Thu 29 May 2014
A Review by David Vineyard: TALBOT MUNDY – The Mystery of Khufu’s Tomb.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Pulp Fiction , Reviews[9] Comments
TALBOT MUNDY – The Mystery of Khufu’s Tomb. First published as “Khufu’s Real Tomb” in Adventure magazine, October 10, 1922. First book edition: Hutchinson & Co., UK, hardcover, 1933. First US edition: D. Appleton-Century Co., hardcover, 1935. Several other reprint editions exist. (Follow the link to an online edition of the pulp magazine version.)
Talbot Mundy’s career was as strange as anything he wrote, and that is no small statement. A con man and adventurer in India he came to the United States, nearly died, saw the light, and reformed by becoming a writer, almost immediately penning a number of classics such as Rung Ho!, The Eye of Zeitoon, and Hira Singh. He shot to the top of the list of Haggard and Kipling successors and stayed there until his death, his work a staple in the pulps, particularly the grand old pulp icon, Adventure.
His King of the Khyber Rifles was twice filmed, a bestseller, and even adapted by Classics Illustrated, and his novel Jimgrim, or King of the World is considered by many, myself included, the greatest achievement of the adventure pulps.
Jimgrim featured one of Mundy’s series heroes (Tros of Samothrace, the Greek trader and opponent of Caesar and Cleopatra, is his other great creation), the American Captain James Schyler Grim, in the service of His Majesty’s Secret Service in the Middle and Near East. With his ally and friend Jeff Ramsden, his Sikh friend Naryan Singh, his Indian Secret Agent companion Chulander Ghose, and a small army of Mundy’s other heroes (Athleston King and Cottswold Ommony among them) he battles to keep the Middle East, Palestine in particular, from exploding.
All of that fairly standard British Raj rah rah rah save for one fact: Talbot Mundy was no admirer of the Empire and stood for self-rule in India and the Middle East. It was a unique view of the world for an adventure story writer in that era. There is little racism or jingoism in Mundy.
Later in life Mundy became obsessed with the philosophy of Theosophy, a semi-mystical religious movement out of Madame Blatavasky and the Golden Dawn. That would have ruined a lesser writer. In Mundy’s case it inspired his finest novels and most loved tales, Om: The Secret of Ahrbor Valley, The Nine Unknown, The Devil’s Guard, Full Moon, and Jimgrim.
The change in his work showed first in the Jimgrim tales in Adventure, where Grim and company left the British Army and Secret Service behind and took up with American millionaire Meldrum Strange who financed their adventures from there on. And what adventures they were, a search for what happened to all the coins minted in the ancient world (they were hidden beneath the Ganges by the Nine Unknown), a war of good and evil on the roof of the world where the Black Lodge is challenged by the White, and the final novel of the series, Jimgrim, in which the world must be saved from a fanatical madman, leading to a finale that still stuns the unsuspecting reader today and never fails to bring a tear to my eye.
In the transition period from the heyday of the series to the later deeper novels Mundy’s best is the Jimgrim adventure The Mystery of Khufu’s Tomb.
It begins when engineer Jeff Ramsden is nearly run off a road on the Geiger Trail near Virginia City by Joan Angela Leich, the kind of headstrong heiress who was common in fiction of the time. Joan and Jeff are old friends though, and she has nearly gotten him killed before.
That’s Joan all over, and a welcome breath of femininity she is in Mundy’s masculine world. She is also guaranteed trouble, and here is no exception. This time she has gotten involved with one Mrs. Isobel Aintree, a fatale femme with a cobra’s bite that Ramsden and Grim have battled before. Joan needs help concerning a purchase made while in Egypt during a revolution (the more things change …) where she “…went and bought a lot of land that everybody said was no good because it was too far from the Nile.”
Now a man called Moustapha Pasha (“…there are men of all creeds and colours, who can mouth morality like machines printing paper money, but who you know at the first glance have only one rule, and that an automatic, self-adjusting, expanding and collapsing one, that adapts itself to every circumstance and always in the user’s favour. This man was clearly one of those.”) wants the land and won’t take no for an answer, but Joan is too stubborn to ever yield.
Just what is on that land that Mrs. Aintree wants it and Moustapha Pasha is willing to bribe Ramsden to betray Joan to the tune of one million dollars (1920‘s dollars at that)? Mrs. Aintree wants it so bad she marries Moustapha Pasha. The answer must be in Egypt, and anywhere east of the Pillars of Hercules there is no better man to have on your side than Jimgrim, so Joan hires Meldrum Strange’s team to help her.
