Foiling The Death-Sellers. [And:] Fighting The Ju-Ju. [Bound with 16 further numbers in The Boys’ Torch Adventure Library].

Notes

A bound collection of boys' adventure stories, including two scarce early works from Geoffrey Trease, published around the time of his 1934 debut children's novel, Bows Against the Barons. Trease had as a young man 'scraped a living for two years from Grub Street literary work... pouring out articles and short stories at a guinea or so a time' (ODNB) but then, by his telling, experienced an epiphany about children's literature upon finding a Soviet book for young readers explaining Stalin's five year plan. Bows Against the Barons, a socialist retelling of Robin Hood, was the result, an attempt to move on from the boy's adventure story where, he recounts in his autobiography, 'there had been no development since my own childhood. Such stories still implied that war was glorious, that the British were superior to foreigners, [etc]' (Whiff of Burnt Boats, 1971).
The stories here, though contemporaneous with his new vision, are more mixed in their politics: 'Foiling The Death-Sellers', number 65 in the series,features a young South American boy who foils a military-industrial plot with the help of an English engineer friend and succeeds in accessing higher education, while 'Fighting The Ju-Ju', number 80 in the series, is a standard colonialist yarn about Geno, a Nigerian boy who attends a school run by white missionaries, and upon his return to his village is able, thanks to his rational Christianity, to overthrow the backward and primitive superstitions of his tribesmen.
The other stories included are a broken run of Boys' Torch Adventure Library issues between nos. 67 and 80, with a full list available on request. Ephemeral by nature, these publications are understandably institutionally scarce, with the BL holding an unspecified run and individual issues held by a handful of institutions: the two Trease stories are Cambridge only on Library Hub.