Crime-Book Society paperback edition - 1936?
I must admit this is the first Crime-Book Society paperback I have really struggled to finish. Set in India, in the last decades of the British Raj, it was a lumbering (rather like the elephants involved) tale. I felt no sympathy, let alone empathy, with any of the characters - there was no hero and no out-and-out villain. Apparently, the author produced a series of short stories and novels about the Criminal Investigation Division of India, which featured Chullunder Ghose in many of them as their protagonist. Certainly not as a hero - this babu (often a highly placed government officer, usually addressed as 'Sir'), when we first meet him, is a dark-skinned man in a blue European suit, a raincoat, and a turban, who introduced himself to Dr. Stanley Copeland, an American specialist from the neck up - eye, throat, nose, and ear - as a reprehensible and graceless babu. Ghose is also obese.
Copeland wants to get into the state of Kutchdullub, to shoot a tiger. The state is ruled by a Rajah, who spends most of his time drinking and wenching. The Rajah has a cousin, a Prince, who wishes to overthrow him. Linked up with this is a ruined temple, where a group of Kali's priests appear under the thumb of a mad woman Soonya, who has adopted the terrible creed of Kali, which served death, not life; and at least one tiger who has slain six women, four men, five children, six-and-fifty goats and nineteen head of cattle. The Raja, desperately short of cash, employs a servant, Syed-Suraj, a shifty, self-seeking man, to get a money-lender Ram Dass to provide more wherewithal. Others in the story include Major Eustace Smith, the representative of the British Ray, who is suffering from painful neck boils and desperate to leave India for a little cottage in Madeira; Hawkes, a retired infantry sergeant eking out his pension by staying in India and getting employment in a Native State. If it all sounds confusing, then it is because that's what it is! The story plods along and I increasingly lost the will to follow it. I have been to India and felt no affinity for the countryside, the weather or the buildings. Our tiger foray produced no animals of any sort. I don't usually give away endings but, spoiler alert, Syed-Suraj is killed by the Rajah who, in turn dies in the tiger pit - as do Soonya, the priests and the tigers. The cousin succeeds to the throne. When the babu says in the final paragraph of the novel - "Oh, my karma! let us drink annihilation to the C.I.D., and politics, and tigers, and to every other dam' thing!" - I couldn't concur more. I do hope the next Crime-Book Society novel returns to their usual level - this one had no detection or thriller aspects at all.
Talbot Mundy (1879-1940)
Far more interesting was reading about Talbot Mundy. Born William Lancaster Gribbon in Hammersmith, London, and educated at Rugby School, he left with no qualifications and moved to British India, to work as an administrator and then as a journalist. After a sojourn in East Africa, where he became an ivory poacher and then a town clerk!, he moved to New York City in 1909. He began selling non-fiction articles and short stories to pulp magazines, such as Argosy and Adventure. (I have several of these pulp magazines, but none with his material). He became a Christian Scientist and embraced Theosophy. He was married five times, was a heavy cigarette smoker throughout his life, suffered from diabetes, eventually dying of complications.
One of his biographers described Mundy as a strange, enigmatic personality, noting that in his early life he was known for being a wastrel, confidence-trickster, barefaced liar and a womanizer. Well, at least that was more interesting than this novel. He had strong political views, being contemptuous of the British establishment and opposing imperialism. He supported the move for Indian independence. This can be deduced from this novel. Chullunder Ghose, commenting on the boil on the back of Eustace Smith's neck, describes it as an officially dignified and economically useless, ethically hypocritical anachronism's neck. He also chides Copeland with being afraid of moss-back majors with a mid-Victorian morality that makes them fit this epoch as a pig fits an automobile. Although Mundy's work was often compared with that of Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard, he disliked the comparison. Finally, Munday was perhaps best known for his King of the Kyber Rifles. It was published in 1916, the same year as John Buchan's Greenmantle, which has a similar theme. It was adapted for a film in 1929, starring Victor McLaglen and Myrna Loy; a second version came out in 1953, starring Tyrone Power, Michael Rennie and Terry Moore. It had little in common with Mundy's novel.
No comments:
Post a Comment