Wallace Boys Series

Nigel, Bruce and St Helenian Jimmy Fowler risk their necks by accepting a ride aboard a motor yacht, the St Valery, for their return to Cape Town. The owner, Barry Jones, wants to make a detour to see the terrifying Namibian Skeleton Coast where numerous ships have come to grief, including the Dundee Star on which Barry’s father worked during World War Two. Aboard the wreck is a cache of diamonds, and Barry knows just how to get it, and nothing, it seems, will stop him! This desperate adventure takes the boys to the edge of danger where they fight the most dangerous of the world’s deserts with its mysterious plant and animal life, the weird Welwitschia, the grotesque elephant’s foot, the desert lions, the brown hyena and the Namib sidewinder snake. They even encounter a galleon several kilometres inland of ‘the coast that walks’! All the while, they are dogged by the presence of Isaacs and Lambert.

The three boys are still aboard the St Valery with Barry when she gets hijacked after leaving the Namibian port of Luderitz. The hijacker is a young German, by the name of Gustav Stoltenhoff, who has just joined the yacht for the final leg of the journey to Cape Town. He is desperate to reach the tiny South Atlantic island called Inaccessible in the Tristan da Cunha Group. Gustav is a descendent of one of the few people ever to live on Inaccessible Island, and he has recently learnt that a German U-boat put into the island late in World War Two on its way to find refuge in Argentina. Aboard the submarine was a treasure of artworks looted by Hermann Goering. After the treasure has been loaded aboard the St Valery in a secret cave, following their hazardous ocean crossing, the three boys and Barry are marooned on the island. In their attempt to get rescued, they encounter most of the island’s amazing bird population - albatrosses, spectacled shoemakers, the tiny Inaccessible rail, rockhopper penguins and the vicious skua.

The first adventure in the series starts aboard a ship visiting the Island of St Helena where the Wallace Boys are going to stay with their uncle, the Governor. While on board the RMS St Helena, Bruce discovers that there are a pair of stowaways in one of the lifeboats and he gets thrown off the back of the ship for his pains. When the brothers, together with St Helenian, Jimmy Fowler, arrive on St Helena, they discover that all is not well. Their search for the stowaways, Isaacs and Lambert, who have eluded detection, leads them to Longwood House where Napoleon spent his years on the island following his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, and thence to the Gates of Chaos, an extremely treacherous part of the island. Matters reach a head when the Governor starts behaving strangely and the three boys find that weapons, including Russian-made AK-47s, have been smuggled onto the island. It is clear that a coup is being planned. Can the boys foil the attempt?

This is the sixth in the Wallace Boys series. Winner of the Highly Commended Award by the National Book Development Council of Singapore, this adventure takes place in the Kafue National Park of Zambia. Here the Wallace Boys and Muyunda visit Muyunda’s uncle, the Chief Game Warden in the park. Apart from the uncle acting weirdly, the boys discover very soon that they are on the trail of a vicious gang of poachers who have teamed up with a group of terrorists. Set against the exciting backdrop of Africa’s magnificent wildlife, including a cantankerous elephant that chases cars and buffaloes used as a decoy, the story leads the three boys in an ancient Land Rover, named by the boys ‘Lazarus’ for obvious reasons, to track down the poachers, the terrorists and what is upsetting Muyunda’s uncle.

Back home on their parents’ farm outside Bulawayo in Zimbabwe, the Wallace boys team up with Muyunda Munalula, of the Lozi tribe in Zambia. For nearly as long as he can remember, Muyunda has worn a pendant round his neck. When it gets tampered with, Muyunda relates how it came into his possession. His great-grandfather was dying and had told him how as a little boy he had joined the retinue of Lobengula, the last of the Matabele kings, who was reputed to have amassed a fortune in diamonds and gold. After being defeated by the forces of Cecil John Rhodes, the founder of the country that bore his name - Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Lobengula is forced to flee his capital of Gu-bulawayo to the north where he dies. His faithful followers, including Muyunda’s great-grandfather, continue to the banks of the Zambezi River where, in a cave in the Batoka Gorges, they hide the treasure. The Wallace Boys and Muyunda set off to find this treasure on horseback, making their starting point the magnificent Victoria Falls, visited and named by David Livingstone in 1855. The boys visit Scottie, a family friend, who proudly shows them the fantastic sights in his Fox Moth biplane. Muyunda for the first time encounters the Wallace Boys’ nemesis, the unholy pair of Isaacs and Lambert. Captured and tortured to reveal what he knows about Lobengula's treasure, Muyunda is left for dead when he falls over the gorge beside the Devil’s Cataract. Eventually, the boys reach the long-lost cave tucked behind a small waterfall that tumbles into the Batoka Gorge many kilometres from the Victoria Falls. Their attempt to find the treasure is nearly thwarted by Isaacs but for the arrival of Scottie in his vintage Fox Moth.

