Affair in Araby
By Talbot Mundy
I love a good fight and have been told I should be ashamed of it. I’ve noticed, though, that the folk who propose to elevate my morals fight just as hard and less cleanly with their tongue than some of us do with our fists and sinews. I’m told, too, quite frequently that as an American, I ought to be ashamed of fighting for a king. Dear old ladies of both sexes have assured me that it isn’t moral to give aid and comfort to a gallant gentleman—a godless Mohammedan, too, which makes it much worse—who is striving gamely and without malice to keep his given word and save his country.
But if you’ve got all you want, do you know of any better fun than lending a hand while some man you like gets his? I don’t. Of course, some fellows want too much, and it’s bad manners and a waste of time to inflict your opinion on them. But given a reasonable purpose and a friend who needs your assistance, is there any better sport than risking your neck to help him put it over? Walk wide of the man, particularly the woman who makes a noise about lining your pocket or improving your condition. My friend James Schuyler Grim is an altruist, but he makes less noise than a panther on a night, and I never knew a man less given to persuade you.
He has one purpose but rarely talks about it. It’s a sure bet that if we hadn’t struck up a close friendship, sounding each other out carefully as opportunity occurred, I would have been in the dark until now. All the news of Asia, from Alexandretta to the Persian Gulf and Northern Turkestan to South Arabia, reaches Grim’s ears sooner or later. He earns his bread and butter, knitting all that mess of cross-grained information into one intelligible pattern, after which he interprets it and acts suddenly without advance notice.
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Talbot Mundy
Talbot Mundy (born William Lancaster Gribbon, 23 April 1879 – 5 August 1940) was an English writer of adventure fiction.
Biography.
For most of his life in the United States, he also wrote under the pseudonym of Walter Galt. Best known as the author of King of the Khyber Rifles and the Jimgrim series, much of his work was published in pulp magazines. Mundy was born to a conservative middle-class family in Hammersmith, London. Educated at Rugby College, he left with no qualifications and moved to British India, where he worked in administration and journalism. He relocated to East Africa, where he worked as an ivory poacher and then as the town clerk of Kisumu. In 1909, he moved to New York City in the U.S., where he lived in poverty. A friend encouraged him to start writing about his life experiences, and he sold his first short story to Frank Munsey’s magazine, The Scrap Book, in 1911.
He soon began selling short stories and non-fiction articles to pulp magazines, such as Argosy, Cavalier, and Adventure. In 1914, Mundy published his first novel, Rung Ho!, soon followed by The Winds of the World and King of the Khyber Rifles, all set in British India and drew upon his own experiences. Critically acclaimed, they were published in both the U.S. and the U.K. Becoming a U.S. citizen, in 1918, he joined the Christian Science new religious movement and moved to Jerusalem to establish the city’s first English-language newspaper. Returning to the U.S. in 1920, he began writing the Jimgrim series and saw the first film adaptations of his stories. Spending time at the Theosophical community of Lomaland in San Diego, California, he became a friend of Katherine Tingley and embraced Theosophy.
Many of his novels produced in the coming years, most notably Om: The Secret of Ahbor Valley and The Devil’s Guard, reflected his Theosophical beliefs. He also involved himself in various failed business ventures, including an oil drilling operation in Tijuana, Mexico. During the Great Depression, he supplemented his career by writing novels and short stories and authoring scripts for the radio series Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. In later life, he suffered from diabetes, eventually dying of complications arising from the disease.
Talbot Mundy
