Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Africa Demise of Peter Hathaway Capstick?

5sdad, if you ever do run across it I'd give my sons right nut for a copy <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />.

Dave.

Elwood1, I agree. I admit that I haven't read Hemingway and very litte of Ruark but can't imagine either of them could almost make me feel the bite of a teetse the way Capstick can. Boddington, altough a fine writer, cannot.

Dave.

There was a big discussion about Capstick sometime on the gunwriters forum I believe. Any way you slice it Pete Capstick is an original and will be missed by all who read his work. If everything he reported didn't happen exactly as written it should have. Writers of his caliber are extremely rare.

Nothing against any of the others, but when Hemingway describes riding back to camp in the car, mixing whiskey and water in a canteen cup, you can smell the night and taste the steel cup. Not now, because it's October, but maybe three months hence, you really should get acquainted with Papa.

Start with "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and finish with "The Old Man and the Sea", and read the war stories in between. A man who can win the Novel Prize for literature with a story about a fishing trip ("The Old Man and the Sea") can put the sentences together.

Carlos,
That was also a great movie with exciting scenes of shooting at charging lions while double rifles were being tossed back and forth between the gunbearer and shooter.

What PHC did was resurrect the African safari industry with the interest in going there and doing it generated by his books. That was unique.

jim

5sdad - I remember this story well. Capstick had an affinity for BB guns. He was hunting by moonlight, but over bait. As I recall the bait was the remains of double Whooper extra cheese hold the onion. I recently corresponded with Ken Wilson of Sportsmen on Film who remarked that his widow Fiona may be working on Peter�s autobiography.

If I remember correctly PHC wrote briefly for G&A,the last page kind of thing.The one that started me as a fan was also an "air gun" article.The backdrop was in his Florida home.The "weapon" involved was one of those BB machine guns that was powered by a freon gas cylinder.They were widely adsvertised at the time.They were fairly inexpensive,and so were freon cannisters .This was before the environmental hazards of freon were known.The quarry was dragonflys.It was so well written I never failed to read anything I came accross written by him again.Have bought and treasure all his books.
For 17 years I lived in the town next to the one he grew up in,have often tramped and hunted the same woods he did, although long after he had left.In my opinion , it's not just that his excellent writing helped revive interest in African hunting among the likes of us that was his most important contribution,but that he made the readers feel so good about it.I invagled a couple of non hunting friends to read some of his work.No question about it,they didn't become hunters,but they had a changed opinion of hunting and hunters afterward.
As did Ruark before him, he had a way of conveying the "rightness" of it.....something most non hunters never really understand.

Steve: If you have all his books, that specific story is in one of them, I believe it in 'Death in a Lonely Land." BTW, there are little if any hazards associated with Freon, especially that GUFF about the ozone and global warming. jorge