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JimGrim. JimGrim was created by “Talbot Mundy,” the pseudonym of William Lancaster Gribbon (Billy Blain, Anton Edwards, Athelstan King, Kirk Montgomery, Cotswold Ommony, K.C. Smith, Tros of Samothrace), and appeared in twenty-nine short stories and fourteen novels from 1921 to 1939, beginning with “The Adventure at El-Kerak” (Adventure (U.S.), Nov. 10, 1921).

James Schuyler "JimGrim" Grim is an American adventurer. During World War One he served with T.E. Lawrence, "doing the unseen, unsung spade-work” of British secret service work. After the war he was attached to British Intelligence. In that role he fights the enemies of the British empire. If an invasion of Palestine is planned by a group of renegade sheikhs, Grim will capture and kidnap the ringleader. If the Dome of the Rock is to be blown up by conspirators looking to start a war in the Middle East, Grim and a group of Sikhs (they often help Grim, or come to the rescue at the last moment) will take care of the group. If a native warlord, working from the hidden city of Petra, plans to invade Palestine, Grim will convince the warlord, through fair means and foul, not to.

At length Grim leaves the service of the British and strikes off on his own, as a professional adventurer, bankrolled by the mysterious and wealthy Meldrum Strange, who wants Grim and his friends to hunt down international criminals. His tasks remain strenuous and bloody. Grim and his friends go to Egypt, to the very heart of the Great Pyramid itself and the real tomb of Khufu; they go to India, where they encounter the evil agents of the Nine Unknown, a group of ruthless Tibetan fakirs whose mystic powers seem at first to be more than a match for Grim; and Grim and his friends go to northwest India, where Grim's friend Joan is kidnaped. In Tibet, where the group goes to rescue an old friend of Ramsden, the stories’ narrator, the group comes in conflict with the Black Lodge, a group of evil, occult-powered mystics. Grim’s comrade-in-arms Narayan Singh dies in battle in Tibet, and Grim begins to be trained in the mystic and occult by the White Lodge, the Black Lodge's opposite. In the final JimGrim story Grim and his friends confront the evil Tibetan Yellow Peril Dorje, who discovers a city full of Atlantean SCIENCE! buried in the Gobi Desert. Dorje uses this science and the weapons of Atlantis to try to CONQUER THE WORLD! But Dorje's organization is flawed, and after much bloodshed he is destroyed, his monastery blown up, and Grim within it. (That was not intended to be the end of the series; Mundy had plans for at least one more JimGrim novel, but Mundy died before he could write it)

Grim is assisted in his adventures by a select few friends: Ramsden, the narrator, a very strong and large American big game hunter; Narayan Singh, the ferocious, turbaned Sikh warrior and veteran of World War One; Chullunder Ghose, the fat Indian Con Man, spy, and figurative son of Rudyard Kipling’s Hurree Chunder Mookerjee; and Joan Angela Leich, a rich, smart, spunky woman of 23 and an old friend of Grim's.

Grim is of average height, very strong, with large hands, dark skin, and grey-blue eyes. He is fluent in a number of languages, sympathetic to the Arabs and Indians among whom he works, and is an excellent agent and handler of agents. He is unflappable and ruthless in pursuit of his tasks, but not exploitative. Those who work under him are always aware of the risks he is going to put them through.

* I'm including the JimGrim stories and novels in the Best of the Encyclopedia category because they are among the foremost examples of fun pulp adventure published in the 1920s and 1930s. Whether they are racist or not I'll leave to others to decide; for every one stereotypical bad Tibetan or Indian character there are three that are unstereotypical and good. But what is certain is how much fun the stories and novels are, how much they are examples of High Pulp (The Nine Unknown! The Black and White Lodges! The weapons of Atlantis!), how enjoyable and unique Chullunder Ghose is, how far-flung and worldly the stories are, and of course how heroic JimGrim and his pals are. Big fun in the High Pulp style. 

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