The Nine Unknown (Heathen Edition)
Talbot Mundy (born William Lancaster Gribbon, 1879-1940) was a world-traveling Englishman and, before he found writing, a scoundrel with a rap sheet virtually as long as his future literary output-fraud, impersonation, swindling, adultery, bigamy, imprisonment, even deportation from Africa!-before emigrating to the United States in 1909, where gambling with New York gangsters netted him a nearly fatal beating and a radical, life-altering opportunity: a reporter that covered the incident was so impressed with Mundy's globe-trotting tales that he lent him a typewriter and urged him to write while nursing his wounds. Mundy seized the moment and never looked back, becoming one of the most prolific pulp writers of the 1920s, producing 19 novel-length stories between 1921 and 1923 alone! Not least among them was The Nine Unknown, wherein a priest tasks Jimgrim and his motley cohorts with discovering where the world's supply of gold and silver is disappearing, which will lead, most assuredly, to the fabled Nine Unknown Men and, more importantly, their nine books of secret Ancient Wisdom which the priest seeks to destroy. However, what they discover is something more valuable than precious metals, and why the Nine Unknown is far more than legend.
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"The Nine Unknown is an occult thriller for fans of the Indiana Jones movies, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Rudyard Kipling's Kim and, of course, Mundy's other supernaturally inflected adventure classics." -Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
"Talbot Mundy was one of the bestselling writers of adventure fiction of his day." -Peter Berresford Ellis, The Last Adventurer
"The story of the Nine Unknown Men was popularized for the first time in 1923 by Talbot Mundy. His book is half fiction, half scientific inquiry." -Louis Pauwels & Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians
"One of the kings of the pulps was Talbot Mundy." -Famous Pulp Classics
"Jimgrim joins forces with a group of multi-talented comrades to battle the secret forces of the occult in India . . . filled with excellent examples of oriental magic, mysticism, and machination." -Roger C. Schlobin, The Literature of Fantasy
"Excellent ethnic characterizations . . . Original subject matter, rapid movement. One of the most successful attempts to weld adventure onto the occult novel." -Everett F. Bleiler, The Guide to Supernatural Fiction
"Mundy is in many respects superior to Rider Haggard, although he never achieved the latter's popularity. He has a better sense of character, his plots are much tighter, and his style is smoother." -Fanz Rottensteiner, The Fantasy Book
". . . richly entertaining and imaginative adventure fiction . . ." -Lee Server, Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers
"In retrospect, Mundy can be seen as the most influential and enduring, if not the bestselling, writer of Eastern adventure of his day." -Brian Taves, Talbot Mundy, Philosopher of Adventure
"Talbot Mundy was one of the great fantasy adventure writers of a time when the art of writing a firmly built long magazine story was at its zenith." -Mary Gnaedinger, Famous Fantastic Mysteries
