The Harold Lamb Megapack Read online

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  The Harold Lamb Megapack is copyright © 2014 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

  * * * *

  “His Excellency, the Vulture” originally appeared in Adventure, Oct. 1, 1917.

  “Khlit” originally appeared in Adventure, Nov. 1, 1917.

  “Wolf’s War” originally appeared in Adventure, Jan. 1, 1918.

  “Tal Taulai Khan” originally appeared in Adventure, Feb. 14, 1918.

  “Alamut” originally appeared in Adventure, Aug. 1 1918.

  “Yellow Elephants” originally appeared in Argosy, March 8, 1, 1919.

  “The Village of the Ghost” originally appeared in Adventure, May 15, 1921.

  “The Grand Cham” originally appeared in Adventure, July 1, 1921.

  “The Make-Weight” originally appeared in Short Stories, Sept. 25, 1921.

  “The House of the Strongest” originally appeared in Adventure, Nov. 20, 1921.

  “The Wolf Chaser” originally appeared in Adventure, April 30, 1922.

  “The Net” originally appeared in Adventure, June 10, 1922.

  “Sangar” originally appeared in Adventure, Aug. 20, 1922.

  “Road of the Giants” originally appeared in Adventure, Aug. 30, 1922.

  “Protection” originally appeared in Collier’s, August 24, 1923.

  “The Red Cock Crows” originally appeared in Collier’s, June 9, 1928.

  “The Rogue’s Girl” originally appeared in Collier’s, Oct. 29, 1932.

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  Harold Lamb (1892–1962) was an American historian, screenwriter, short story writer, and novelist. He was born in Alpine, New Jersey and attended Columbia University, where his interest in the peoples and history of Asia began. Lamb’s tutors at Columbia included Carl Van Doren and John Erskine.

  Lamb built a career with his writing from an early age. He got his start in the pulp magazines, quickly moving to the prestigious Adventure magazine, his primary fiction outlet for nineteen years. In 1927 he wrote a biography of Genghis Khan, and following on its success turned more and more to the writing of non-fiction, penning numerous biographies and popular history books until his death in 1962 in Rochester, N.Y. The success of Lamb’s two-volume history of the Crusades led to his discovery by Cecil B. DeMille, who employed Lamb as a technical advisor on a related movie, The Crusades, and used him as a screenwriter on many other DeMille movies thereafter. Lamb spoke French, Latin, Persian, and Arabic, and, by his own account, a smattering of Manchu-Tartar.

  Although Lamb wrote short stories for a variety of magazines between 1917 and the early 1960s, and wrote several novels, his best known and most reprinted fiction is that which he wrote for Adventure magazine between 1917 and 1936. The editor of Adventure, Arthur Sullivant Hoffman, praised Lamb’s writing ability, describing him as “always the scholar first, the good fictionist second”. The majority of Harold Lamb’s work for Adventure was historical fiction, and can be thematically divided into three broad categories of tales:

  Stories featuring Cossacks

  Stories featuring Crusaders

  Stories with Asian or Middle-Eastern Protagonists

  Lamb’s prose was direct and fast-paced, in stark contrast to that of many of his contemporary adventure writers. His stories were well-researched and rooted in their time, often featuring real historical characters, but set in places unfamiliar and exotic to most of the western audience reading his fiction. While his adventure stories had familiar tropes such as tyrannical rulers and scheming priests, he avoided the simplistic depiction of foreign or unfamiliar cultures as evil; many of his heroes were Mongolian, Indian, Russian, or Muslim. Most of his protagonists were outsiders or outcasts apart from civilization, and all but a very few were skilled swordsman and warriors.

  In a Lamb story, honor and loyalty to one’s comrades-in-arms were more important than cultural identity, although often his protagonists ended up risking their lives to protect the cultures that had spurned them. Those holding positions of authority are almost universally depicted as being corrupted by their own power or consumed with greed, be they Russian boyars or Buddhist priests, and merchants are almost always shown as placing their own desire for coin above the well-being of their fellow men. Loyalty, wisdom, and religious piety is shown again and again in these stories to lie more securely in the hands of Lamb’s common folk.