As usual Grim knows more than might be expected:
“Let’s hope it’s true!” said I.
“Let’s hope it isn’t true!” Grim answered. “Any such sum of money as that would turn Egypt into Hades! If it’s there it means civil war, whoever gets it!â€
Two billion dollars and the fate of Egypt, just the sort of thing Grim lives for.
And they are off with the help of a Chinese astronomer, Chu Chi Ying, and it is no real mystery what lies beneath Joan’s land.
So if Khufu, Cheops, money is not in the Great Pyramid of Giseh, where is it? Want to hazard a guess?
Our band of heroes must deal with enemies on all sides and excavate the treasure that Khufu flooded under Joan’s land without drawing too much attention. Mundy never made things easy for his heroes. You may even wish he had, because the danger, sweat, set backs, short-lived victories, and sheer impossibility of the task will leave the reader almost as stretched as the heroes.
And it can only get worse, as Grim battles the forces of Moustapha Pasha and Mrs. Aintree above ground while Jeff and Joan are trapped underground avoiding death traps laid by the determined Khufu, and up against blind mutated giant albino crocodiles.
Long before Indiana Jones, Clive Cussler, and James Rollins Mundy’s heroes were knee deep in the kind of adventures readers today savor. Today’s heroes rely on relentless action though, and while there is no shortage of action and movement, Mundy’s heroes use their brains first, then their brawn.
That is one reason Mundy remains not only readable, but fresh and entertaining to read when so many others have been passed by. It isn’t hard to see the influence he had on Robert E. Howard, Philip Jose Farmer, and Fritz Leiber as well as a generation of adventure writers. His name still triggers images of exotic locales and high adventure in the wild places as much as Rider Haggard before him.
I’ll give Mundy, via Ramsden, the last perfect words:
I don’t see that adventure today is in any better hands.
May 29th, 2014 at 6:42 pm
Very interesting material.
Egypt, whether real or imagined, has long held an important place in the Western imagination, especially when it comes to adventure tales.
May 29th, 2014 at 8:15 pm
Sorry about the typo, that should be Gizeh (using the spelling of the novel).
After Carter found Tut’s tomb in 1922 Egypt was all the rage, though it had been off and on since Napoleon invaded and the Rosetta Stone was translated.
Mundy’s Jimgrim and Sax Rohmer’s Daughter of Fu Manchu both feature running gunfights in the Great Pyramid, and Mundy’s Tros spends his last two novels Queen Cleopatra and The Purple Pirate moved from ancient Britain to Cleopatra’s Egypt. Bram Stoker had already done Egypt with The Jewel of the Seven Stars and Baroness Orczy and Marie Corelli had both done Egypt (Orczy’s a good lost city novel). Well before Carter Fu Manchu was described as looking like the bust of Seti (Rohmer had been a clerk with P.G.Wodehouse at a bank in Alexandria).
The French have Belphegor, an Egyptian spirit haunting the Louvre, and Karl May’s Kara Ben Nemsi got all over the Middle East, Valentine Williams had Mr. Ramosi set there. Agatha Christie, S.S. Van Dine, and Ellery Queen all used the Egyptian thing. Even Charlie Chan went there in the movies.
At least two other Mundy novels from this era are set in Egypt. Jimgrim and a Secret Society and Jimgrim, Moses, and Mrs. Aintree (making something of a trilogy with Khufu).
It’s still a popular site for adventure today as note Ken Follett’s The Key to Rebecca, Robin Cook’s Sphinx, Wilbur Smith’s bestselling River God trilogy, and Michael Ondjante’s The English Patient.
May 29th, 2014 at 8:51 pm
David, this is a wonderful tribute to Mundy. In the wake of Indiana Jones in the early ’80s, the trades reported that Philip Kaufman planned to write and direct a series of movies based on the Jimgrim novels, starting with THE NINE UNKNOWN. And Ballantine Books announced a tie-in plan to bring the books back to print. Neither enterprise ever materialized, but a purported copy of Kaufman’s draft script could be found on the Web for a while. If it was the real thing, we can probably be thankful that no movie appeared.
Today’s readers may want to start with the more mystical entries that you mention — THE NINE UNKNOWN, THE DEVIL’S GUARD, and JIMGRIM, prefaced by KING — OF THE KHYBER RIFLES and CAVES OF TERROR, in the latter of which Athelstan King joins up with Jimgrim’s crew for the first time. The earlier stories, starting with JIMGRIM AND ALLAH’S PEACE, are great fun but mostly straight adventure, no fantasy. If people wonder why the Middle East is the mess it is today, Mundy’s earlier novels and David Fromkin’s non-fiction history A PEACE TO END ALL PEACE are sadly enlightening. Between copies of used paperbacks from the ’60s and ’70s and a more recent wave of POD reprints, Mundy’s books should be fairly easy to find at reasonable prices.
