Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Announcing the Karavansara Reading Challenge 2016

OK, we discussed this in a few previous posts, but now let’s try and make this official.

 

The first Karavansara Reading Challenge will start on the 16th of February 2016.
On that day, I’ll start posting about three books, as I read (or re-read) them.
The books are…

. Ella Maillart’s Forbidden Journey, 1935
. Peter Fleming’s News from Tartary, 1936
. Stuart Stevens’ Night Train to Turkistan, 1988

I’ll go slow, cross-referencing the books and in general tracking the progress of Fleming & Maillart, that in 1935, on the 16th of February, started their adventure along the Silk Road, heading from Peking to Kashmir. Continue reading →


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The Swift One: El Borak

el borak 2Today is Robert E. Howard’s birthday, and it seems a nice thing to do to post something about one of the most popular and influential pulp authors of all time.

I discovered Howard – I think I already mentioned it – with Conan the Adventurer, when I was fifteen or thereabouts.
But I’m not here to praise Conan.
In his brief career Howard wrote a huge number of stories, and created an army of characters, and one in particular I always liked, and I consider fitting for Karavansara’s themes and topics.

His name is Francis Xavier Gordon, but they call him El Borak. Continue reading →


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A bad girl, or so she said

I fall easily in love with the women of yesterday – especially those that I discover in my search for what I usually call pulp history.

220px-Emily_HahnFor instance – Shanghai, 1930s, a party in the Italian consulate, one of the guests is a beautiful woman chaperoning a gibbon wearing a diaper.
I put that in my novel, The Ministry of Thunder, and I was told I was silly.
But it’s a historical fact : the gibbon was called Mr Mills.
The beautiful lady was Emily Hahn.

Born in 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri, Emily Hahn was the first woman in America to get a degree in Mining Engineering – basically because she had been told she would never get it, and it was an unsuitable job for a woman.
And indeed it was – in the sense that she was ostracized, and had to find another way to make a living. So she started writing.

Sort of. Continue reading →


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The Mysterious Orlandini

The Karavansara Challenge 2016 has yet to start1, and already strange connections are beginning to appear.
On the first page of her Forbidden Journey, Ella Maillart writes (my translation)…

Finally, the Italian Orlandini, having spent one year in China, was ordered away from the Xinjian frontier[…] He covered great distances by bicycle, an ideal means of transport in Central Asia, and tells a curious story, according to which, having been mistaken for a spy, he risked being poisoned in Inner Mongolia.

And that’s it.
An Italian, traveling through Central Asia and Xinjian (or Sinkiang, or Chinese Turkestan) on a bicycle, and being mistaken for a spy and almost poisoned?
How comes nobody ever told me his story?! Continue reading →