The Achmed Abdullah MEGAPACK ®. Achmed Abdullah
INTRODUCTION, by Darrell Schweitzer
Achmed Abdullah. There was a time when his name was synonymous with romantic, exotic adventure. The byline of Achmed Abdullah appeared on numerous magazine stories and books. His English style was excellent, even poetic, but with a voice of authenticity that suggested that maybe this writer was an Arab or some other “Oriental.” All the better, in an era in which Lawrence of Arabia was one of the first media celebrities and Rudolph Valentino’s portrayal of The Sheik played to every woman’s daydreams.
The truth is more complicated and even more exotic. Those who met Abdullah found him very British in speech, manner and ideas. Indeed, he had been educated at Eton and Oxford (and the University of Paris), and had served in the British Army in the Middle East, India, and China, but he was actually the son of a Russian Grand Duke, the second cousin of Czar Nicholas II. His Russian name was Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff (sometimes given as Romanowski). His Muslim name was Achmed Abdullah Nadir Khan el-Durani el-Iddrissyeh. While the byline “Achmed Abdullah” was easy to remember and quite exotic, it wasn’t, strictly speaking, a pseudonym, and he came by it legitimately. Admittedly “Achmed Adbullah” was more likely to sell books of Oriental adventure than “Alexander Romanoff.”
Abdullah/Romanoff was born in 1881 and died in 1945. His birthplace is variously reported as Malta or Russia. What is certain is that after his army service, he embarked on a general literary career, writing novels and stories of mystery and adventure and some fantasy, with much of his work appearing in pulp magazines such as Munsey’s, Argosy, and All-Story. His first novel was The Swinging Caravan (1911), followed by The Red Stain (1915), The Blue-Eyed Manchu (1916), Bucking the Tiger (1917), The Trail of the Beast (1918), The Man on Horseback (1919), The Mating of the Blades (1921), and so on, all the way up to Deliver Us From Evil (1939). He edited anthologies, including Stories for Men (1925), Lute and Scimitar (1928), and Mysteries of Asia (1935).
Among his fantasy volumes, the story collection Wings: Tales of the Psychic (1920) is most recommended by aficionados. His best-remembered and most famous work is the 1924 novelization of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.’s film, The Thief of Bagdad. As it has been reprinted many times over the years, clearly Abdullah’s Thief of Bagdad is more than a mere typing exercise. It is, after all, the novelization of a silent film, which meant the novelist had to be considerably more creative and invent most of the dialogue.
Abdullah’s connection with Hollywood did not end with a novelization. He had written plays for Broadway, such as Toto (1921) and went on to do a number of screenplays, including Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), for which he and collaborators John Balderston and Waldemar Young shared an Academy Award. The film was based on the novel by Francis Yeats-Brown, but it is clear that Abdullah was eminently suited to the material.
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Achmed Abdullah’s works are the product of another era, when the British Empire was widely seen as a pinnacle of civilized achievement and native peoples were not supposed to aspire to nationhood. His outlook has much in common with that of H. Rider Haggard, Talbot Mundy, or Rudyard Kipling.
Certainly he is an authentic and articulate voice of his era, and a first-rate storyteller. He published his autobiography in 1933, The Cat Had Nine Lives: Adventures and Reminiscences, detailing a real life as eventful as his fiction. He also was one of several authors who embodied the ideal of the adventure writer, who was himself expected to be an exotic figure, a world traveler, whose wild yarns were given a sense of reality from having been lived, rather than merely made up.
WINGS
Chapter I
That Saturday night at the height of the London season when Martab Singh, Maharaja of Oneypore, made his initial bow to Belgravia in the salon of the Dowager Duchess of Shropshire, properly introduced and vouched for by Sir James Spottiswoode of the India Office, there wasn’t a man in the great scarlet and purple room, nor woman either, who did not look up quite automatically when the big, bearded, turbaned figure crossed the threshold and bent over the wrinkled, perfumed old hand of her grace.
There wasn’t a person in that room—and people of all classes crowded the gossipy old duchess’s Saturday night at homes, from recently knighted, pouchy, sharp-voiced barristers to gentlemen of the bench who hid their baldness and their forensic wisdom under tremendous, dusty wigs, from the latest East African explorer returned from a six-months’ unnecessary slaughter, to the stolidest novelist of mid-Victorian respectability; from the most Parisianized Londoner to the most Anglified Parisian; from the latest shouting evangelist out of the State of Wisconsin to the ungodly Yorkshire peer who had varied the monotony of last year’s marriage to, and divorce from, a Sussex dairymaid by this year’s elopement with a Gaiety chorus-girl; from Mayfair Dives to Soho Lazarus—there wasn’t a person in all that mixed assembly who did not feel a shiver of expectation as the raja entered.
Expectation of something.
Waiting, tensely, dramatically, silently, for something.
“Not waiting for something to happen,” Charlie Thorneycroft put it. “Rather waiting for something that had already happened, you know. Which of course is infernal rot and asinine drivel. For how in the name of my canonized great-grandaunt can you wait for the future of the past tense? But—there you are!”
And Thorneycroft, of London, Calcutta, Peshawar, Melbourne, Capetown, and the British Empire in general, vaguely attached to some mythical diplomatic bureau in some unknown diplomatic capacity, would drop his monocle and look up with a sharp, challenging stare of his ironic gray eyes, as if expecting you to contradict him.
It was not that the presence of a raja, or any other East Indian potentate or near-potentate was an unusual occurrence in London. Rajas are more common there than Nevada plutocrats at a Florida resort, or black-cocks on a Yorkshire moor. London is the capital of a motley and picturesque empire, and pink turbans soften the foggy, sulfurous drab of Fleet Street; lavender turbans bob up and down the human eddy of the Burlington arcades; green and red and white turbans blotch the sober, workaday atmosphere of East Croydon and Pimlico.
Nor was it anything in Martab Singh’s appearance or reputation.
For, as to the first, he was good-looking in rather a heavy, simple, bovine fashion, with two hundred pounds of flesh and brawn carried by his six foot two of height, his great, staring, thick-fringed, opaque eyes, his melancholy smile, and his magnificent beard, dyed red with henna, which was split from the chin down the center and then curled up on either side of his face so that the points, which touched his ridiculously small ears, looked like the horns of a combative ram.
And as to his reputation and standing, Sir James Spottiswoode had vouched for it.
There was also Charlie Thorneycroft’s drawling, slightly saturnine corroboration.
“Tremendously swanky beggar in his own country,” he said to pretty, violet-eyed Victoria de Rensen. “Descendant of the flame on his father’s side, and related to the moon on the bally distaff. Cousin to Vishnu, Shiva, Doorgha, and what-not, and college chum to all the assorted and hideous divinities of the Hindu heaven. His principality is small, barren, poor. A mixture of rocks and flies and hairy and murderous natives. But he is the very biggest among the bigwigs of India. To two hundred million benighted Hindus he is the deity—Brahm, what?—all the gods rolled into one and topped by a jolly, crimson caste-mark. He’s the gods’ earthly representative, you know, Vic darling. Not only that. For”—he dropped his voice to a flat whisper—“this is the first time in the history of the world—hang it, before the history of the world—that a Maharaja of Oneypore has left his native soil.”
“Why shouldn’t he?”
“Because by leaving India he pollutes his soul, he loses caste. And that’s just why I wonder—”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing!”
Quite suddenly he looked up, and his long, white fingers gripped the girl’s arm nervously.
“Did you feel—it?” he whispered.
There