Achmed Abdullah

Achmed Abdullah was born Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff to a grand duke father and a highborn Afghani Muslim mother in czarist Russia. Raised in Afghanistan, where he assumed his Asian title of Prince Nadir Khan, he was educated at Eton and Oxford, then became a gentleman officer in the British army, keeping the peace along the Khyber Pass and in assorted colonies in Africa. He became a writer in the early 1900s, establishing the name of Achmed Abdullah as an erudite teller of thrilling stories and an elegant stylist whose work appeared in numerous periodicals and pulp magazines. Abdullah cultivated a romantic public image-the writer as dashing, exotic, and cosmopolitan-which lent an extra glamor to his work: the adventure fiction of farflung Asian and African outposts, upper-crust mysteries set in manor houses and penthouse apartments, and lurid tales of violence and drama in New York's Chinatown. His name appeared with frequency on the covers of novels, short story collections, and popular histories. The Trail of the Beast (1919) was a spy thriller about a planned political assassination, set in a thrilling France of nightclubs, apache dancers, and promiscuous female agents. Night Drums (1921) concerned insurrection in Africa, a would-be black emperor, and an ancient mummy, and the bandaged body of the first man- Adam himself. Many of Abdullah's American-set stories were tied to the exotic East or Africa, the "Dark Continent." In The Bungalow on the Roof (1931), a ritzy New York apartment building contains on its rooftop a secret headquarters for an African cult, where wealthy New Yorkers go to satisfy their "diseased, degenerate craving after foul, bestial voodoo rites and worship..."