An excellent little book that I picked up in my charity shop was that of Wilbur Smith’s Cry Wolf.

An elderly American man was chatting to me one day (while his wife was trying on clothes). He asked me if I had ever read Edgar Allen Poe or Wilbur Smith? I replied I hadn’t heard of either.

He expressed shock. However some days later I spotted a Wilbur Smith paperback on our book shelf and I picked it up and was very pleasantly surprised how well written it was. It was a bit of a page turner!

The book was actually written in 1976 but it was set just before WW2 just before the invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) by Italy.

The front cover has an illustrated picture of an attractive blonde woman leaning out of the top of what looks like a military tank. The synopsis at the back is simple too:

‘Two men, one girl and a batch of decrepit armoured cars…running the gauntlet of an Ethiopia in the grip of the wolf of Rome.’

The wolf of Rome is a reference to Benito Mussolini the fascist dictator of Italy at the time.

The book starts in Dar Es Salam which is a city in Tanzania. Jake, is an American engineer who has left a stable company job to buy 5 armoured cars which he intends to fix up and sell on at a profit. His dream is to return to the USA and work on his inventions. During the auction Jake runs into Gareth who is sort of a roguish English ‘gentleman’ who likes his creature comforts but never has the money to pay for them. Both men get emotional and there is a bidding war where the cars sell for vastly higher than they are worth. Jake gets them in the end. Gareth initially tries to approach and swindle Jake with fake cheques however Gareth and Jake ultimately decide to team up combining Gareth’s sales and contacts with Jake’s practical engineering prowess.

The two attend a meeting with some Ethiopian royalty where the Ethiopians agree to Gareth’s sales price as long as Gareth and Jake deliver the cars personally to Ethiopia. 

The female on the front cover is the American journalist Vicky who is sort of the moral compass of the group, all the while fighting off both Jake’s and Gareth’s advances.

Cry Wolf is an interesting book as it is set in a totally different era and a totally different landscape. That of pre WW2 when Britain was the empire that the sun never set on. The armoured cars are all Bentley and Rolls Royce as opposed to the Japanese Toyota and German Volkswagen of today. The mounted machine guns are Vickers. The Royal Navy patrols the seas on the east coast of Africa stopping the transport of arms. The League of Nations acts as a sort of ineffectual United Nations issuing the arms embargoes against Ethiopia. The Ethiopian prince was educated, like Gareth, at Eton in England, adding to an atmosphere of English soft power.

Obviously for a man who lives in the Scottish Highlands like myself the African continent is an exotic and interesting place for an adventure story. At one point a Lion attacks Jake and he manages to kill it with a rock in defence. The desert is hot and the gang have to manage the cooling of the cars in addition to other dangers and factors. The gang also have an Ethiopian guide which adds to the exoticness and glamour of the whole story.

Overall I would say this book is a page turner with loveable characters in an interesting era and setting (somewhat like Harry Potter).