Muyunda invites his two friends, the Wallace Boys, to Mongu in Western Zambia to witness the colourful Kuomboka Ceremony in which the Lozi people move from their homes on the Barotse Plain flooded by the rising Zambezi River to their winter quarters. Muyunda himself is a paddler in the ceremony during which he sees someone behaving very strangely; when this same person takes the same aeroplane flight the boys are on, Muyunda realizes that something very strange is going on. This is confirmed when the man orders the pilot of the Beaver aircraft to fly along the narrow corridor of land known as the Caprivi Strip to the Etosha Pan in Namibia. After a hair-raising landing on the flat surface of the salt pan, the boys find themselves up against Isaacs and Lambert once again! The return flight, now with a hoard of diamonds, crashes. The pilot is out of action with a broken leg and Bruce is taken hostage, to ensure Isaacs and Lambert’s safety after they cross the Kalahari. However, Bruce is spat in the eyes by a spitting cobra, and the men abandon their now blind hostage. A Bushman boy of their own age leads Nigel and Muyunda across the Kalahari to the Okavango Delta (check out this very good National Geographic video) in Botswana where a dramatic chase ends the flight of Isaacs and Lambert who have commandeered a swamp buggy. Once again, Scottie and his Fox Moth biplane, this time with floats, have got in on the act!

The Wallace brothers and Muyunda plan a quiet camping trip on Lake Kariba on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, but things turn a little hairy. While photographing hippos one night, Bruce sees a mysterious boat loaded with uniformed men and an assortment of weapons crossing the lake, and the boys decide to investigate. Their curiosity leads to both Bruce and Muyunda being captured by guerrilla fighters intent on overthrowing the Zimbabwean government. It is up to Nigel to rescue them which he does by setting fire to the surounding bush, nearly incinerating his brother and friend in the process! Together again, the three boys have to race against time to reach the immense Kariba Dam Wall before a bomb explodes set to bring the wall down.

Almost immediately following 'Assignment in the Alps', the Wallace Boys and Karl-Franz head up into a remote area of the little Alpine kingdom for a bit of R&R. Little do they realize they are heading for trouble - in the form of a secret department of the CIA, America's Central Intelligence Agency. It is this department that has been clandestinely funding the attempted coup in the kingdom - and now they want their money back! The three boys somehow get in the way! And the CIA is hot on their heels, not to mention Rupert of Hentzau, Duke Michael and their oafish henchmen, Bersonin and Krafstein.

In the tenth Wallace Boys series, Nigel and Bruce have been given an assignment by the Foreign Office of the United Kingdom. They have to try to help the faltering monarchy of the small Alpine Kingdom of Ruritania on the verge of a coup, the Wallace Boys find themselves in a desperate search for gold and art treasures taken from the fabulous Schloss Falkenstein and hidden in a remote mountain lake by the Nazis at the end of World War Two. To do this they must team up with the Crown Prince, the Archduke Karl-Franz; get the help of a band of gypsies; climb a glacier at night and paraglide down to the lake. But there is a deadline which is drawing dangerously near. Can they make it in time?

The Wallace Boys leave Africa and go to the United Kingdom. They immediately fall into an adventure in London, giving Scotland Yard a helping hand along the way! This story is set in the West End Theatreland of London and South Cornwall. A leading actor in Agatha Christie’s world-famous, long-running play – The Mousetrap – helps ‘lost’ youngsters on the streets of London. But is he all that he appears to be? The Wallace Boys assist a young boy in finding out what happened to his elder brother who has disappeared under very mysterious circumstances.

This is the ninth in the Wallace Boys series. Following their adventure in London and Cornwall, the boys go to the far north-west of Scotland where they intend to refurbish a yacht, the ten-metre Silver Spray, prior to sailing her out to the South Pacific. They meet up with Richard Hannay, a boy of their own age, the grandson of the famous John Buchan character in 'The Thirty-nine Steps'. The Silver Spray is lying up on Loch Machray overlooked by a magnificent island castle similar to the famous, dramatic Eilean Donan, but no one can visit the island, for it is certain death for anyone who dares. Like Gruinard Island, this island too was infected with the deadly anthrax bacteria during a biological experiment during World War Two. Bruce then lands accidentally on the island in thick fog! And then the excitement really starts, involving the IRA and a royal hostage, secret tunnels, laird’s lugs and a bottle pit dungeon!

This story, the twelfth in the Wallace Boys series, starts with a horrifying terrorist massacre of tourists at Queen Hatshepsut’s Temple, one of the most spectacular archaeological sites near Luxor in Egypt – something like this actually happened a number of years ago. Nigel is caught up in the massacre but has obviously escaped death. He is missing. Bruce and a new-found friend, a Saudi prince by the name of Hanafi, are then involved in a desperate rescue bid on camels across the deserts of northern Saudi Arabia to save Nigel.

