The Hungry Tiger of Oz, by Ruth Plumly Thompson – I reread this book for its centennial, and as usual, it was a fun experience. The adventure of the famous feline starts out quite similarly to Cowardly Lion, not only with someone wanting to capture the big cat, but the culprit specifically being the ruler of a Middle Eastern style kingdom. The Pasha of Rash, “pasha” being a title for a high official in the Ottoman Empire and Rash a small country in Ev, wants the Tiger to come to his court to eat his prisoners. The cat initially agrees, figuring that eating dangerous criminals wouldn’t affect his conscience, but he soon finds out that the Pasha orders execution for very petty reasons. It’s interesting that the Tiger’s dilemma here is about whether he should eat live people in general, not specifically fat babies. I suppose that would have had the potential to be way more disturbing. Anyway, the Tiger is locked up in a courtyard, but he manages to escape with some of the prisoners, including the young Prince Evered, or Reddy for short, the rightful ruler of the country.

The rest of the book is largely about their search for the three Rash Rubies, possibly based on the Pearls of Pingaree from Rinkitink. They find them largely through coincidence, but that’s often the way things go in Oz stories. The travels and characters are still enjoyable and inventive. Betsy Bobbin arrives in Rash with Carter Green, a vegetable man who’s made of vegetables, and has the habit of taking root if he stays in one place for too long.

He’s quite pleasant and entertaining, and is the subject of some of the best pictures.

There’s also an Airman named Atmos Fere, a balloon-like person like the Loons of Loonville, but with a bit more development. He’s an explorer from a land in the clouds who wants to prove that there’s life at the bottom of the air.

The first person he sees when getting down there is Ozma, so he takes her away as a specimen, and she somewhat uncharacteristically pops him with a pin in order to get away, then feels really bad about it afterwards. I found the plot device of time running faster in the sky to be rather weird, especially as it never works that way in any other airbound country in the series. I have to suspect it was just to make the times work out for Ozma and Atmos’ shorter journey to coincide with Betsy and the Tiger’s longer one, but I’m sure that could have been handled in some other way. On the evil side, there’s the Pasha’s scribe Ippty, who has a pen, pencil, eraser, stick of ceiling wax, candle, and pen knife as fingers. At one point he sharpens the pencil with the knife, so I have to wonder what happens when he reaches the bottom. Maybe it grows back.

After the prisoners escape Rash, they come to the underground Down Town. There was a Baum Bugle article by Patrick Maund that explained how this episode could best be understood as playing on the views of really young children who hear about their fathers going to work to make money without really knowing how it works. The Queen of Down, Fi Nance, is literally made of money, but implies that she wasn’t always.

This kind of fits with Carter’s origin story, as he turns into vegetables by eating too many of them, and “I’m not made of money” and the idea of turning into something if you eat a lot of it are both expressions used with kids.  Down Town is a bit contradictory in some ways, as the characters encounter a sign saying the place is “for the daddies” after the Queen tells Betsy she should become a cash girl. And for a town that’s so obsessed with making money, it appears that all the tools needed for various trades can be picked for free from the Indus Tree, and nobody tries to stop our heroes from escaping even though they have an outstanding bill.

Next, they come to the Nome Kingdom for the first appearance in a Thompson book of Kaliko, who here is generally friendly but is goaded by his chamberlain Guph into mischief and violence. Kaliko appointed Guph to that position in Tik-Tok, although Rinkitink had a different chamberlain named Klik. Then the characters visit Immense City, home of the Big Wigs, giants who are the size of normal humans except when they wear their magical wigs. Since everything else there is giant, including the animals that don’t appear to be wearing wigs, there might be an untold story as to how it came to be populated by people who aren’t naturally that big. The Princess of this city keeps the Tiger as a pet, seeing him as a kitten, and is unintentionally rough with him. It’s funny that her name is Elma, as she’s similar to Elmyra on Tiny Toon Adventures in that respect.

I’ve written before about Thompson’s tendency to essentially pinball her characters around the map to get them where she needs them to be, and to include fast transportation that doesn’t always make much sense. Betsy and Carter found themselves on the edge of the Deadly Desert after being caught on a winding road. She later says it’s “near the Emerald City,” but since she hears Carter from her room in Ozma’s palace, I have to wonder when they left the city proper. A pair of Quick Sandals takes them across the desert to Rash, then leaves on its own accord. The courtyard in the castle of Rash just happens to have a cavern under it leading to a tunnel that goes far underground.

The travelers leave Down Town through what’s labeled as a subway to Up Town, but there’s no train, just a passage with a lot of turns. It dead ends at the Cave Inn, which caves in and deposits them in the Lost Labyrinth of the Nome Kingdom. I have to wonder if there might have actually been a subway and an inn there at one point. Perhaps sour relations between Down and the Nomes resulted in their shutting down? And Rash has Hurry-Canes that can presumably take anyone anywhere, even across the desert to Oz. I also have to wonder about how the book ends with the Tiger being relieved that none of his friends found out he went to Rash willingly, when there are some indications in other books that the Oz books themselves exist within the fairyland, so it’s likely they’ll find out eventually.