May 29th, 2014 at 9:14 pm
And of course, Indiana Jones introduced a new generation of movie goers and readers to Egypt. There were also numerous TV movies set in Egypt, I recall, in the early to mid 1980s.
The setting doesn’t seem so popular anymore these days, but I am fairly sure it will again. Ever since Napoleon, Anglo and French audiences have been enthralled by Egypt. It just waxes and wanes
May 29th, 2014 at 11:18 pm
Talbot Mundy is just one of the team of excellent adventure writers that ADVENTURE published during the late teens and 1920’s mainly because of the efforts of one of the great fiction magazine editors, Arthur Sullivant Hoffman.
Stories like KHUFU’S REAL TOMB is one of the reasons that I tracked down all 753 issues of ADVENTURE, 1910-1953. The last pulp sized issue appeared in 1953 and then it switched formats to 8 1/2 by 11 inches and became a men’s adventure magazine, sort of like ARGOSY.
But I discovered ADVENTURE back in 1972 when I attended the first Pulpcon and looked through some back issues that were for sale. Frankly, I was stunned because even though I was just skimming through the issues, I recognized that here was a magazine with such excellent writers and quality fiction, that it made the other pulps look mediocre.
Another collector and I became friends and we started reading the Talbot Mundy stories, especially the Jimgrim series together. We corresponded and visited each other and our discussions always covered where we were at with the Mundy stories in ADVENTURE.
I just pulled out my copy of the October 10, 1922 issue and my note says I read KHUFU’S REAL TOMB in July 1975. I was very impressed and gave it an outstanding rating. I still have my set of ADVENTURE and am still reading it. For instance, I just completed novels by Gordon Young about the South Seas; W.C. Tuttle about Hashknife and Sleep, his rangeland detectives; Georges Surdez about life in the French Foreign Legion; and Ernest Haycox about the terrible conditons on the British prison ships in the 1700’s.
This review brings back a flood of memories about ADVENTURE and I can only mention a few, otherwise I’d be writing a long article about the magazine.
I’d rather read the stories than talk about them all the time, so I must not get started!
June 3rd, 2014 at 9:16 pm
I agree Walker.. Young’s Don Everhard and Hurricane Williams, Arthur O. Friel, Lamb, Hashknife Hartley, Surdez, so many others. Better to read than write about for the most part.
July 13th, 2014 at 10:38 pm
The ideas and images found in the novels written by Talbot Mundy brought me to different level when I first read them decades ago. He blended place, history and theory to a degree to which I was unaccustomed. For a writer to consult an encyclopedia or a movie director to order a set to look like a city in Morocco or Greece or Turkey or to be the catch-all “exotic†is one thing but Mundy upped the ante with his breadth of scope and like a gambler who suddenly grows more serious about the game when the stakes go up, the reader is drawn deeper into Mundy’s writing.
I do not always have the same thrill upon returning to works of a writer who had thrilled me years ago and with Mundy I have wondered occasionally for quite a while if reading him again would knock him from where he is enshrined in my memory and if the best decision were to leave him in peace. David Vineyard sparked my hankering to read Mundy again enough. He convinced me to revisit an old teacher who taught me a new way to think about the world.
November 1st, 2014 at 12:41 pm
You might want to check my biography, Talbot Mundy, Philosopher of Adventure (McFarland, 2005), for current info on Mundy. I cover such topics raised here as the Kaufman film attempt. The picture is not of Mundy, but Henry King, director of the 1954 movie, King of the Khyber Rifles.
October 29th, 2015 at 7:04 am
Mundy !! Very nice and lively review. I happened to search again for any works by Mundy, after many years. I was enraptured by his writings when I was a young man, a teenager, now I am more than 60, but still really like this writer. As a boy I was deeply impressed with Tros, and later by Jimgrim. In all these many years I have not seen a hero or protagonist in film or literature who is better. I was also, and remain, fascinated by Mundy’s take on Arabic culture…and his portraits of their state of mind and affinities still ring true, and brilliant, even today, at least in my mind. I honestly think some of Mundy’s works should be required reading for security, government and business types going to work in those regions. Thanks for this great review. Nice to see that Mundy serves the Test Of Time and still shines through.