A recollection from childhood

Some time in my childhood, maybe when I was about ten (i.e. 1953) I was given the book "The magic of Matt" to read. I think it was a gift. It really amused me and I re-read it from time to time. I think it was a new book that had just become available

It was set in Jamaica (where the author had lived) and consisted of stories about a young Jamaican boy ("Matt") who had a habit of outsmarting the adults in his environment.

It would all be politically incorrect these days as the black adults in the stories were very stereotyped. And the book does now seem to have been forgotten: Which is sad considering the entertainment it can give. The only mention of it that I can find on the net is:

"Between 1934 and 1950, [Alan] Hyder published around 130 short stories in the London newspaper The Evening News. Many of these stories are about a ten-year old Jamaican boy named Matthias Nehemiah Martingue but called Matt, and twenty-six stories were collected in Matt (London: Quality Press, 1944). A further fifty stories were collected in The Magic of Matt (London: P.R. Gawthorn, 1950), which includes seventeen rather crude illustrations by the author. The dust-wrapper blurb notes the ingredients of the stories are "humour and pathos, thrills and adventures, fantasy and romance, with a slight salting of horror." Jack Adrian characterized Matt as "lively, mischievous, and irrepressible" and his stories as "knockabout tales in which Matt either gets the better of fat constable Mermian, or gets whupped by his (equally fat) Mammy."

Some wicked person should acquire a copy and put it online. I no longer have it. My mother (now deceased) threw out all my books after I left home -- to my great irritation.