Talbot Mundy

Talbot Mundy. What a name!  Better than Port Talbot, though others may disagree. I first came across Talbot Mundy on my dad’s bookshelves and read it as a child, my first introduction to the First World War, the vastness and glamour of the British Empire. 

 Don’t judge a book by its cover or in this case a lack of one. 

 

The tale, told through the eyes of Hira Singh, is a fictionalised account of an essentially true story. A Sikh regiment fought alongside the British army in the trenches of France and were captured by the Germans. Convinced of their potential value in stirring up discontent and rebellion, the Germans shipped them to the Middle East. The regiment, though, remained loyal to the British, and after many adventures escaped, trekked across Central Asia, and returned intact to British India.

To a child, the book opened up strange, vivid new worlds; and the name, Talbot Mundy remained fixed in the back of my mind.  I dug out the book from where it had been hiding and for the first time wondered about the man himself: Talbot Mundy.

For a start, it wasn’t his real name. William Lancaster Gribbon was born in 1879 and died in 1940 and for much of his life was an amoral drifter, leaving school with no qualifications. For scoundrels and adventurers, for those without purpose, the British empire proved something of a boon, and in his early years he found clerical employment in India before dabbling in journalism and then moving to East Africa, where he became an ivory poacher, and then town clerk in the frontier town of Kisumu. By this time, he was married, the first of five wives, but after a series of sexual adventures with local women he lost both wife and job. Undeterred, he seduced a married woman in Nairobi and later married her, using the name ‘Talbot Mundy’ for the first time.

In 1909, he made the most important move of his life taking his new wife to New York. There they found lodgings in the lower east side, where he took a series of menial jobs before a vicious mugging hospitalised him. Out of work and with heavy hospital bills, Mundy had reached rock bottom, when his luck changed. 

Jeff Hanley, an American journalist, mesmerised by Mundy’s tales of Africa and the Far East, persuaded him to write.  He even lent him a typewriter. Talbot Mundy had found his vocation: pulp fiction.

Getting up between 3- 4 am, Mundy worked seven hours a day, six days a week, producing over a lifetime 47 novels, 130 novelettes and short stories, 23 articles and a non-fiction book. 

He also influenced some of the big names in pulp and fantasy fiction: Robert E Howard, Fritz Lieber, Andre Norton, L Sprague de Camp and Marion Zimmer Bradley. And to think, for all this time I had him down as an old Victorian fuddy-duddy with a walrus moustache, a champion of traditional values.