own almost. White’s children’s fantasy adventure Stuart Little. A mouse born to a human family races a sailboat in Central Park, gets shipped out to sea in a garbage can, and sets out — several years before Kerouac’s On the Road — on a cross-country odyssey.
The book was criticized, at the time, by the New York Public Library’s influential children’s lit expert for being nonaffirmative, inconclusive, and unfit for kids. Kenneth Fearing’s noir crime adventure The Big Clock. George Stroud, a disaffected wage slave, must solve a murder in which he is the chief suspect. Meanwhile, his boss, who’s assigned him the task, wants to pin the murder on him.
Stroud is trapped in an invisible prison — the “Big Clock” of the title is short-hand for bureacracy. ’s (as Vernon Sullivan) noir crime adventure I Shall Spit on Your Graves. Lee Anderson, a light-skinned black man, sleeps with the daughters of a plantation owner who’d orchestrated the lynching of Anderson’s brother, thus setting the scene for an orgy of violence. It’s been described as “a fusion of prime US pulp and French sado-eroticism.” • 1946.
Michael Innes’s fantastical WWII crime/espionage adventure From London Far, an ironic homage to the adventures of John Buchan. A middle-aged scholar of classic literature stumbles upon a massive art smuggling operation in war-torn London; he pretends to be a member of the smuggling gang, and winds up at an isolated Scottish castle housing foreign agents. Michael Innes’s espionage adventure The Journeying Boy. Why does Humphrey Paxton, son of one of Britain’s leading atomic boffins, insist that he is being persecuted by spies? His new tutor, Mr. Thewless, “a man almost irrationally determined to deny that the universe holds anything dangerous or surprising,” suspects that Humphrey is a fantasist and a delinquent — and so does the reader, at first. Ironic homage to the adventure genre.
Hammond Innes’s survival adventure The White South. Duncan Craig, captain of a whaling ship, is trapped in the Antarctic — along with the crew of an enormous factory ship. “I can still hear the roar of the ice as the great bergs close in upon those stranded men of the whaling fleet,” Daphne du Maurier said of this novel which the author researched on location. ’s fantasy adventure The Lord of the Rings was written during these years. A posse of easy-going hobbits must destroy the One Ring, the ultimate weapon created by the Dark Lord. They are aided by the superhuman ranger Aragorn, the Human Boromir, the Dwarf Gimli, the Elf Legolas, and the wizard Gandalf. The book began as a sequel to The Hobbit, then turned into an epic.
Published as a book in 1954–55. Robert Lawson’s YA adventure The Fabulous Flight. When young Peter P. Pepperell III shrinks until he’s pocket-sized, he befriends a slang-talking seagull named Gus.
Learning that a reclusive middle-European scientist has invented a tiny, super-powerful explosive, Peter and Gus volunteer to steal it away from him. To this day, the compartment in which Peter rides on Gus’s back makes me gnash my teeth with envy.
Graham Greene’s crime adventure The Third Man, a treatment prepared by the author as he was writing the screenplay for the suspenseful 1949 movie of the same title. In postwar Vienna, Rollo Martins, a British author of pulp Westerns, discovers that his old friend Harry Lime is dead and that he’d been suspected of being “the worst racketeer who ever made a dirty living in this city.” Martins begins an investigation to clear his friend’s name. Nevil Shute’s WWII adventure A Town Like Alice.
Having served as a prisoner of the Japanese in Malaya, a young Englishwoman returns after the war to build a well in a village then travels to Australia, in search of a former fellow prisoner whom she had believed dead. Once there, she makes improvements to a primitive town in the Queensland outback.
An endearing combination of a prisoner-of-war adventure with an entrepreneurial Robinsonade. Patricia Highsmith’s crime adventure Strangers on a Train, which was adapted as a film in 1951 by Alfred Hitchcock.
