Mundy wrote four stories about actress/woman about town Kitty Crothers. I’m very pleased to share them here, because it’s doubtful they would find their way into print these days, as they offer settings far from the exotic locales Mundy is famous for in “Soul of a Regiment,” King—of the Khyber Rifles, and his JimGrim tales. Many, many thanks to Georges Dodds, who maintains the R.U.R.itaninan Muglug web site -- where you'll find a number of electronic texts (including the Mundy story, "The Soul of a Regiment") -- for digging up these tales and making them available for The Pulp Rack to post.
The Kitty stories are amusing in ways that his better-known stories of intrigue and adventure are not, although those tales include amusing scenes. Certainly the conversations Mundy created for the Kitty stories demonstrate his ear for dialog, and one sees in the manipulations and personal intrigues he recounts here the foundations for the plotting and intrigue-driven characters that appear in the JimGrim novels and other tales.
Clearly Mundy knows women and their wiles -- or perhaps he well knows wily women -- and it’s likely he learned much during his days as a rogue abroad before he settled in America to become a respected author. One who’s read Peter Berresford Ellis’ biography of Mundy, The Last Adventurer, is familiar with Mundy’s reputation as a rounder who knew his way round a number of good and bad women. The many maneuvers by Kitty that Mundy describes seem to set the foundation for innumerable plots of feminine intrigue in soap operas and vicious cat fights in television shows like Dallas and Dynasty.
Before proceeding to the stories, Mundy scholar Brian Taves has a few words about Kitty and her place in Mundy’s oeuvre.
- Duane Spurlock
Mundy, Kitty, and the Feminine
By Brian Taves
I’m glad Duane has posted "The Lady and the Lord," because it is one of the best of Talbot Mundy’s stories, indicating his talent for humor and romance. Contrary to general assumptions, Mundy did not set out to be an author of adventure/fantasy stories, but found it to be his most lucrative genre, as I note in my biography and with added detail in "Talbot Mundy’s Earliest Stories: An Author in Search of His Genre" in Ed Hulse's magazine, Blood ‘n’ Thunder, No. 12/13 (Fall/Winter 2006).
The first woman to figure as the central character in a Mundy series was Kitty Crothers, in an amusing series of four 1911 All-Story short stories. They told of the various entanglements and vicissitudes of a self-absorbed, good-hearted. not-so-young widowed actress, who is independent from both the men and women around her. The first person narrator is himself a writer, not taken too seriously by the vivacious Kitty (she describes him as a "nonentity," in an obvious analogy to Mundy himself). Kitty began in "The Lady and the Lord," where she invests in a stock at random that, as luck would have it, skyrockets in value. Returning to New York, no longer needing the stage for a living, in "Kitty Burns Her Fingers" she resolves to put her financial independence to good use by becoming a patroness of young talent. Her "first victim," as the narrator calls him, is the son of a Russian refugee, Paul Gurwicz, and she uses his infatuation with her to ensure that he actually marries a more suitable woman.
In "Vengeance is Kitty's," she finds herself pitied by a fellow actress who had earlier befriended her, but now spreads gossip about her relationship with Gurwicz. In revenge, Kitty arranges for the other actress also to become apparently involved with a younger man, to the point that his family warns her to stay away from him. In "Kitty and Cupid," she uses the marriage of a couple to block a threatening blackmailer.
The Kitty stories provide the first indication of the vivid feminine characterizations Mundy would create, and the concern for gender equality. Two years later, he united feminism and his fascination with India in the greatest character in all his writing, the remarkable, matchless Yasmini, and in subsequent years, with two books on history’s most absorbing woman, Cleopatra. Mundy’s characterizations of Yasmini and Cleopatra are of women scheming to carve an empire, and who are sometimes devious, manipulative, and always surprising, like his Kitty Crothers, only on a very different scale.
Yasmini initially appeared in two Adventure novelettes in early 1914, "A Soldier and a Gentleman" and "Gulbaz and the Game," and you can read the former reprinted for the very first time in my Mundy anthology, Winds From the East. And for probably his most purely feminist novel, try Guns of the Gods (still in print), Mundy’s story of Yasmini’s youth, in which the principal characters are all women, of East and West, and the men secondary or villains.
"Mundy, Kitty, and the Feminine" (c) Brian Taves
(author, Talbot Mundy, Philosopher of Adventure, and editor, Winds From the East: A Talbot Mundy Reader)
"The Lady and the Lord"
This story, originally appearing in the June 1911 issue of All-Story Magazine, is quite different from the exotic action tales that Mundy wrote for Adventure and Argosy. Still, it has elements of the club story, in which some adventurer or explorer recounts a thrilling tale in the smoking room of a gentlemen's club; and from the escapades Kitty relates, one can see how Mundy drew on his own rascally experiences as a sometime confidence man to lend verisimilitude to his protagonist's tale. Click here to read the story.
"Kitty Burns Her Fingers"
Terraforming is an element of some science fiction. SF and Fantasy writers are frequently critiqued on their abilities at worldbuilding. In this second outing of Mundy's vivacious heroine, Kitty Crothers, attempts something far more difficult: building a person. Mundy does a very nice job -- with some chuckles along the way -- of demonstrating how trying to recreate a person in one's own image (even when it's "for their own good") usually has problematic consequences. Click here to read the PDF of "Kitty Burns Her Fingers."
Links:
For more information about Talbot Mundy at The Pulp Rack, click here.
Learn more about Talbot Mundy's adventurous life from Brian Taves' Talbot Mundy, Philosopher of Adventure: A Critical Biography, which is available at Amazon.com. Learn more by clicking here.
For Winds from the East: A Talbot Mundy Reader, click here.
Mundy’s Guns of the Gods, published by Wildside Press, is available from Amazon. Click here.
Visit Georges Dodds' R.U.R.itaninan Muglug web site! It's full of interesting stories and e-texts. Click here.
For Last Adventurer: The Life of Talbot Mundy by Peter Berresford Ellis, click here to visit Amazon.com.
Posted by ds at August 16, 2007 09:09 PM
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