This review first appeared on SciFiandScary.com
‘Danger: Dinosaurs!’ is a fun curio, a young adult sci fi novel from the 1950s by a writer who went on to be hugely successful in another genre. That writer is one of my favourites, Evan Hunter. Hunter wrote the superb ‘87th Precinct’ series of police procedural novels under the pseudonym Ed McBain between 1956 and 2005. ‘Danger: Dinosaurs!’ was published in 1953 under another pen name Richard Marsten. Under his real name, Hunter also wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’ as well as ‘The Blackboard Jungle.’ 'Danger:Dinosaurs!' was out of print for a long time, but is now available again on Kindle.

This is a book with time travel and dinosaurs. If I’d happened across it as a kid I’m pretty confident I would have loved it. As an adult it’s easier to see its flaws, but there’s still a lot to enjoy here. The setup is simple – in the future we have developed the ability to travel back in time. Such jaunts, called ‘Time Slips’ are available to the wealthy for recreation, as well as being used for scientific purposes. I really liked the analogy that Hunter uses to describe how time travel works. Time, we are told, is like a record playing on a turntable. We are the stylus, being led through time by the grooves in the record. The Time Slip technology allows the needle to skip back over the grooves to a previous time.

The book is about one such trip, back to the jurassic age. Naturally, there are a couple of shady characters on the trip – the brilliantly named Brock Gardel and his almost as brilliantly named boss, Dirk Masterson. Masterson’s niece, Denise, and servants Arthur and Pete are also in the party, which is led by guide Chuck Spencer and his young brother Owen.

The Time Slip rules state that they can’t take any guns with them (they can only “hunt” the dinosaurs with cameras) and they have to stay within a set radius of their initial landing point. Within minutes of arriving in the past Masterson has inexplicably driven a jeep into the protective force field, destroying it. This sets in motion a chain of events that sees the characters stranded and fighting for their lives.

There’s a lot of what you’d expect based on that synopsis. Stegosaurus stampedes, vicious Allosaurs and plenty of treachery from Masterson and Gardel. There’s also a massive time paradox-based twist. I won’t give it away but it’s fascinating because Hunter interprets the rules of time travel in almost exactly the opposite way to what we’ve become accustomed to in the fifty plus years since the book was written. As a result, the twist doesn’t make much sense (to a modern reader at least), but Hunter does get a lot of mileage out of it and it definitely changes the tone of the second half of the book from a straight up adventure to something more speculative.

The writing isn’t great, certainly not up to the standard of Hunter’s later work, but he does keep the plot moving and it’s a fun, quick read. He throws in some commentary on capitalism and racism too, which adds to the depth a little. Overall then, this is an entertaining throwback. It’s fast-paced if a little stilted at times, and the different take on time travel is interesting, if not entirely convincing. ( )