(1879-1940)
The author of richly entertaining and imaginative adventure fiction, Talbot Mundy came relatively late in life to the storytelling trade, after many years as a globe-wandering drifter and reprobate. He was born in London, England, named William Lancaster Gribbon. From birth, he would claim, he had a “thirst for adventure.” His parents, he recalled, “destined me for the church or the law, I forget which, but I know they gave me the choice of two evils and that I chose a third that they never even dreamed of.” He drifted and took odd jobs in England and Germany as a teenager and then, some time around his 21st birthday, he secured passage to India and worked as a colonial merchant. Years of exotic experiences followed, in India and then Africa, which Mundy would subsequently write about with exuberant enthusi-asm—and practiced mendacity, describing his lordly life as a warrior and big-game sportsman. In fact, his life abroad was anything but regal. He was in this period a con man, town clerk, bigamist, exposed adulterer, and jailbird. In British East Africa the local natives, annoyed by his shifty antics and his sexual alliances with tribesmen’s wives, gave him a Swahili nickname, Makundu Viazi—White Arse. An English police superintendent in the port of Kisumu wrote to one of the magazines that featured Talbot Mundy’s work and recalled his knowledge of the man: “I first met him at Kisumu in 1904 when he had been posing as Sir Rupert Harvey, Baronet, and had stung a lot of business firms! I arrested him on a warrant from the High Court and he was given six months with hard labor.”
Eventually, with a new wife and a new name—Talbot Mundy—he arrived on American shores. In New York he immediately fell in with a rough crowd and was beaten and robbed by thugs. While recovering from the skull fracture he received, Mundy tried his hand at writing. He sold some articles to English and American magazines and then sold a sketch about hunting boar in India to the popular pulp magazine Adventure for its February 1911 issue. This was to be the beginning of a long and glorious relationship between the prestigious pulp and the colorful writer. Although Mundy had had more than his share of adventures in real life, most were of such a sordid nature that he cleaned them up for the pages of Adventure, so that editor Arthur Hoffman’s introduction of Mundy was filled with half-truths and lies:
The 1917 edition of The Winds of the World by Talbot Mundy, known for his exotic, adventurous tales
Shake hands with Mr. Mundy—there is only time for me to whisper these words in your ear. An Englishman, India, China, the Himalayas, Persian Gulf, the Boer War . . . elephant hunting, pigsticking, single-handed yachting, two campaigns against African tribes . . .
Mundy pursued his new profession, and sold more stories. By 1912 he had published his first novel, Rung Ho!, an adventure story of India. In 1914 the Bobbs-Merrill Company published perhaps his most successful and most famous novel, King—Of the Khyber Rifles, a tale of adventure and intrigue on the Raj’s troubled northwest frontier. More than 40 topics, novellas, and serials followed. Mundy worked in what was then a thriving area of popular literature, exotic adventures of a sort H. Rider haggard had pioneered, and British colonial and regimental settings like those by Rudyard Kipling. Mundy’s best novels in this vein—King, Om, The Devil’s Guard (Ramsden in magazine form)—were exhilarating tales with fascinating characters and vivid word pictures of the exotic East. His work was further distinguished by its lack of colonial conformism, the sort of cant and racism endemic to British Empire stories of the time. Mundy’s recurring cast of Orientals—the crafty babu Chullunder Ghose, the Mata Hari-like Spy Yashmini, the fearless warrior Narayan Singh, among them—are at least as fully and sympathetically drawn as his assorted European Secret Service aces, regimental commanders, and great white hunters.
In the mid-’20s, Mundy began writing more expansive historical fiction, the saga of Tros of Samothrace, a Greek adventurer and the nemesis of Julius Caesar, who sailed the seas of the ancient world in a magnificent super-galley called the Li-afail. The original account, serialized in the pages of Adventure, totaled half a million words, and was as pleasurable a reading experience as any the
The 1917 edition of The Winds of the World by Talbot Mundy, known for his exotic, adventurous tales pulps ever offered. Mundy’s characterization of Caesar as “a liar, a brute, a treacherous humbug” brought forth a deluge of angry letters from those who disagreed with the writer’s interpretation of history. Mundy wrote back with thousands of words of rebuttal, fanning the flames of this controversy even more. Tros’s exploits were read by such fledgling adventure and fantasy writers as Robert E. howard and Fritz Leiber and would greatly influence the development of the sword-and-sorcery genre. Tros returned in Mundy’s excellent Queen Cleopatra (which, in topic form, preceded publication of Tros of Samothrace), and then in another thunderous adventure epic, The Purple Pirate.
Mundy in later life settled in California and became a devoted adherent of the Theosophist sect. He had been working in radio, writing scripts for the children’s radio series Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy, at the time of his death in 1940.
