South American Mission

Peter Grey wrote the 12-book Kit Hunter series. He was born in London in 1918, and worked as a journalist and editor before becoming fiction editor of Girl in the early 1950s. He contributed several stories to Girl before writing the Kit Hunter series. He was an editor for Hurlton Press and features director of Buckingham Press Ltd as well as editing Readers’ Review.

The Kit Hunter books were written over a relatively short period: 1959–1961, with the first two being reprinted in Girl, illustrated by Harry Lindfield. The series has lovely illustrated boards (see right), though the rather lurid dustjackets aren’t to everyone’s taste. The original dustjackets have an interesting mistake: you’re told to travel the world with Kit Hunter and coal-black Dixie, but in the first book we are told Dixie was the name of the pony Colonel Hampden bought for a young Kit, who had died prior to the start of these stories.

The series is not a hard one to find, or expensive. If you want to collect a pony series quickly and cheaply this is probably one of the best bets.

Some titles (I’m not sure if all) were republished in the early 1970s as part of the Redwing library with pictorial boards. They were republished in paperback in the early 1980s, and some have been re-published with laminated pictorial boards in the 1980s as with two stories per volume.

Finding the books
All are relatively easy to find.

Sources
Many thanks to Hannah Fleetwood for information on the series. Thank you to Dawn Harrison, Konstanze Allsopp, and Helen Millar for photographs.
Steve Holland’s article on Peter Grey
Summaries of the books