Ronald M. Helmer

Novels

Stag Party (Nonfiction 180 Pages)

Helmer traveled to New Zealand in 1953 and spent time in the bush for several months and wrote this book about the professional deer hunters he met while there. Stag Party was published in 1964 and became a best seller. It went to two printings in hard cover and one in paperback and was still sold thirty years after being first published. Helmer hunted with a 19-year-old lad by the name of Barry Crump who went on to become famous in his own right as a best-selling author of humourous semi-autobiographical books about life in the New Zealand bush. Helmer's account of his adventures with Crump gives this book one of its main flavours.

Helmer tells of his first days when he becomes acquainted with Barry Crump and meets some of the other men who are working in the Urewera rainforest. Crump tells him about the life he has come to know in his own inimitable way. Helmer is acquainted with wild life he has not known previously and introduces Crump to experiences he has previously only heard about.

Stag Party is a crackling account of the doings of Government Deer Shooting Party Number Six — in the bush and in the city. Canadian Ron Helmer takes you into the Urewera country with the deer hunters, up razorbacks, across roaring streams, through back-breaking bush. You look along his rifle sights at graceful deer and savage boars and you see big rainbow trout lazing in the river pools.

You wonder at the grandeur of the New Zealand wilds, described so freshly and arrestingly. And you meet, memorably, a New Zealand bush character and highly successful author, Barry Crump.

In the descriptions of deer killing the dialogue is simply the talk of expert men going about their work: laconic, sometimes boisterous, coarse. There is no exaggeration; Helmer is 'spot on'.

New Zealanders like to hear outsiders' opinions of their way of life. Helmer has seen a tough, self-reliant bunch of New Zealanders at work and in his writing shows that he admires them. He's not so enthusiastic about officialdom, and in one part of the book he describes the row he had with one of the department types. The reader can judge the rights and wrongs this little affair.

But Helmer has written a stimulating book about New Zealand life. And, as one of the shooters might have said to their Canadian cobber, You'll do us, Canada!

Helmer took a rifle and a camera into the bush and most of the pictures in this book were taken by him.

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Peddler in the Patch (Fiction 533 Pages)

Matthew Middleton is a Canadian struggling to save his firm from bankruptcy during a slump in the oil industry. Angela Haverstock is beautiful and blonde, a rising star with the Royal ballet until her career is ruined by an automobile accident. Unaware of the dark side to Angela's nature, Matthew is drawn inexorably into an affair which gradually matures from lust into passion.

Peddler in the Patch follows their torrid affair through hotel rooms, wooded glades and cramped flats to a shocking climax when the demons that haunt Angela come to the surface. Ron Helmer's novel is a fast-moving story of greed, jealousy, violent death, witchcraft and sexual passion.