King of the Khyber Rifles

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "King of the Khyber Rifles" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

King of the Khyber Rifles

Cover to the hardback 1st edition
Author	Talbot Mundy
Genre	Adventure novel
Publisher	Bobbs-Merrill
Publication date	1916
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print (hardback and paperback)

King of the Khyber Rifles is a novel by British writer Talbot Mundy. Captain Athelstan King is a secret agent for the British Raj at the beginning of the First World War. Heavily influenced both by Mundy's own unsuccessful career in India and by his interest in theosophy, it describes King's adventures among the (mostly Muslim) tribes of the north with the mystical woman adventuress, princess Yasmini and the Turkish mullah Muhammed Anim. Like Greenmantle by John Buchan, also first published in 1916, it deals with the possibility that Turkey might try to stir Muslims into a jihad against the British Empire.

The Khyber Rifles was and is an actual regiment.

What was to be Mundy's third novel was originally serialised in Everybody's Magazine in nine parts from May 1916 illustrated by Joseph Clement Coll.^[1] It was published in book form in November 1916.

The book gave many characters and themes to the book The Peshawar Lancers, including the main character, Athelstane King.

The first film adaptation was The Black Watch (UK title King of the Khyber Rifles), released in 1929 and starring Victor McLaglen and Myrna Loy. A second version, King of the Khyber Rifles (1953) featured Tyrone Power and Terry Moore. Apart from the title and the Khyber Pass setting, it has little in common with Mundy's novel. A third adaptation, to have been adapted by Philip Kaufman and released by TriStar Pictures was planned but never made.

A Classics Illustrated comic book of Mundy's book was printed in 1953, No. 107.

• King of the Khyber Rifles at Project Gutenberg
• King of the Khyber Rifles public domain audiobook at LibriVox
• King of the Khyber Rifles at IMDb 

This article about an adventure novel of the 1910s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. See guidelines for writing about novels. Further suggestions might be found on the article's talk page.

• v
• t
• e