When I was about nine or ten I had a book on fish. It was probably called Fish. I don't remember much about the contents, but I do remember the cover. It was a drawing of an underwater scene and, although perhaps not strictly accurate in the way in which it grouped so many different species into one small section of ocean, it managed to convey the rich variety of marine life. It was in the style used by educational publications like Look and Learn and World of Wonder, done by artists such as C.L Doughty and Angus McBride. In the foreground of the picture was a shark. It was executing a U-turn, away from the bottom right corner, and in this particular movement the artist had managed to convey both a sense of speed and savagery. I remember taking the book to school and copying out the picture in a Friday afternoon art class. It was the first in a small library of books about the ocean that I accumulated. One was called The Wonderful World of Oceans, and another was about sharks. I would sit in my bedroom - like Chief Brody in his den - flipping through the pages and being both fascinated and horrified by the pictures.
I also had a big collection of Biggles books on my shelf. I don't remember any shark-related incidents in any of them, but there must have been some in Biggles in the South Seas. Another series
that I read avidly was the Adventure stories by Willard Price, and there were some harrowing shark encounters in Underwater Adventure. Herge's Tintin books had some memorable moments: in Red Rackham's Treasure Captain Haddock almost gets his hand taken off by a shark, and Tintin dives for the treasure in a shark-shaped submarine. Disappointingly, The Red Sea Sharks does not live up to the promise of its title, although at the end it does have a shark swallow a mine and blow up. There was another exploding shark in the original 1966 Batman movie, a camp spin-off of the camp TV show. As a kid I took the heroic antics of the crime-fighting duo at face value and missed all the satirical signifiers.
Having outgrown the boys' own adventures of Tintin and Biggles and Batman and Robin, I moved on to the more adult gung-ho exploits of Alistair Maclean, and Ian Fleming. There were sharks aplenty in the novel Live and Let Die, but in the film they played a supporting role to the crocodiles. Nevertheless, they did get a Tarot card to themselves on the movie's poster (surely one of the best of Bond), which also adorned the cover of my film-tie-in paperback copy. Thunderball had Sean Connery swimming with sharks even though he was separated from them by a clearly visible Plexiglas partition. In For Your Eyes Only Roger Moore and Carole Bouquet are dragged through the Aegean as shark bait in a scene that is lifted from the novel Live and Let Die. Timothy Dalton threw a crooked federal agent to the sharks in Licence to Kill, whilst arch-villain Stromberg used them to deal with under-performance in his organisation in The Spy Who Loved Me.
Movie scenes involving sharks have always fascinated me. The only thing I remember from Disney's The Swiss Family Robinson was the shark attack at the beginning. I have vivid memories of a scene from a film about a group of castaways in which a man sacrifices himself to a pack of sharks in order to save his friends. There was also an episode of Skippy, which involved a young boy stranded on a capsized boat in shark-infested waters. Probably the most enduring celluloid shark moment I can remember prior to seeing Jaws was not from a film but from a trailer. I have no memory of the title, but it was the early Seventies and it must have been some sort of Roger Corman exploitation flick. It was about a group of hippies on a backpacking trip to South America. Their crazy hedonist antics incur the wrath of a demon on whose burial ground they have pitched their tents. I remember there were some cheesy shots of girls in bikinis grinding to a rock beat and the Voice Over Man intoned, 'They danced on his grave'. Cut to a shot of a decomposed body rising up from its tomb. There was also a scene where a young woman goes skinny-dipping in a lake and is attacked by a shark. I don't know why, but that trailer is one of those weird insubstantial pieces of pop culture that has managed to stay in the active part of my brain for nearly forty years.
In the movies of my childhood memories, sharks were always portrayed in the same way. The ominous shot of a fin slicing through the water and then an insert of real shark footage. Before Jaws, I don't think there was ever a POV shot to indicate the presence of a predator. But even if the cardboard fin was not quite convincing, it always managed to make me shudder at the thought of what might be below the surface.
