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A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery
by Jennie Erin Smith
Tortoises disappear from a Madagascar reserve and reappear in the Bronx Zoo. A dead iguana floats in a jar, awaiting its unveiling in a Florida court. A viper causes mayhem from Ethiopia to Virginia. In Stolen World, Jennie Erin Smith takes the reader on an unforgettable journey, a dark adventure over five decades and six continents.
In 1965, Hank Molt, a young cheese salesman from Philadelphia, reinvented himself as a "specialist dealer in rare fauna," traveling the world to collect exquisite reptiles for zoos and museums. By the end of the decade that followed, new endangered species laws had turned Molt into a convicted smuggler, and an unrepentant one, who went on to provide many of the same rare reptiles to many of the same institutions, covertly.
But Molt soon found a rival in Tommy Crutchfield, a Florida carpet salesman with every intention of usurping Molt as the most accomplished reptile smuggler in the country. Like Molt, Crutchfield had modeled himself after an earlier generation of natural-history collectors celebrated for their service to science, an ideal that, for Molt and Crutchfield, eclipsed the realities of the new wildlife-protection laws. Zoo curators, caught between a desire for rare animals and the conservation-minded focus of their institutions, became the smugglers' antagonists in court but also their best customers, sometimes simultaneously.
Crutchfield forged ties with a criminally inclined Malaysian wildlife trader and emerged a millionaire, beloved by some of the finest zoos in the world. Molt, following a string of inventive but disastrous smuggling schemes in New Guinea, was reduced to hanging around Crutchfield’s Florida compound, plotting Crutchfield's demise. The fallout from their feud would result in a major federal investigation with tentacles in Germany, Madagascar, Holland, and Malaysia. And yet even after prison, personal ruin, and the depredations of age, Molt and Crutchfield never stopped scheming, never stopped longing for the snake or lizard that would earn each his rightful place in a world that had forgotten them - or rather, had never recognized them to begin with.
"Starred Review. Very disturbing and very entertaining chronicle of reptile smugglers...the subculture's brazen shenanigans make for a convoluted, fascinating tale." - Publisher's Weekly
"If Darwin, Dostoyevsky, and George Lucas had collaborated on a novel, it might have resembled Stolen World. But it's all true. The characters of Henry Molt and Tommy Crutchfield are Indiana Jones wannabes rewritten by Monty Python, as bizarre, dark, funny, and irresistible as any of the nobler yet loonier protagonists of fiction. Jennie Erin Smith has unearthed a riveting tale of the collision of the old world of zoological adventuring and the new world of Greenpeace and political correctness. And her writing serves it up superbly, the equal to every fantastic element of this wondrous, strange, endearing story of human folly." - Peter Nichols, author of A Voyage for Madmen
"The snakes in the grass are not necessarily reptiles in Jennie Erin Smith's marvelous book. They're smugglers in love with wild life in all of its manifestations, and you'll find yourself rooting for them against the zooreaucrats who lust after the same beautiful and often deadly beasts. Smith conveys this stolen world with - dare I say it? - a viperish wit." - Will Blythe, author of To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever
This information about Stolen World was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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