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INTRODUCTION, by Darrell Schweitzer

Achmed Abdullah. There was a time when his name was synonymous with romantic, exotic adventure. The byline of Achmed Abdullah appeared on numerous magazine stories and books. His English style was excellent, even poetic, but with a voice of authenticity that suggested that maybe this writer was an Arab or some other “Oriental.” All the better, in an era in which Lawrence of Arabia was one of the first media celebrities and Rudolph Valentino’s portrayal of The Sheik played to every woman’s daydreams.

The truth is more complicated and even more exotic. Those who met Abdullah found him very British in speech, manner and ideas. Indeed, he had been educated at Eton and Oxford (and the University of Paris), and had served in the British Army in the Middle East, India, and China, but he was actually the son of a Russian Grand Duke, the second cousin of Czar Nicholas II. His Russian name was Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff (sometimes given as Romanowski). His Muslim name was Achmed Abdullah Nadir Khan el-Durani el-Iddrissyeh. While the byline “Achmed Abdullah” was easy to remember and quite exotic, it wasn’t, strictly speaking, a pseudonym, and he came by it legitimately. Admittedly “Achmed Adbullah” was more likely to sell books of Oriental adventure than “Alexander Romanoff.”

Abdullah/Romanoff was born in 1881 and died in 1945. His birthplace is variously reported as Malta or Russia. What is certain is that after his army service, he embarked on a general literary career, writing novels and stories of mystery and adventure and some fantasy, with much of his work appearing in pulp magazines such as Munsey’s, Argosy, and All-Story. His first novel was The Swinging Caravan (1911), followed by The Red Stain (1915), The Blue-Eyed Manchu (1916), Bucking the Tiger (1917), The Trail of the Beast (1918), The Man on Horseback (1919), The Mating of the Blades (1921), and so on, all the way up to Deliver Us From Evil (1939). He edited anthologies, including Stories for Men (1925), Lute and Scimitar (1928), and Mysteries of Asia (1935).

Among his fantasy volumes, the story collection Wings: Tales of the Psychic (1920) is most recommended by aficionados. His best-remembered and most famous work is the 1924 novelization of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.’s film, The Thief of Bagdad. As it has been reprinted many times over the years, clearly Abdullah’s Thief of Bagdad is more than a mere typing exercise. It is, after all, the novelization of a silent film, which meant the novelist had to be considerably more creative and invent most of the dialogue.

Abdullah’s connection with Hollywood did not end with a novelization. He had written plays for Broadway, such as Toto (1921) and went on to do a number of screenplays, including Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), for which he and collaborators John Balderston and Waldemar Young shared an Academy Award. The film was based on the novel by Francis Yeats-Brown, but it is clear that Abdullah was eminently suited to the material.

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Achmed Abdullah’s works are the product of another era, when the British Empire was widely seen as a pinnacle of civilized achievement and native peoples were not supposed to aspire to nationhood. His outlook has much in common with that of H. Rider Haggard, Talbot Mundy, or Rudyard Kipling.

Certainly he is an authentic and articulate voice of his era, and a first-rate storyteller. He published his autobiography in 1933, The Cat Had Nine Lives: Adventures and Reminiscences, detailing a real life as eventful as his fiction. He also was one of several authors who embodied the ideal of the adventure writer, who was himself expected to be an exotic figure, a world traveler, whose wild yarns were given a sense of reality from having been lived, rather than merely made up.