Violet Books

She is "one of the great classics" of fantasy as Ev Bleiler in SF: The Early Years correctly observes. For poetry & incident, She is in the running for the best tale of action & the supernatural ever written, having a depth of gloom & mystery that even Haggard never fully duplicates in later books.

King Solomon's Mines was written in only six weeks in Rider's spare time! Though his later African romances, notably the Zulu cycle, were based on personal knowledge of the people & land, Mines was strictly the product of youthful imagination. Rider's novels launched amateur expeditions & colored popular belief about Africa for a century.

She-Who-Must-Be- Obeyed still lives in this first sequel to She, namely Ayesha: The Return of She, a novel rich in violent magic & supernaturalism. Here the Lost Race is descended from Alexander the Great's armies, preserving their ancient culture in a secret place in Turkistan.

Michael Trevor's 1947 novel Inca City, finely illustrated by J. Knight, adds the theme of a magic talisman to that of the Lost Race, in this case a hidden city of classical Incas revealed during a quest for El Dorado.

This jacket on a Harrap, London, 1943 reissue of the 1887 rarity Allan Quatermain is spectacularly bloody. First sequel to King Solomon's Mines, this is widely regarded as the "the Lost Race par excellence, setting up many of the motifs and fictional patterns that became an integral part of the subgenre — one of the most important 19th C works of popular fiction," to quote Ev Bleiler in SF: The Early Years.

John Clifford's Atlantis Adventure (1958) posits an Atlantean lost race discovered by atomic submarine exploring the Carribean sea bottom. The tale is spiced with giant spiders, serpent monsters, & super-robots.

Atlantis was a favorite subject for Lost Race romancers. David Craigie's Dark Atlantis (1951) was superbly illustrated by Dorothy M. Craigie, who was the actual author of the book, too, though she chose to byline herself David for the novel & Dorothy for the artwork. By means of a bathyspere voyage into the Hollow Earth vicious Atlantean survivors are discovered. There's also a seabottom race of Creature of the Black Lagoon-like frog-people. Oo!

Whether in darkest Africa, darkest South America, darkest Gobi Desert, or darkest Anywhere, there's always a Lost Race to be discovered. David Gammon's 1947 adventure novel Against the Golden Gods discloses the existence of such a race in the Australian outback.

Homer L. Hooban's Senor el Dik Dak in the Land of the Gauchos (1957) has dw, endpapers, & many interior illustrations by Charles Point. This is a little known Lost Race novel set in South America, not the usual Aztec connection but featuring an older culture of mound builders ruled by an overly emotional queen, in imitation of Ayesha.

James Paul Kelly's 1910 classic Prince Izon, A Romance of the Grand Canyon assumes the classical Aztecs survived hidden in the Grand Canyon, which in 1910 was the only place in North America not yet completely mapped. The front endpaper map gave the route to Colorado after the conquest of their original empire. Besides the stunning pictorial binding, there are a number of jaw-droppingly lurid full color plates within, all by Harold & Edwin Betts.

Harold M. Sherman's Tahara series was a four-volume set issued in 1933. In the course of these books, our intrepid young hero discovers a blue-eyed stone age Lost Race in Arabian desert; a race of treehouse-dwelling missing link ape-men; & after acquiring mystical powers in India, discovers his own ancient heritage among Aztecs hidden in the Yucatan.

Jack Wright's The Scout Patrol Boys Exploring the Yucatan (1933) tells of a troup & their anthropologist scout leader discovering a secret Aztec stronghold & participating in their rituals. The book is significant as first such tale to tell us stealing ancient treasures from other peoples is bad manners.