I’m still on my mission to write good ‘boys’ books, and have been re-reading some of my own childhood influences. Times change. What was an ‘easy sell to any boy’ then probably would be a lot harder to ‘sell’ to any but the most determined and desperate young reader now.

I think the problem with many of them is slower immersion, and despite the fact that there are enormous differences between modern kids and what would have been the target audience (or at least what the acquiring editors thought would be the target audience), particularly for UK books. They are, many of them, very class related – with it assumed the buyers would (or want to be) modelled on upper-middle class families. Whether we’re talking WILLIAM, BIGGLES or FAMOUS FIVE, things like large family holidays, parents who can afford private boarding schools, often with Military or Colonial Official backgrounds, which I think was always a harder sell in the US, and a lot trickier now.

Much of this – as a kid in South Africa, was quite alien to me, but not to my parents. They bought the books. I was an avid reader, and bypassed much of this in the way people ignore stats in books. It also had a sort of alien charm, with jolly feasts and ruined castles etc.

SWALLOWS AND AMAZONS – the heroes are obviously the children of relatively well-to-do people who can – in the 1920’s afford such things as motor-launches and yachts (Back when for a lot of the population, a motor-car was pretty spiffy). Anyway: what I was finding interesting was that the kids in the story spend a lot of their time ‘Cos-playing’ pirates and explorers (a lot of it dealing with ‘natives’ (adults, local English people) and ‘savages’ (the same but plainly more interesting and not always friendly) who of course had eaten a great many of their enemies. Their discoveries are named out of what their own reading has given them (A high spot is called ‘Darien’, the nearest lakeside town ‘Rio’ and the highest mountain ‘Kangchenjunga’.) Their adventures have real-world elements, but very interwoven with this. Neither the readers nor the characters pretend these are real… but it shapes their behavior, their adventures, and the whole story.

It’s a theme that recurs in the WILLIAM books.

I was trying to think of any American, or even more recent UK books… but other than GOOD OMENS (which draws heavily on WILLIAM) failed to think of anything but CALVIN (playing Spaceman Spiff or the detective, or time-traveler).

I could think of plenty, of course, where the kids faced real dangers, but none where they were ‘acting out’ their favorite stories. I may well have missed them.

Have you any suggestions for me, on this ‘type’? Or do kids just no longer do this?

The picture is from my ‘back-yard’ – heaven to play pirates or hide from savage tribes… if that is still the dream?