In the field of fantastic literature his works are highly prized (often highly priced, also) and many such readers find, possibly to their surprise, that they also enjoy his other stories.  This may be due in some part to the fact that Mundy used the same characters over and over again, in novels in which each played the lead and as sub-characters in other novels.  One keeps meeting old friends.

This leads to one difficulty in reading Mundy, however.  If one is going to meet these characters, it is much more enjoyable to watch them develop from birth, so to speak—­and not vice versa, like coming into a theatre in the middle of the picture.  But, a reading sequence is a real difficulty.  Each story is complete in itself, but the characters are re-shuffled into various combinations and any one of them may, and does, strike off into a novel of his own, only to reappear at a later date in some combination with other such characters.  It is confusing, to say the least.  To add to the confusion, all or nearly all of Mundy’s stories first appeared in magazines, largely in Adventure, but later in Argosy.  As his popularity grew, his older stories were republished in book form, as well as each of his new novels, so that the date of publication of his books means nothing as far as reading chronology is concerned.

Before going any further, it may be interesting to digress a bit, and consider some of his earlier stories in Adventure Magazine, and more particularly as they apply to his books.  No attempt is being made to give a complete listing of his magazine stories here.  Adventure Magazine began publication in November 1910, but the earliest issue that I have for reference is that of August 1911.  This contains a short story by Mundy, “The Phantom Battery.”  By this time he was publishing five to eight short stories per year.  These early stories were mostly about the British Army and the most important was his “The Soul of A Regiment,” (February 1913) a tale of native troops in the ill-fated first expedition against the Dervishes in Egypt, with a surprise, terrific, ending.  This story was published as a book, “The Soul of A Regiment,” (Alex Dulfer, San Francisco, 1925) and was anthologized by Arthur Sullivant Hoffman in “Adventure’s Beet Stories—­1926” (Doran, New York, 1926).  It was reprinted in Adventure Magazine in April 1917 and followed next month be a sequel, “The Damned Old Nigger.”  Three of his early novelettes (1913), “Hookum Hai,” “For the Salt He Had Eaten,” and “Machassan Ah,” will be found in the book “Told in the East,” (Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1920).  The first two concern the Sepoy Revolt and the third is a humorous story of the British Navy.  All are good tales.  The characters in the latter appear also in “An Arabian Night” (Adventure, November 1913).  The first of his Indian hillman type stories is probably the short novel “The Letter of His Orders” (Adventure, September 1913).  His first serial, “For the Peace