Captain Athelstan King is a secret agent for the British Raj at the beginning of the First World War. Heavily influenced both by Mundy's own unsuccessful career in India and by his interest in theosophy, it describes King's adventures among the (mostly Muslim) tribes of the north with the mystical woman adventuress, princess Yasmini and the Turkish mullah Muhammed Anim.

Author Biography

Talbot Mundy (born William Lancaster Gribbon, 1879 - 1940) was an English-born American writer of adventure fiction. Based for most of his life in the United States, he also wrote under the pseudonym of Walter Galt. Best known as the author of King of the Khyber Rifles and the Jimgrim series, much of his work was published in pulp magazines. During Mundy's career his work was often compared with that of his more commercially successful contemporaries, H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, unlike their work his adopted an anti-colonialist stance and expressed a positive interest in Asian religion and philosophy. His work has been cited as an influence on a variety of later science-fiction and fantasy writers and he has been the subject of two biographies.