Raymond Sheppard and Alexander Lake in Everybody's

 

Everybody's 21 August 1954 p30

Alexander Lake (29 July 1893 - 25 December 1961) was born in Chicago, Illinois and moved to South Africa with his family in 1908. Due to his great marksmanship skills developed at school in a shooting team, he was hired as a meat hunter by the trader Nicobar Jones. This job took him to Portuguese East Africa, Tanganyika, Kenya, Uganda, Northern Rhodesia and German Southwest Africa. Within a couple of years he was a fully-fledged and licensed white hunter. ~Taken from Shakari Connection

I've been looking at the drawings accompanying Alexander Lake's run in Everybody's magazine, appearing in 1954 and which are all reproduced below. Lake, (whose middle name appears to be James) wrote mainly about hunting in Africa and is quoted with Jim Corbett, - unfairly in my opinion as the latter was a conservationist not a hunter per se - when writings like these are cited. After being written and published in English, many of his stories were published in Spanish and Italian throughout the later half of the fifties and the sixties.

In the first of 5 instalments, titled for the magazine as "The jungle is my business", Alexander Lake's second book, published that year, African Adventures is adapted with accompanying images drawn by Raymond Sheppard. The headline on the cover "by one of Africa's greatest hunters".

Everybody's 24 July 1954 (pp14-15)

The first part appeared in Everybody's under a cover about Wilfred Pickles' popular show "Ask Pickles".  Everybody's 24 July 1954 (pp14-15, 16) shows Sheppard's illustration of drunken apes. "By mid-morning nearly every adult ape was staggering about hopelessly. My Basuto boys leaped among the helpless drinkers" reads the caption. The following page shows a cropped image of the drum from which the apes are drinking. 

Everybody's 24 July 1954 (p.16)

The second episode  has the dramatic lion leaping

Everybody's 31 July 1954, pp30-31

Everybody's 31 July 1954  has the fantastic title "Mussolini shot a lion he never saw!" with a corresponding clue in Sheppard's illustration as to what the title means. A lion in full flight races towards a cameraman as Alexander Lake raises his rifle - some filming! The caption reads: "I shot the lion in mid-jump. I heard the thud of the bullet as it hit, but he never faltered".  The story tells of how Lake signed up to help the photographer (Gennaro Boggio) for the Italian Ministry of Education get a great shot of a lion  being killed by the mighty hunter Il Duce, Mussolini without him being anywhere nearby. Lake's figure was to be dubbed in Italian and not shown as that might give the game away!
 

Everybody's 7 August 1954, p.31

Everybody's 7 August 1954 has another episode - this time called "Quicksands of death" in which Kees Jonker, an entomologist in "the Gaboon district of French Equatorial Africa" has to conquer his fear - of all things - of insects! When he accidentally encounters a giant West African spider on his face, he screams, runs pulling it off, and heads straight into the quicksand at which the men are camped. Thus we see the picture drawn by Sheppard. “I dug my feet in, leaned forward and pulled... I pulled until my ears ached...I heard Jonker yelling but he seemed miles away”

Everybody's 14 August 1954, pp.30-31

In Everybody's 14 August 1954, pp.30-31 we see another adventure in the series "The Jungle is my business" called "Drug madness in the Congo". We firstly have an image stretched across pp30-31 showing the caption “Bwana”, Wabo hesitated then blurted angrily: “If you wish it, I will put a spear through the back of this Bwana Poullet”. Lake is sat at the table as his helper opens the door and light floods in on Lake. The second picture is of Alexander Lake with a rifle on a horse approaching a snarling dog and vulture. The caption tells us: "Jenssen's big white boarhound fought to keep the obscene vultures away". I'm surprised the vulture is still sitting there with such a ferocious attacker near by.

Everybody's 14 August 1954, p.30

The last story, (Everybody's 21 August 1954 p30) taken from his book African Adventure, is called "The Man-Killer Dogs of Africa" and the image appears at the top of this article with a caption: "Those animals I'd dropped were torn to bits by the pack as Faure led on. But there were only five shots left – and twenty-five dogs" and shows a man holding high, his box of morphine and Lake aiming at the dogs. Thankfully Sheppard was not a literalist who had to draw 25 dogs!

Alexander Lake

 ALEXANDER LAKE BIBLIOGRAPHY

• "Corner in Apes", Short Stories September 25 1935
  "Blood of the Snake", Short Stories October 10 1935
• "Man-Eater!", Jungle Stories, Summer, 1941
• "Pygmy Peril", Jungle Stories, Spring 1942 
• "The Thunder God Burst", Jungle Stories, Summer 1942 
• "Killer Elephant", Argosy December 1951
• "The Truth About African Hunting", Argosy August 1952
• Killers in Africa : the truth about animals lying in wait and hunters lying in print. London: W.H. Allen, 1953
• African Adventures London: W.H. Allen, 1954
• Hunter's choice; true stories of African adventure. Garden City, N.Y.,: Doubleday,  1954
• "Boots in the Face" (with Nicobar James), Adventure August 1955
• "The Monster of the Congo" (with Nicobar Jones), Adventure September 1956
  

I don't know if it's the same Alexander Lake who later produced two books containing short stories of prayers being answered but I suspect they are one and the same.

• Your prayers are always answered. Kingswood: The World's Work, 1957 
• You need never walk alone. New York: Gilbert Press, 1959

From: Killers in Africa (1953):

ALEXANDER LAKE spent much of his boyhood in Africa, where his father was a missionary. An excellent shot, Mr. Lake was persuaded to turn to professional meat hunting after Nicobar Jones, one of the world's greatest hunters, had seen him make an unusually high score with a rifle. Mr. Lake became an expert on animal habits and a thorn in the flesh of nature hunters after scouting the African jungle for twelve years. He has written countless articles and stories under various pen names for many national magazines. [Emboldening mine]

This appeared in:

How Your Prayers Are Always Answered came to be written
IN 1910, when I was seventeen, the South African colonies joined to become the Union of South Africa. Louis Botha was appointed National Premier by the King of England. The question of a native policy for the new Union was vital and pressing, and Botha, and other prominent South Africans such as Generals Jan Smuts and Christian De Wet, occasionally came to the Johannesburg home of my missionary father, Dr. John G. Lake, for advice.
These men always knelt and prayed before starting discussions, ending the closed each meeting with a prayer of thanks. Sometimes they'd sit for a while, telling stories of answers to prayer. Some of the answers were so remarkable—and made so deep an impression on me—that I began a life-long hobby of collecting prayer stories.
Whenever—anywhere in the world—I hear of some outstanding answer to prayer, I check the story; interview all concerned; dig out any data connected with it; write detailed notes and file them away.
From a collection of more than 2,000 such stories—all remarkable, fascinating and inspiring—I selected those that seemed to me to have the simplicity, directness, and the human and spiritual qualities so needed by people of this seemingly chaotic and insecure world of today.

I suspect we are yet to discover many of Lake's pen-names but hopefully this gives future researchers a starting point.

Thanks as usual to various websites and Phil Stephenson-Payne's site