In Missing in the Mekong, the nineteenth in the Wallace Boys series, Nigel and Bruce, together with Singaporeans Kheng Peng and Zainal, while returning to Singapore from the Sulu Sea aboard the Silver Spray, encounter a small boat bobbing about on the wide expanse of the South China Sea, apparently abandoned. This chance encounter takes the four boys to the shores of Vietnam, where they help to find an American soldier, Marvin Wynne, left over from the Vietnam War under tragic circumstances.

In the sixteenth book in the Wallace Boys series, Nigel and Bruce are aboard their yacht the Silver Spray cruising the Islands of the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. Out of the blue, they are invited by Barry Jones – readers may remember him in The Sands of the Skeleton Coast and Trouble in Tristan – to help with a slight problem. His motor yacht, the St Valery II, has been hired by a group of rather sinister individuals to visit the remote Kerguelen Islands in the South Indian Ocean. He needs the boys' help. It promises to be a hairy ride to one of the most inhospitable places on earth, also called the Islands of Desolation. They also visit the even more remote, desolate Heard Island. The destination is Nazi gold!

This is the thirteenth in the Wallace Boys series. Immediately following 'Rebels across the Red Sea' and Nigel’s rescue, the Wallace Boys and Hanafi, the Saudi Prince, find themselves up against a renegade group of Iraqis guarding chemical and bacteriological weapons in a remote hide-out in northern Saudi Arabia. A blind Nigel Wallace returns to the terrorist desert encampment, hidden in a rocky valley.

This is the fourteenth book in the Wallace Boys series. On returning to Egypt from northern Saudi Arabia, Nigel, Bruce and Hanafi follow a trail leading to the band of terrorists who carried out the vicious Luxor massacre. They travel by ultralight aircraft to a remote training camp in the Tibesti Mountains on the border of Northern Chad and Southern Libya.

In the fifteenth book in the Wallace Boys series, it It is now winter, and the Wallace Boys have been recalled to the tiny European kingdom of Ruritania because because the Archduke Prince Karl-Franz is missing. Their investigation leads to a lonely monastery high in the Montafon Range of mountains on the border with Austria. Here they discover that the monks hold a terrible secret dating back to World War Two - the three boys discover underground mine tunnels directly beneath the monastery where the Nazis built their V-2 rockets using slave labour!

In the seventeenth book in the Wallace Boys series, Nigel and Bruce arrive in Singapore in South-East Asia, having sailed nearly halfway round the world in the Silver Spray. They meet up with two Singaporeans, Kheng Peng, a Chinese boy, and Zainal, a Malay. A radio mayday message, in Kheng Peng’s possession, from a Japanese ship in the closing stages of the Pacific War together with a visit to a former fighter of the Japanese in the famous Malayan stay-behind Force 136 lead the boys to realize they are on the trail of adventure; namely, General Yamashita (the ‘Tiger of Malaya’) Tomoyuki’s legendary treasure. Their trail takes them to a small island, Pulau Tulai, near Malaysia’s Pulau Tioman where they find more clues to the location of the treasure - and they find these clues under an unexploded World War Two bomb! Following an intensive scuba-diving course for the two Singaporeans, the boys set sail across the South China Sea.

This is the eighteenth book in the Wallace Boys series. 'The Sultan of the Sulu Sea' follows on from 'The Treasure of the Tiger' where the Wallace Boys and Singaporeans, Kheng Peng and Zainal, are aboard the Silver Spray after the traumatic hunt for General Yamashita’s fabled treasure. The boys’ return to Singapore is forestalled by the appearance of the pirate boat, the Sabil. Following a desperate attempt to elude the Moro pirates, the Silver Spray is captured and the boys are taken as hostages. The deliberate scuttling of the Silver Spray by the boys leads to tragedy, and the two Wallaces are transported to a small island in the Sulu Sea, the pirates’ lair, from which rescue seems impossible.

Number twenty in the Wallace Boys series. While Zainal was searching the sunken Hana-Maru for treasure, he came across a magnificent kris, the wonderful wavy-bladed knife of the Malays that forms so much of their legends. When the Arabic inscriptions have been deciphered, it leads the boys off in a search of the rain forests of Malaysia for a ruined temple lost deep in the jungles of Taman Negara, the main National Park of Malaysia, encountering much of the wildlife of the Malay Peninsula, tigers, a slow loris, a rather bad-tempered king cobra and the little mouse deer, pelanduk - the animal of so many Malay legends. Their search is complicated by a group of ex-Communists who have returned to the jungle to continue their banditry. From their hide-out, surrounded by lethal booby traps, the outlaws have ambushed the Eastern & Oriental Express Train that plies its luxurious way between Singapore and Bangkok. One of the most elegant of all trains, the Eastern & Oriental is forced to make a detour, and when the raiders board it, they take a hostage in the form of the beautiful Flavia, a rockstar princess. However, an idea taken from Alfred Russel Wallace’s book 'The Malay Archipelago', a king cobra, a gecko and a story about a pontianak - a beautiful female ghost - all lead to an extremely satisfactory conclusion.