Guy Haines wants to divorce his unfaithful wife, Miriam; while on a train, he meets Charles Anthony Bruno, a sociopath who proposes an idea to “exchange murders” — it seems his wants his father killed. Guy doesn’t take Bruno seriously but when he returns from a trip to Mexico, he discovers that his wife has been murdered! Nicholas Monsarrat’s WWII sea-going adventure The Cruel Sea, which draws on the author’s own wartime experience on anti-submarine escort ships. A young naval officer, Keith Lockhart, is given command of an unglamorous little corvette, complete with an inexperienced crew. For years, they battle U-boats and fierce storms until they are torpedoed.
Mickey Spillane’s crime adventure One Lonely Night, in which ex-WWII assassin Mike Hammer so frightens a woman he was trying to rescue that she leaps to her death from a bridge. Discovering that the woman was a Communist, Hammer attends a meeting and is mistaken for a spy from Moscow. Meanwhile, the FBI is searching for lost secret papers and the career of a popular politician is threatened. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower historical sea-going adventure Lieutenant Hornblower, serialized. Probably my favorite of the series. Unique in being told from a perspective other than Hornblower’s which allows the author to sustain a mystery about how Captain Sawyer, a paranoid schizophrenic, came to be injured.
Published in book form in 1952. Geoffrey Household’s espionage adventure A Rough Shoot (aka Shoot First). A Buchan-esque thriller — written to be serialized — in which Roger Taine, a Dorset salesman, accidentally kills a man (while hunting) who turns out to be a neo-Nazi.
The dead man’s comrades want revenge — and hunt Taine across the rooftops of London. The first of two short adventures, published one after the other, about the same protagonist. John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic science fiction adventure The Day of the Triffids, in which a man whose eyes are bandaged escapes a world-wide epidemic of blindness (caused by a meteor shower). Not only does civilization collapse, but the blind are helpless to resist the depredations of a bioengineered species of plants known as “triffids.” Rival colonies of survivors are formed, some more humane than others. Alfred Bester’s science fiction adventure The Demolished Man, serialized. A police procedural set in harshly capitalistic future world where widespread telepathy has rendered deceit and crime impossible — and privacy a thing of the past. When Ben Reich, a young businessman, decides to murder a rival, he hires an Esper (telepath) to hide his murderous thoughts.
Published in book form in 1953. NB: Winner of the first Hugo! ’s surreal crime adventure The Killer Inside Me. Lou Ford, a cliché-spouting deputy sheriff in a small Texas town, is secretly a sadistic sociopath. Stanley Kubrick’s blurb: “Probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.” Credited with spawning the serial-killer adventure sub-genre. ’s science fiction adventure Fahrenheit 451. Published shortly after McCarthy’s speech about Communists making policy in the State Department, Bradbury’s best novel takes as its theme censorship and the threat of neo-fascist book burning in the United States.
But it’s also an exciting hunted-man tale: Who can forget the robot dog, with its hypodermic snout! ’s fantasy adventure Three Hearts and Three Lions, serialized. Holger Carlsen is an Allied covert operative who winds up in a parallel universe, one whose historical past is the Matter of France.
There, he must prevent the evil of Faerie from encroaching on humanity. Expanded and published in 1961. NB: The Dungeons & Dragons alignment system was influenced by this book. ’s fantasy adventure The Broken Sword. Michael Moorcock declared The Broken Sword superior to Tolkien, calling it “a fast-paced doom-drenched tragedy in which human heroism, love and ambition, manipulated by amoral gods, elves and trolls, led inevitably to tragic consequences.” PS: It was influenced by H. Rider Haggard’s 1891 Viking adventure The Saga of Eric Brighteyes.
Crockett Johnson’s children’s dream adventure Harold and the Purple Crayon. A four-year-old with a purple crayon draws an adventure for himself. Along with Ruth Krauss, P.D. Eastman, Syd Hoff, Leo Lionni, Lilian Moore, and William Steig, Johnson (who was author, from 1942–52, of the great newspaper strip Barnaby) was a leftist who raised questions — in an ostensibly playful manner — about our taken-for-granted forms and norms.
Alistair MacLean’s WWII commando adventure The Guns of Navarone. New Zealand mountaineer-turned-commando Keith Mallory, American demolitions expert Dusty Miller, and Greek resistance fighter Andrea are sent on a mission impossible: to destroy a seemingly impregnable German fortress that threatens Allied naval ships in the Aegean Sea. Adapted as the 1961 movie starring Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn. ’s Tintin adventure Tintin in Tibet, the author’s own favorite of his books.
