For Lancashire, it's a sweltering day & I'm feeling a sense of desert heat reading this pulp adventure novella about Francis Xavier Gordon, known as El Borak "The Swift", amongst the cities, villages and encampments of the Near & Middle East.
The milieu is the Great Game played by the Western colonial powers, & while Gordon is a maverick with little time for bureaucracy, his loyalties lie with them.
There's a definite whiff of Yellow Peril ⬇️
Bookwomble ... about the secret society & hidden city of assassins that Gordon seeks to infiltrate, & every character, however minor, is identified by his (no women so far) supposed racial origin. That Howard uses that contemporary understanding of race, history & politics as narrative colour rather than polemic is a relief. These are the pulp stories that feed into Indiana Jones, Uncharted, etc: rollicking juvenile fun if they're not taken too seriously. 5mo
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