Works
STORIES
- “Across the Color Line” (1912);
- “America Horns In” (1919)
- “Arabian Night, An” (1913);
- “At Meneuvers” (1913);
- “Babu, The” (1931);
- “Bengal Rebellion” (1935);
- “Big League Miracle, The” (1928);
- “Billy Blain Eats Biscuits” (1916);
- “Black Flag” (1931);
- “Bucket of Drums, A” (1929);
- “Camera” (1934); “Case 13″ (1933);
- “Chaplain of the Mullingars, The” (1912)
- “Chullunder Ghose the Guileless” (1932);
- “Companions in Arms” (1937)
- “Consistent Anyhow” (1930);
- “Cornelia’s Englishman” (1911);
- “Cowards, The” (1912);
- “Damned Old Nigger, The” (1917);
- “Disowned” (1915);
- “Dorg’s Luck” (1912);
- “Dove with a Broken Wing, The” (1915);
- “Drop or Two of White, A” (1916);
- “Elephant Hunting for a Living” (1912);
- “Elephant Waits, The” (1937);
- “Eye Teeth of O’Hara, The” (1931);
- “For the Salt Which He Had Eaten” (1913);
- “For Valor” (1912);
- From Hell Hull and Halifax” (1913);
- “Galbaz and the Game” (1914);
- “Gentility of Ikey Blumendall, The” (1914);
- “Golden River” (1929);
- “Goner, The” (1912);
- “Go, Tell the Czar!” (1914);
- “Heinie Horns into the Game” (1919);
- “Honor” (1912);
- “In Old Narada Fort” (1929);
- “In Winter Quarters” (1912);
- “Jackson Tactics” (1919);
- “Kitty and Cupid” (1911);
- “Lancing of the Whale, The” (1914);
- “Love and War” (1912);
- “MacHas- san Ah” (1915);
- “Man from Poonch, The” (1933);
- “Man on the Mat, The” (1931);
- “Man Who Saw, The” (1912);
- “Milk of the Moon” (1938);
- “Night the Clocks Stopped, The” (1941);
- “No Name” (1915);
- “Nothing Doing” (1914);
- “Oakes Respects an Adversary” (1918);
- “Odds on the Prophet” (1941);
- “One Year Later” (1913);
- “On Terms” (1915);
- “On the Road to Allah’s Heaven” (1928);
- “Payment of Quinn’s Debt, The” (1912);
- “Phantom Battery, The” (1911);
- “Pig Sticking in India” (1911);
- “Private Murdoch’s G. C. M.” (1913);
- “Rabbit” (1912);
- “Red Sea Cargo” (1933);
- “Return of Billy Blain” (1915);
- “Second Rung, The” (1912);
- “Shriek of Dum, The” (1919);
- “Single-Handed Yachting” (1911);
- “Soul of a Regiment, The” (1912) (1916);
- The Queen, God Bless Her” (1912);
- “Temporary Trade in Titles, A” (1915);
- “Three Helios” (1913);
- “Top of the Ladder, The” (1912);
- “Wheel of Destiny, The” (1928)
BOOKS
- Black Light (1930);
- Caesar Dies (1934);
- Caves of Terror, The (1924);
- C.I.D. (1932);
- Cock o’ the North (1929);
- Devil’s Guard, The (1926);
- East and West (1937);
- Eye of Zeitoon (1920);
- Full Moon (1935);
- Gunga Sahib, The (1934);
- Guns of the Gods (1921);
- Her Reputation (1923);
- Hira Singh’s Tale (1918);
- Hundred Days, The (1930);
- I Say Sunrise (1947);
- Ivory Trail, The (1919);
- Jimgrim (1931);
- Jimgrim and Allah’s Peace (1933);
- Jungle Jest (1931);
- King in Check, The (1933);
- King of the Khy-ber Rifles (1916);
- Lost Trooper, The (1931);
- Marriage of Meldrum Strange, The (1930);
- Mystery of Khufu’s Tomb, The (1933);
- Nine Unknown, The (1924);
- Old Ugly Face (1940);
- Om: The Secret of Ahbor Valley (1924);
- Purple Pirate; (1935);
- Queen Cleopatra (1929);
- Red Flame of Erinpura, The (1934);
- Rung Ho! (1914);
- Seventeen Thieves of El-Kalil, The (1935);
- Soul of a Regiment, The (1924);
- Thunder Dragon Gate, The (1937);
- Told in the East (1920);
- Tros of Samothrace (1934);
- Valiant View, The (1939);
- When Trails Were New (1932);
- Winds of the World, The (1916);
- Woman Ayisha, The (1930)