A strange adventure without an antagonist (unless the Yeti counts?), without Calculus or the Thompsons. Just Tintin, Haddock, Snowy, and the sherpa Tharkey, trekking across the Himalayan mountains in search of the sole survivor of a plane crash. An emotional, mystical, funny, weird voyage of redemption. Published as a color album in 1960.
Graham Greene’s espionage adventure Our Man in Havana, a sardonic inversion of the genre. In this black comedy, which Greene considered an “entertainment” rather than a “novel,” Greene mocks intelligence services, especially the British MI6 (for whom he’d worked during WWII), and their willingness to believe reports from local informants.
Adapted as the 1959 movie starring Alec Guinness. ’s science fiction adventure Time Out of Joint. Ragle Gumm believes that he lives in the year 1959 in a quiet American suburb. His repeatedly wins the cash prize in a newspaper competition, “Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next?”. Confusion gradually mounts for Gumm.
Adapted as (actually, baldly ripped off by) The Truman Show. Except Gumm’s occluded reality is much weirder than Truman’s. Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate, a political thriller about the son of a prominent US political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist conspiracy. Condon’s over-the-top style is strong medicine; as much as I like the 1962 John Frankenheimer movie adaptation, the novel is much better. “Raymond stood as though someone might have just opened a beach umbrella in his bowels.” • 1959–60. René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s historical adventure Asterix the Gaul. The story was first published as a serial in Pilote magazine, a Franco-Belgian comics magazine founded by Goscinny and others.
Published in album form in 1962. The English translation was first published in 1969. Donald Hamilton’s espionage adventure Death of a Citizen, the first in a long-running (27 titles) series featuring assassin Matt Helm. The title refers to the metaphorical death of peaceful citizen and family man Matt Helm and the rebirth of the WWII killer.
NB: In the late 1960s, several comedy movies — sardonic inversions of the genre — starring Dean Martin were produced. Geoffrey Household’s hunted-man adventure Watcher in the Shadows, his second best novel (after Rogue Male). Zoologist Charles Dennim is sent a mail bomb — why? Turns out that during the war, he was a double agent working for the Allies as a Gestapo officer in a concentration camp.
Now the husband of one of the Gestapo’s victims wants revenge. Jean Lartéguy’s military adventure The Centurions, which concerns paratroopers in Indochina and Algeria.
Pierre Raspeguy must transform a military unit accustomed to conventional warfare into one that can handle the complex, dynamic challenge of defeating an insurgency. The book, which includes the first use of the so-called “ticking time bomb” scenario, was adapted in 1966 as the movie Lost Command. Lionel Davidson’s adventure The Rose of Tibet. A Haggard-esque yarn in which an English man travels to Tibet searching for his missing brother. He is mistaken for a god; he falls in love with a high priestess; he is entrusted with a treasure; and he in the end, he must flee the invading Red Chinese army. Graham Greene: “I hadn’t realised how much I had missed the genuine adventure story until I read The Rose of Tibet.” • 1962.
Madeleine L’Engle’s YA science fiction adventure A Wrinkle in Time. Fourteen-year-old Meg Murry is shy, awkward, and too good at math to be considered cool. When their scientist father disappears, Meg and her genius baby brother travel through space and time to rescue him — with the assistance of two weird neighbors (Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs.
Who), and a basketball-playing jock. Eric Ambler’s crime adventure The Light of Day. A petty crook in Athens, Arthur Abdel Simpson, preys on an international jewel thief — who blackmails him into driving a suspicious car across the Turkish border.
Caught by the Turkish police, Simpson is coerced into spying on his erstwhile colleagues. Adapted by Jules Dassin as the light-hearted caper movie Topkapi. Len Deighton’s espionage adventure The IPCRESS File is a sardonic inversion of the genre but still an exciting thriller.
