Talbot Mundy, one of the Forefathers of Sword and Sorcery, died on this date in 1940. I'm short on time but respects must be paid.*

I was thinking the other day about where we see Mundy's influence in the current SFF scene. Over fifteen years ago, The Peshawar Lancers by S.M. Stirling was published. Stirling dedicated it to Mundy--and others like Sabatini and Robert E. Howard. Its Mundian lineage is palpable, with the main protagonist being named "Athelstane King" and his love interest in the novel is named "Yasmini". Yep, straight outta King--of the Khyber Rifles, with Stirling's book title a nod to the title of the Mundy classic. The Peshawar Lancers is an alternative history novel with some steampunk elements. It's a rip-roaring read and I recommend it. Stirling, who's been a bestselling novelist for well over a quarter century now, intended for The Peshawar Lancers to be the first in a series, but the sales simply weren't there. We can only hope he returns to it at some point.

A Mundy-influenced effort of much more recent vintage is Paul Daly's Tempest at Hazard webcomic. Daly, a professed fan of Mundy, is a capable artist and writer. His protagonist, Major Hazard, adventures across an alternate Victorian world where Well's Martians landed and were defeated, Mycroft Holmes is the British Minister of Defense and vampires use precocious dirigibles to raid England. One could liken it to Mundy's Jimgrim tales such as The Nine Unknown, just set twenty-five years earlier with some Vernean steampunkage thrown in. While one could also compare it to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it definitely has its own flavor. A fun, rollicking read...and it's free. Check it out here.

Something else I recently stumbled upon is the very sad news that Brian Taves died in mid-December, 2019. Mr. Taves worked at the Library of Congress, was a noted film scholar and was considered a world-class authority on Jules Verne. He also wrote what many consider the best biography of Mundy, Talbot Mundy, Philosopher of Adventure. Feel free to click here and use Amazon's "Look Inside" feature to read ten or so pages of the bio. Good stuff.

I finally got around to checking out something from Mundy that I'd heard about awhile back: Moon Over Africa. It's a “lost” radio serial that Talbot wrote sometime in the mid-'30s. The story involves a bad-ass professor seeking an Atlantean city in equatorial Africa. This is Mundy with his Haggardian roots on full display. Not prime Mundy, but pulpy fun, nonetheless. I'd like to give my own full review of it, but time grows short. Check out this guy's review here. While not exactly my take on the serial, it's close enough.

You can find Moon Over Africa for free at archive.com. You can listen to it over at the RUSC site for a fee, but that fee covers all listens for a month. Or, you can buy the program from the Old Time Radio guys. If you take that route, you do get extra stuff thrown in.

It occurred to me that someone could do a novelization of Moon Over Africa, just as movies have been novelized again and again since the early days of film. Fritz Leiber, who did the novelization of the screenplay for Tarzan and the Valley of Gold. was a huge Mundy fan. Imagine if he'd been given a chance to tackle Moon Over Africa. In "Valley of Gold", Leiber's novelization greatly improved upon the original screenplay. Just think what he could've done with something straight from Mundy.

Of course, Fritz Leiber passed away in 1992 and likely never knew that Moon Over Africa existed. What about novelizing it today? I think that S.M. Stirling--who’s also a fan of Haggard--could very likely do a good job. Joe R. Lansdale might be able to pull it off as well. It just occurred to me that James Reasoner could probably do a fine job on such a project. It's all very, very likely a pipe-dream...but dreaming about it is fun.

Well, that about wraps it up. In closing, since this post is in remembrance of Mundy's passing in 1940... In a short memoir published in Talbot Mundy: Messenger of Destiny, Talbot's fifth and final wife, Theda "Dawn" Webber, described the last night the couple spent together. They were in Florida at the time, living in a beach-house not far from Tampa They walked on the moonlit beach for hours. Then, the two of them went back to their house and made love. Talbot drifted off to sleep and never woke up.

There are worse ways to go.

*After this blog entry was published, I learned that “Moon Over Africa” was very likely not written by Mundy. Read the full story here.