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Published in 1937 this book was bought by my parents when they were
living in London before the war. Two earlier anthologies in the same
series were The Mystery Book (1934) and the Great Book of Thrillers
(1935). But Enthralling Stories is the one that attracted me as an eleven
year old, leading a blameless life in Cheltenham. ‘Seventeen full page
illustrations’ were commissioned from different artists, none particularly
well known today, but the black and white drawings add excitement to
the stories. On page 177 Geoffrey Lister, in sola topi and on horseback
watches in horror as a band of armed keffiya wearing Arabs ‘hurled
themselves upon the rock, uttering hideous cries, their faces alight with
cruelty and the lust for revenge’. The accompanying story ‘The Traitor’
is set in Egypt where Arabs in traditional dress are rare, but that is
entirely beside the point. This is the mysterious East where anything can
happen, and to a child everything seems possible.
‘Sheik Achmed Abdulla’, the editor, was a pseudonym of Alexander
Nicholayevitch Romanoff, himself a writer, whose father was cousin to
Tsar Nicholas II and his mother. Princess Nounnahal Durani, the
daughter of the Amir of Afghanistan - a suitably exotic introduction to
the book. The choice of stories was eclectic and the East was interpreted
as anywhere between Cairo and Peking. A few of the authors are
recognised today, if not much read - Somerset Maugham, Maud Diver,
Pearl Buck, Ernest Bramah, Lafcadio Hearn, Pierre Loti and Sax
Rohmer. The latter was a prolific novelist best known for his Dr Fu
Manchu stories, but his story here is set in Cairo where the narrator, the
Honorable Neville Kernaby, has adopted native dress in order to find the
secret ingredient of a rare perfume, nicknamed 'The Breath of Allah’.
Kemaby gets stoned on hashish and describes trying to read an ancient
Arabic prescription: I found myself pursuing one slim ‘alif entirely up
the page from the bottom to the top where it finally disappeared under
the thumb of the Lady Zuleyka!’
This is pretty good stuff from someone who started life in Birmingham
as Arthur Henry Ward, son of poor Irish immigrants and whose first job
was as a clerk. Perhaps the more mundane one’s early circumstances,
the more some of us crave for the exotic and have found it in the Orient.
Magical place names - Bokhara, Constantinople, Samarkand, old Delhi,
Lahore, Rangoon, Singapore, and Shanghai. Magical people too - Abu
Tabah, the sorcerer; the Maharajah of Coochperwani; Lee Fong the
opium addict; Daulat Ram the cruel moneylender - often more vividly
drawn than the pipe-smoking, sola topi-wearing Britons who confronted
them and who often came off the worst. So I’ll settle for the romance of
the mysterious East, still undimmed by visiting in later life many of the
places I had read about as a child in England. And meeting some
fascinating people too.
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