The plot involves mind control, the titular acronym standing (absurdly) for “Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex under strESS.” The novel’s protagonist if nameless; he works for an intelligence agency with the unexplained acronym WOOC(P). Adapted in 1965 as the popular Michael Caine movie. Richard Stark’s (Donald E.
Westlake) crime adventure The Hunter. Parker, a brutal thief, is shot and left for dead by his partner and wife. He recovers, then embarks on a relentless quest to retrieve his money and get revenge. Westlake would write 23 other Parker novels over the next half-century; he is credited with having made it OK for readers to root for the bad guy.
Adapted in 1967 as John Boorman’s excellent movie Point Blank. ’s apophenic adventure V. — published on the cusp of the Sixties. I am fascinated by fiction from ’63 — — in so much of which we find a volatile admixture of seriousness (not earnestness) and irony.
In Pynchon’s début novel, which details the picaresque exploits of schlemiel Benny Profane and the Whole Sick Crew, in and underneath New York, characters in search of a plot (in the paranoid sense of the term), jazzman McClintic Sphere articulates Pynchon’s cynical-yet-innocent worldview: “Keep cool but care.” • 1963. Helen MacInnes’s espionage adventure The Venetian Affair.
Though she got famous writing WWII anti-Nazi espionage adventures, some consider her Cold War anti-Communist books to be her best. In this one, set in picturesque Venice, a resourceful, intelligent amateur gets into a situation where a skilled agent would fear to tread. Adapted into a film in 1967 starring Robert Vaughn and Elke Sommer. ’s crime adventure The Grifters. A lollapalooza, in which a young con artist’s half-hearted efforts to go straight are stymied by his youthful con artist mother — who strongly resembles his girlfriend. Crime, sex, murder, crime, sex, impersonation, incestuous desire, murder. “There is no ease on Uneasy Street.
The longer one’s tenancy, the more untenable it becomes.” • 1963. John Le Carré’s espionage adventure The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, in which the head of the West Berlin office of the British Secret Intelligence Service, is recalled in disgrace but then asked to stay “in the cold” for one last mission. A sardonic inversion of the genre, one which de-glamorizes the spy and spy-craft — and at the same time a suspenseful, elegantly plotted, morally ambiguous thriller. Publishers Weekly named it the “best spy novel of all-time.” Adapted as an excellent 1965 movie. ’s children’s fantasy adventure Where the Wild Things Are.
Forget the self-consciously sad live-action 2009 Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers feature-film adaptation — please! Dressed in a wolf costume, Max goes wild — and is sent to his room, which transforms into a jungle. Max sails to an island inhabited by magnificently grotesque Wild Things, whom he (the most feral thing on the island) subjugates.
A Wild Rumpus ensues. Louise Fitzhugh’s YA espionage adventure Harriet the Spy. Perhaps my favorite YA novel ever. Harriet is an amazing character.
She’s praiseworthy in her intrepid, self-motivated, eccentric (and un-supervised) adventuring; a talented crafter of gnomic aperçus; a loyal friend and a terrifying enemy. And yet, she’s in the wrong; the reader knows it, and so does everybody else in the book. It’s an emotional roller-coaster ride. Thomas Berger’s revisionist Western Little Big Man. Jack Crabb, a 111-year-old survivor of Custer’s Last Stand, narrates his mock-heroic, picaresque adventures.
As his roles vary over the course of his wanderings, from Cheyenne warrior to Army scout to small-time huckster, so does the style of Crabb’s (unreliable) narrative. Adapted as a movie in 1970 by Arthur Penn. ’s science fiction adventure The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Via an odyssey of nested hallucinations, the Gnostic idea that the world is the creation not of God, but of an evil, lesser deity, is burned forever into the reader’s mind. The title character is a demiurge who brings to mankind a “negative trinity” of “alienation, blurred reality, and despair.” • 1965. Sol Yurick’s hunted-man adventure The Warriors, which was loosely based on Xenophon’s Anabasis — which recounts the travails of Greek mercenaries betrayed and stranded deep within enemy territory.
