Talbot Mundy

Talbot Mundy was born William Lancaster Gribbon in London and spent his twenties in India and East Africa as an ivory poacher and confidence man, jailed more than once, before reinventing himself in America as a novelist. King of the Khyber Rifles made his name. He later embraced Theosophy, and his adventure fiction is unusually respectful of the Asian cultures it borrows from.