Talbot Mundy Novels : Arthur's Classic Novels

Talbot Mundy Novels

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Who is Talbot Mundy?
William Lancaster Gribbon was born near London, England, in 1867. Expelled from school at 16 he ran off to Germany to join a travelling circus. After returning home in 1897, he spent time in India doing relief work and as a newspaper corespondent. Back in England in 1903, broke and under suspicion of shady stock deals, he married, escaped arrest, and joined his new wife in South Africa. She returned to England, while he claimed to have worked his way to Australia on a series of steamers to avoid arrest. Back in South Africa in 1904 under the alias Tom Hartley he led a life of an ivory poacher, cattle rustler, grifter and womanizer, some of which he retold in his early novel The Ivory Trail (1919). Besides being intimate with a number of native women, he also began a torrid affair with a hard-drinking and married woman of the British aristocracy. Upon being divorced by their spouses, Inez and William, now using the alias Talbot Chetwynd Miller Mundy, married. Mundy was to marry thrice more, under similar circumstances. In 1909 Inez and Talbot moved to New York City, where, after recovering from a beating at the hands of some seamy poker players, Mundy spent some time homeless before being taken in by a reporter who loaned him a typewriter.

The Eye of Zeitoon
Through the partly open door we could smell everything that ever happened since the beginning of the world, and hear most of the elemental music -- made, for instance, of the squeal of fighting stallions, and the bray of an amorous he-ass

Old Ugly-Face
Set in Tibet, the story concerns a group of men and women who are vitally involved in an exciting situation in that forbidden land of towering mountain peaks and age-old secrets. The Dalai Lama had died, and the choice of a successor to the most influential position in Tibet is a matter of utmost concern to the agents of various foreign governments and to Tom Grayne

Hookum Hai
A coppersmith was about the only living thing that seemed to care whether the sun went down or not. He seemed in a hurry to get a job done, and his reiterated "Bong-bong-bong!"--that had never ceased since sunrise, and had driven nearly mad the few humans who were there to hear it--quickened and grew louder. At last Brown came out of a square mud house, to see about the sunset.

The Soul of a Regiment
The First Egyptian Foot had colors -- and has them still, thanks to Billy Grogram; so the First Egyptian Foot is still a regiment. It was the very first of all the regiments raised in Egypt, and the colors were lovely crimson things on a brand new polished pole, cased in the regulation jacket of black waterproof and housed with all pomp and ceremony in the mess-room at the barracks.

Rung Ho!
THAT was no time or place for any girl of twenty to be wandering unprotected. Rosemary McClean knew it; the old woman, of the sweeper caste, that is no caste at all, -- the hag with the flat breasts and wrinkled skin, who followed her dogwise, and was no more protection than a toothless dog, -- knew it well, and growled about it in incessant undertones that met with neither comment nor response.

Om -- The Secret of Ahbor Valley
There used to be a cafe in Vienna, where a man might learn enough in fifty minutes to convince him that Europe was riding carelessly to ruin; but that was before 1914 when the riders, using rein and spur at last, rode straight for it.

Machassan Ah
From the moment that the lookout, lashed to the windlass drum up forward, had spied the little craft away to leeward and had bellowed his report of it through hollowed hands between the thunder of the waves, Joe Byng had had premonitory symptoms of uneasiness. He had felt in his bones that the navy was about to be nose-led into shame.

The Lady and the Lord
An actress who is not exactly in the first flight is bound to be more or less of a nomad; so there was nothing particularly astonishing in not hearing from Mrs. Crothers for several months.

King--of the Khyber Rifles
The men who govern India -- more power to them and her! -- are few. Those who stand in their way and pretend to help them with a flood of words are a host. And from the host goes up an endless cry that India is the home of thugs, and of three hundred million hungry ones.

Jimgrim and Allah's Peace
I had been there a couple of times before the World War, when the Turks were in full control. So I knew about the bedbugs and the stench of the citadel moat; the pre-war price of camels; enough Arabic to misunderstand it when spoken fluently, and enough of the Old Testament and the Koran to guess at Arabian motives, which are important, whereas words are usually such stuff as lies are made of.

The Ivory Trail
To us -- even to Yerkes, familiar with United States merchant kings -- he seemed with his thirty thousand dollars a year already a gilded Croesus. He had ample to travel on, and finance prospecting trips. We never lacked for working capital, but the quest (and, including Yerkes, we were as keen as he) led us into strange places.

Hira Singh: When India Came To Fight In Flanders
Had Ranjoor Singh and his men been Muhammadans their accomplishment would have been sufficiently wonderful. For Sikhs to attempt what they carried through, even under such splendid leadership as Ranjoor Singh's, was to defy the very nth degree of odds.

Her Reputation
There is an hour of promise, and a zero hour; the promise first; and promises are sometimes even sweeter than fulfillment. Jacqueline Lanier was unconscious of her hour of blossoming, and so the outlines of young loveliness had not been hardened by habitual self-assertion. Since she came under Desmio's care her lot had been cast in very pleasant places, and she was aware of it

Guns of the Gods
There, amid an atmosphere of Indian scents and cigarette smoke, she talked and I made endless notes, while now and then, when she was meditative, her maids sang to an accompaniment of rather melancholy wooden flutes. But whenever I showed a tendency to muse she grew indignant.

For The Salt He Had Eaten
But in the mud-walled cottages, where men were wont to doze through the long, hot days, there were murmurings and restless movement. Men lay on thong-strung beds, and talked instead of dreaming, and the women listened and said nothing

Ceasar Dies
Golden Antioch lay like a jewel at a mountain's throat. Wide, intersecting streets, each nearly four miles long, granite-paved, and marble-colonnaded, swarmed with fashionable loiterers. The gay Antiochenes, whom nothing except frequent earthquakes interrupted from pursuit of pleasure

Affair in Araby
Whoever invented chess understood the world's works as some men know clocks and watches. He recognized a fact and based a game on it, with the result that his game endures.

New Worlds for Old

Even as the world is insisting
in going madly in the wrong direction
We will rely on Him and love one the other.

Even as men think their violence
and have only a response of anger
We hold to a thought of love and comfort.

Many are living in a land of self, alone 
Isolation will drive persons crazy
while We cling to faith and certainty in His grace.

Each of the despairing watch
as another delight is snatched from their world
while we smile our rapture as knowledge overcomes us

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