After an assembly of gangs devolves into chaos, the Coney Island Dominators, a black/Hispanic gang of murderers and rapists, must trek home from the Bronx — all the while defending their thuggish sense of manhood — through gang turfs. Adapted into the cult 1979 movie of the same title. ’s science fiction adventure Dune, a potboiler about one family’s declining empire, a mythology-saturated fantasy about the founding of a new social order, and a band-of-brothers yarn (Thufir Hawat, the human computer; Gurney Halleck, the troubadour warrior; master swordsman Duncan Idaho). It’s also a criticism of humankind’s despoliation of nature in the name of progress. Plus: Alia, a telepathic four-year-old girl, roams the battlefields of Arrakis slitting the throats of imperial stormtroopers! The Bene Gesserit, who subtly guide humanity’s development!
The worm-riding Fremen! ’s science fiction adventure The Crystal World. In the Cameroon Republic, a British doctor discovers that entrance to the forest is being discouraged but he can’t figure out why. Seeking his friends, who run a leper colony, he travels upriver and discovers a forest of glass. Trees, grass, water, animals and men are slowly encased in glittering crystals. The universe, its myriad of possibilities, is crystallizing into sameness. Serialized in the first Moorcock-edited issue of New Worlds.
’s apophenic adventure The Crying of Lot 49. California housewife Oedipa Maas uncovers a centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution companies; or perhaps she’s detecting signals where there is only noise.
“The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.” • 1966. Richard Fariña’s comical picaresque Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. The adventures of undergrad Gnossos Pappadoupoulis in the American West, in Cuba during the revolution, and at an upstate New York university. The author was a folksinger who died in a motorcycle accident two days after this first novel was published. Lionel Davidson’s hunted-man adventure A Long Way to Shiloh (aka The Menorah Men). Caspar Laing, a British professor of Semitic Languages, is asked to translate an ancient scroll found in Israel — which appears to give directions to the hiding place of a sacred menorah rescued from the Jerusalem Temple in 70 AD.
The Jordanians are also hunting for the menorah and what’s worse, the scroll is purposely misleading. Veers from deadly cat-and-mouse chills to hermeneutic thrills. Also, it’s funny! ’s African-American postmodern Western adventure Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. Set in a time warp, it concerns the battle of black cowboy The Loop Garoo Kid against an evil rancher.
It introduces Reed’s concept of HooDoo, i.e., the primitive forces of life pitted against the white Christian tradition. Charles Portis’s satirical Western adventure True Grit, which is told from the perspective of a 14-year-old girl seeking retribution for the murder of her father. Considered one of the great American novels. John Wayne would win a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn in the 1969 movie adaptation; the 2010 Coen Brothers adaptation is also excellent. ’s science fiction adventure Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim witnesses the firebombing of Dresden in WWII while “time-tripping” to the distant planet of Tralfamadore, where he is put in a zoo and mated with a movie star.
Sardonic inversion of the genre; considered the author’s masterpiece. ’s Hainish science fiction adventure The Left Hand of Darkness.
A much-admired novel set on a frozen planet whose denizens are neither female nor male: they have gender identities and sexual urges only once a month. When a Terran envoy, Genly Ai, and an exiled native politician, Estraven, escape from a prison together, they battle snow and ice together; and as Estraven changes from male to female, Ai questions the binary assumptions that structure his own worldview. Harold Bloom said, of this book: “Le Guin, more than Tolkien, has raised fantasy into high literature, for our time.” • 1971. ’s satirical science fiction adventure Love in the Ruins. When Sixties-type political and cultural divides lead America to devolve into chaos, a small-town Louisiana psychiatrist sets up a love nest at an abandoned motel — and uses his invention, the Ontological Lapsometer, to diagnose and treat the harmful mental states at the root of the social crisis. “For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man.” • 1971. Lionel Davidson’s frontier adventure Smith’s Gazelle, which should be much better-known.
A 9-year-old Bedouin boy and a 9-year-old Israeli kibbutznik runaway meet in a hidden ravine in the Israeli desert, which is rumored to be haunted by djinns; though Ishmael and Jacob have been raised as foes, they become friends. Turns out that a reclusive, crazed, and deformed Bedouin shepherd has bred a herd of gazelle in the ravine; an Israeli officer and others are searching for evidence that these gazelle — a species thought to be extinct — do in fact exist. And then the Six-Day War happens. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Subtitled A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, the novel is a sardonic inversion of the picaresque.