  While female characters occasionally played the familiar role of damsel in distress in these stories, Lamb more typically depicted his women as courageous, independent, and more shrewd than their male counterparts. Their motives and true loyalties, though, remained mysterious to Lamb’s male characters, and their unknowable nature is frequently the source of plot tension.

  Lamb was never a formula plotter, and his stories often turned upon surprising developments arising from character conflict. The bulk of his Crusader, Asian, and Middle-Eastern stories (as well as the latter stories of Khlit the Cossack) were written in the latter portion of his pulp magazine years, and demonstrate a growing command of prose tools; the more frequent use, for example, of poetic metaphor in his description.

  COSSACK TALES

  By far the largest number of these tales were short stories, novellas, and novels of Cossacks wandering the Asian steppes during the late 16th and early 17th century, all but a half-dozen featuring a set of allied characters. The most famous of these Cossack characters is Khlit, a greybearded veteran who survives as often by his wiles as his swordarm; he is a featured character in eighteen of the Cossack adventures and appears in a nineteenth. He chooses to wander Asia rather than face forced “Cossack retirement” in a Russian monastery, and launches into an odyssey that takes him to Mongolia, China, and Afghanistan. He comes to befriend and rely upon folk he has been raised to despise, and briefly rises to leadership of a Tartar tribe before he wanders further south. His greatest friend proves to be the swashbuckling Muslim swordsman, Abdul Dost, whom he aids in raising a rebellion against the Moghul emperor in Afghanistan. In later stories Khlit returns as a secondary character, an aged advisor to both his adventurous grandson, Kirdy, and other Cossack heroes featured in separate stories.

  CRUSADER TALES

  Unlike Lamb’s Cossack stories, only a handful of his Crusader stories are inter-related. Two novelettes feature the young knight, Nial O’Gordon, and three short novels are centered around Sir Hugh of Taranto, who rediscovers the sword of Roland, Durandal. Durandal, published in 1931, reprinted all three novels of Sir Hugh with new linking material.

  While Lamb’s Crusaders sometimes battle against their traditional Muslim foes, the majority of these tales feature forays into deeper Asia.

  ASIAN AND MIDDLE-EASTERN TALES

  Lamb also wrote a variety of stories featuring or narrated by Muslim, Mongol, or Chinese protagonists, set for the most part during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. “The Three Palladins” is a story of young Genghis Khan, told mostly from the viewpoint of one of his boyhood comrades, a Chinese prince.

  —John Betancourt

  Publisher, Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidepress.com

  ABOUT THE MEGAPACKS

  Over the last few years, our “Megapack” series of ebook anthologies has grown to be among our most popular endeavors. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”

  The Megapacks (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt (me), Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Bonner Menking, Colin Azariah-Kribbs, A.E. Warren, and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)

>   A NOTE FOR KINDLE READERS

  The Kindle versions of our Megapacks employ active tables of contents for easy navigation…please look for one before writing reviews on Amazon that complain about the lack! (They are sometimes at the ends of ebooks, depending on your reader.)

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  TYPOS

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  THE MEGAPACK SERIES

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  HIS EXCELLENCY THE VULTURE (1917)

  I

  The testimony of Master Thomas Moone, of the ship “Golden Hind,” as to the mutinous bearing of Sir James Falconer, leader of her Majesty’s gentlemen, in the Great South Sea, in the year 1578. Which explains how the general came to visit the port of Lima, to the great gain of her Majesty, the Queen of England

  Master Thomas Moone finished reading the day’s entry in the log of the Golden Hind, written in the hand of the general commanding the expedition to the South Sea. Since Master Moone, although a navigator of rare skill, knew naught of letters and words, he interpreted the entry in the log in his own fashion to the helmsman who was his companion on the quarter deck of the ship.

  “A fair wind, an’ a fair sea. The coast of the Spanish New World on our quarter. A goodly cargo o’ Spanish silver i’ the hold. There, I reckon that be all for today.”

  Moone closed the book carefully.

  “Look-ee, lad; you bear too far to sea. Has Spanish silver dazzled you, that you can not see the shore?”