Tim Dinsdale The Story of the Loch Ness Monster (1973)
Retracing my book reading footsteps back even further than Doctor Who and the Zarbi, as discussed the other week, raw nostalgia brings me to Tim Dinsdale's The Story of the Loch Ness Monster, which was certainly the first Target book I ever bought, and was probably the first book I ever bought in which text took precedence over pictures. I have vague memories of reading the listings in the back of this and being surprised to note that Target had published novels of Doctor Who stories I hadn't seen on the box; so it began here for me. Unfortunately, I have no memories - vague or otherwise - of actually reading this and may have found it all a little dry, what with it not being off the telly.
Dinsdale wisely took the position that the best way to address children is to speak to them as though they are adults, because they can already do all that where's the dolly gone? shit and it encourages them to keep up. The Story of the Loch Ness Monster is therefore only a children's book in terms of the occasional aside to explain a few of the longer words, which is as it should be. Regarding the proposed existence of Nessie, I don't actually have a water horse in this race, and Dinsdale was one of those properly educated good eggs who had spent time in the RAF - as opposed to some lone nutcase - so he presents what there is to present on an even keel, by necessity concentrating on investigations of the hypothetical monster rather than the monster itself. The book is interesting and readable - if not exactly mind-blowing to someone reading it nearly fifty years later - and only the later chapters listing different types of tripod which might be purchased by the budding monster hunter get a bit chewy, somewhat revealing how little there was to actually write about regarding Nessie back in 1973.
Still, I finished the thing suspecting that there probably was a Loch Ness monster or monsters, regardless of more recent puritanical rationalists insisting it can only have been an escaped circus elephant seen reflected from the planet Venus; and it didn't make me irritable, so that has to be a plus.
Retracing my book reading footsteps back even further than Doctor Who and the Zarbi, as discussed the other week, raw nostalgia brings me to Tim Dinsdale's The Story of the Loch Ness Monster, which was certainly the first Target book I ever bought, and was probably the first book I ever bought in which text took precedence over pictures. I have vague memories of reading the listings in the back of this and being surprised to note that Target had published novels of Doctor Who stories I hadn't seen on the box; so it began here for me. Unfortunately, I have no memories - vague or otherwise - of actually reading this and may have found it all a little dry, what with it not being off the telly.
Dinsdale wisely took the position that the best way to address children is to speak to them as though they are adults, because they can already do all that where's the dolly gone? shit and it encourages them to keep up. The Story of the Loch Ness Monster is therefore only a children's book in terms of the occasional aside to explain a few of the longer words, which is as it should be. Regarding the proposed existence of Nessie, I don't actually have a water horse in this race, and Dinsdale was one of those properly educated good eggs who had spent time in the RAF - as opposed to some lone nutcase - so he presents what there is to present on an even keel, by necessity concentrating on investigations of the hypothetical monster rather than the monster itself. The book is interesting and readable - if not exactly mind-blowing to someone reading it nearly fifty years later - and only the later chapters listing different types of tripod which might be purchased by the budding monster hunter get a bit chewy, somewhat revealing how little there was to actually write about regarding Nessie back in 1973.
Still, I finished the thing suspecting that there probably was a Loch Ness monster or monsters, regardless of more recent puritanical rationalists insisting it can only have been an escaped circus elephant seen reflected from the planet Venus; and it didn't make me irritable, so that has to be a plus.
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