Raoul Duke, a journalist who bears a striking resemblance to Thompson, and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo (based on Oscar Zeta Acosta), arrive in Las Vegas to report on a motorcycle race. Loaded to the gills with LSD, ether, cocaine, alcohol, mescaline, and cannabis, they destroy hotel rooms, wreck cars, experience visions in the desert, and comment on how the promise of the Sixties — not to mention the American dream — hasn’t panned out. ’s metafictional crime adventure Mumbo Jumbo, which is set in 1920s New York — locus of a virus known as “Jes Grew,” which influences people to listen to ragtime and jazz, dance, and be happy. (It also infects the book — whose format is disrupted by radio dispatches, photographs, drawings, footnotes — itself. Agents of the white, western, Christian hegemony attempt to suppress the virus. Other agents — including the Mu’tafika, who steal historical artifacts from Western museums and return them to their places of origin — work against the hegemony.
PaPa LaBas, a Voodoo practitioner, is drawn into the conflict. Richard Adams’s epic talking-animal adventure Watership Down, sometimes called the rabbits’ Aeneid. A group of rabbits escape the destruction of their warren and journey across south-central England in search of a new home.
Along the way, they encounter predators, snares, and automobiles; and they’re tempted to join un-free rabbit societies; the monstrous rabbit leader of one of these societies leads an attack on their new warren. Fortunately, the nomadic rabbits are resourceful and brave and they’ve learned how to survive and thrive from the lapine mythology of El-ahrairah the trickster. Trevanian’s espionage adventure The Eiger Sanction, the author’s first novel. In this sardonic inversion of the espionage sub-genre, an art professor and mountaineer who doubles as a hired assassin for a CIA-like government agency, is tricked into a hazardous “sanction” that involves an attempt to scale one of the most treacherous peaks in the Swiss Alps. Trevanian (film scholar Rodney William Whitaker) has been called “the only writer of airport paperbacks to be compared to Zola, Ian Fleming, Poe and Chaucer.” The book was adapted into a weird, vapid 1975 movie directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. ’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
Editor’s note: Literature is a never ending sea of inspiration for us here at GP. As such, we’ve updated our list of best travel and adventure books with 10 new recommendations. Contribution by Peter Saltsman and Jack Seemer. Somewhere between your morning and much-deserved break, you probably dreamed about getting on an and going somewhere (anywhere!), aching for adventure and the promise of a life well lived. We’ve all been there, longing to see the world beyond our reach, perhaps even ready to set off for the remote and distant corners of the globe.
Well, the joke’s on us. At this point, someone has probably beaten us there and no doubt almost died (or, for that matter, actually died) in the process. But man’s penchant for — crazy, reckless, often death-defying exploration — has yielded some pretty good literature over the years, which is a damn good consolation prize. These are stories of conquests, scientific discovery, and jut generally of brave, often foolish men and women doing the things most of us wouldn’t dare. Sit back, read on, and thank god you don’t have to go through any of the shit that happened to them. In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin In 1974, Bruce Chatwin, then a relatively unknown journalist for The Sunday Times Magazine, traveled to South America, resigning with a brief telegram mailed home that read, “Have gone to Patagonia”. Chatwin spent six months there, inspiring this travelogue.
Experimental in form, the book is perhaps best classified as creative nonfiction, comprised of 97 short vignettes (ranging from factual anecdotes to folklore) of the people, places and tales he encountered during the adventure. A Sense of Direction by Gideon Lewis-Kraus Living aimlessly in Berlin, writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus jets off to attempt three historically diverse pilgrimages by foot — the Camino de Santiago in Spain, the Shikoku Pilgrimage in Japan and the Rosh Hashanah kibbutz in the Ukraine — connecting the narrative of his experiences with existential musings on life’s greater, and not so great, purposes.
The result is a text author Dave Eggers calls “a very honest, very smart, very moving book about being young and rootless and even wayward”. The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux Paul Theroux first published The Great Railway Bazaar in 1975, and it instantly became recognized as a modern classic of nonfiction travel writing. The text follows Theroux’s four-month train ride from London to Southeast Asia, then back again via the Trans-Siberian Railway. It’s at times witty and humorous, but Theroux shines best in his sober observations of eccentric personalities he meets along the way.
The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton Swiss critic and scholar Alain de Botton weaves a personal travelogue into five abstract essays that cover different aspects of travel, from the experience of departure to return. His well-read breadth of knowledge comes through in insightful connections he draws, for example, between the desolate landscapes of Edward Hopper paintings and his own reading of hotels and gas stations he encounters on the road.
Mani by Patrick Leigh Fermor During his lifetime, Patrick Leigh Fermor was considered by many to be the greatest travel writer in Britain. One of his earlier works, first published in 1958, Mani chronicles Fermor’s travels to the isolated peninsula at the southernmost tip of Greece (where he eventually settled later in life). Though the book is often seen as a companion piece to Fermor’s other Greece volume, Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece, Mani stands apart as one of Fermor’s best-crafted examples of blending historical research of a place with acute, firsthand observation. The New Granta Book of Travel 23 stories make up this definitive anthology from Granta, the publication that was once (and largely remains) a venue for great travel writers, including Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin.
There’s an introduction by Jonathan Raban, and each story, though different in scope and style, shares an element of engagement with the act of embedding oneself in a foreign place or culture. The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen An early pioneer of LSD, which later inspired a life-long devotion to Zen Buddhism, Peter Matthiessen brings a rich spiritual tone to the form of travel writing, including observations on the relation of self to place. The Snow Leopard is the account of a two-month journey to Nepal, where Matthiessen, along with the naturalist George Schaller, attempt to catch a glimpse of the rarely seen snow leopards that live in the Himalayas. The book won several awards when it was published in 1978, including two National Book Awards in categories of “Contemporary Thought” and “Nonfiction”. Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon In February of 1982, writer William Least Heat-Moon lost his job and wife on the same day. He then set off across America in a van named “Ghost Dancing”, taking only back roads.
His travelogue of the experience, accompanied by the photos he took, has been compared to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road — except “far better”, according to The New York Times. The Way of the World by Nicholas Bouvier The mission: drive an old, rickety Fiat from Geneva, Switzerland, to the Khyper Pass bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan. Niclas Bouvier was 24 years old when we made the trip with his friend, the artist Thierry Vernet (who is credited for the accompanying illustrations), documenting the trip in his journals which, years later, bore The Way of the World. Bouvier wrote of the journey, “You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making — or unmaking — you”. Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer Tibet, China, India and Thailand are the settings of Time writer Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu, a collection of 11 essays that together chronicle Iyer’s travels in what he dubs the “not-so-far-East”. The influence of Western culture is evident, strange and hilarious in form, especially when he encounters the film trade of India, where films such as Rambo get rehashed with nuances of local flavor.
In Trouble Again by Redmond O’Hanlon A semi-famous British explorer, writer and Darwin scholar stumbles his way through the dark and largely mysterious (yes, even by the 1980s) rain forests of Venezuela. Now you get why the title’s so foreboding. Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt Clinton started a charity and Dubya paints portraits of his dogs. What did Teddy Roosevelt, perhaps the nation’s most macho President, do after his term? He hitched up his stirrups, threw on a giant hat and set off for South America in the name of scientific discovery.
Your move, 44. In Brightest Africa by Carl Akeley Akeley was a bona fide explorer, but he’s best known as the philanthropic taxidermist who almost single-handedly created (and populated) the African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. These are his diaries. They’re a little racist, but other than that you can learn a lot. Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck On the Road is for confused teenagers and grown men with Grateful Dead patches on their backpacks. Steinbeck is one of America’s all time great prose stylists, and this is his story of driving across his great country. Recently it’s been criticized for being heavily fictionalized.
Embellishing stories only makes them better. A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby Newby is one of the sharpest, funniest travel writers in print. His first book takes him to a remote corner of Afghanistan where, in 1956, no Englishman had set foot for more than half a century. Not ballsy enough for you? He also drives perilously through Turkey, befriends a dubious companion and climbs a 20,000-foot mountain. Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey Abbey’s writing about his time as a National Park Ranger is much less Yogi Bear and much more Walden. He is at peace in the desert of the American Southwest, and after reading his stories it’s easy to think we could be, too.
In Search of King Solomon’s Mines by Tahir Shah Solomon’s Mines, where the king sourced the gold for his Temple in Jerusalem, are like a cursed, semitic Holy Grail. Many have searched for them, none have succeeded. Tahir Shah goes on a quest to Ethiopia to find them and, as you can imagine, very little good comes of it (except, of course, this book). Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean In 1949, 13 firefighters died in the storied Mann Gulch forest fire in Montana. In 1992, Norman McLean set off on an adventure to figure out what the hell happened out there. The results are riveting.
The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain Next time you’re reminiscing about that backpacking adventure you and your college roommate took through Italy, remember that you weren’t the first American to go abroad. Mark Twain wasn’t either, but he was definitely one of the funniest and most perceptive—especially when he gets to the Holy Land.
The Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway All the gin swilling and abortion equivocating of his fiction aside, this is the book that made Hemingway famous as a dirty, rugged big-game-hunting man’s man. And also a man of letters—much of the book concerns his often profound and sometimes meandering thoughts on writing. Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery Saint-Exupery delivered the mail. Back in the early days of aviation, this meant flying treacherously across the Andes, crashing in the Sahara and, it turns out, making some good friends along the way.
He lived through a lot, but what’s most amazing about this book about the early days of aviation is Saint-Exupery’s overwhelmingly optimistic and enlightening worldview. Going Solo by Roald Dahl Ever wondered what kinds of things Roald Dahl saw that made him dream up James and the Giant Peach?
In Going Solo, he writes about his time as a fighter pilot with the Royal Air Force during World War II. Fighter Pilot by Paul Richey Richey and his RAF squadron were some of the first in the air after war was declared in 1939, and in 1941, after being shot down (for the fourth time) and deemed unfit to fly, Richey published Fighter Pilot based on his wartime journals—even as the war raged on around him.
West With the Night by Beryl Markham It’s unfair to think men had all the adventures. Beryl Markham grew up in Kenya and made her living as a bush pilot. She was the first person to fly across the Atlantic east to west—though that solo flight is only one of the many adventures she writes about. The Spirit of St.
Louis by Charles Lindbergh Lindbergh is an American hero, justly celebrated for his game-changing 1927 transatlantic flight. He’s also a Pulitzer Prize-winning author thanks to this genius autobiography, an hour-by-hour account of his delirious 33-hour flight that most people thought he’d never make.
Into the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick In 1820, the whaleship the Essex sank in the Pacific Ocean after an unfortunate run-in with a giant sperm whale. The surviving crew tried to get to South America in their tiny whaleboats and the rest, as they say, is history. Or in this case, it’s a ridiculously absorbing and cinematic history book. Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl Historical reenactments aren’t usually a good idea, especially when they involve sailing hundreds of nautical miles across the Pacific Ocean on an anachronistic raft.
But Heyerdahl’s quest to prove the possibility of a long-ago Polynesian migration is fascinating. And in this case, the movie’s almost as good as the book—it won the 1951 Oscar for Best Foreign Feature. The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin Darwin is best know for On the Origin of Species, but as a piece of literature it’s kind of boring—all science and no actual discovery. The Voyage of the Beagle is based on his 1831 expedition, and it’s part natural history journal, part captain’s log, containing the seeds of his theory of evolution and the full extent of his seasickness. The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger Fishing is hard. Nature’s a bitch.
If you’re scared of open water, do not read this book. The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard Even in 2013 it’s nearly impossible to get to Antarctica. A century ago, the trek was downright suicidal. In fact, most of the crew of the British Antartctic Expedition of 1910-1913 never made it back. Thankfully Apsley Cherry-Gerrard did, and wrote this dizzying memoir in 1922 about discovery, hard work and survival.