Achmed Abdullah, Swinging Caravan

In this new installment of an ongoing series, LARB founder Tom Lutz reflects on Achmed Abdullah’s significance in the year 1925.

By Tom LutzMarch 31, 2025

• Literary Criticism

• Biography & Autobiography

Editor’s Note: This is the third of 12 monthly articles on the centennial of 1925; some of it is excerpted from Tom Lutz’s 1925: A Literary Encyclopedia, to be published in March. For multimedia materials, see his website.

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ACHMED ABDULLAH was, during the early decades of the previous century, a playwright with successes on Broadway and the West End, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, an author of dozens of books, and a writer of adventure and fantasy stories for the pulps, including Argosy, The All-Story, Munsey’s, and Blue Book. The gossip columns reported his comings and goings as a man about town.

One story he loved to tell was about a certain Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff, whose father was Grand Duke Nicholas Romanoff, a cousin of Tsar Nicholas II, and whose mother was Princess Nourmahal Durani, daughter of the amir of Afghanistan. The scion Alexander was born in Yalta, on the Crimean Peninsula, growing up in the Romanoffs’ Livadia Palace (the villa where Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin later met to carve up Europe after Germany’s surrender in 1945). In Abdullah’s story, the boy was sent from there to England for his education—where, for some reason, he went incognito, changing his name to an Arabic one, his mixed parentage allowing him to easily pass as an Arab. He attended Eton and then Oxford and joined the British armed services, which, given his many languages and changeable looks, employed him as a spy. As a soldier of the British Empire at its height, he served in campaigns in China, Tibet, Russia, Eastern Europe, France, India, and Africa.

As if this wasn’t romantic and swashbuckling enough, he retired from the army as a captain and was then commissioned by the Turkish cavalry, perhaps still as a British spy, perhaps as a Turkish spy, fighting in the First Balkan War in 1912 and 1913. Meanwhile, his father had died, and his mother had remarried and poisoned her second husband. As the picaresque tale continues, Romanoff “wandered over most of the continents or galloped across them,” then moved to the United States, wrote 20 books, and became famous as a playwright, with work produced on Broadway and in London’s West End. After all of that, he moved to Hollywood and became famous as a screenwriter, writing films for Douglas Fairbanks and Gary Cooper. By that point, he had changed his name several times.

It is a tale that, like many of his adventure stories, strains credibility. This one Abdullah told not in the pages of the pulps but in The Cat Had Nine Lives (1933), his autobiography. He claimed he was a Romanoff on his father’s side and Afghan royalty on his mother’s. When his maternal grandmother visited London, he said, she took an entire floor at the Savoy, kept her own cook in the hotel’s kitchen, and was watched over by an armed guard. His father was exiled not to Siberia but to Paris, where he lived with several mistresses. It is as gaudy a tale as any in his adventure novels, but there are no records of any Achmed Abdullah or any Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff at either Eton or Oxford. Although Abdullah did, it seems, spend some time in the British Army, it isn’t clear whether he retired as a captain or a colonel, or whether he had served in any of the countries in his list of combat assignments. On his Social Security application in the United States, he cited his father as Jor. D. Khan and his mother as Nurmalal Tarmarlan, both Afghani, but he still claimed to have been born in Yalta. He told people other versions of this biography at different times, and nobody can be sure of anything about him before he came to the US in the 1910s and became a writer. The New York Times, in their review of the autobiography, admitted that “of course [they] do not believe every word, be it gall or honey, which drops from Achmed Abdullah’s lips,” any more than they “believe the stories in Arabian Nights to be true.” One thing that seems certain is that he was born neither Achmed Abdullah nor Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff.

In 1925, he was 44 and fresh off the success of his screenplay The Thief of Bagdad (1924), which he wrote with Douglas Fairbanks and others, a tale stitched together from stories in the Arabian Nights. He also published The Thief of Bagdad in book form in 1924, one of the first “novelizations,” the story based on the Fairbanks film and illustrated with stills from the movie. In 1925, he published a collection of stories, The Swinging Caravan.

His play, The Passionate Prince, co-written with Munsey’s Magazine editor Robert H. Davis, opened in Baltimore in October 1925. At the same time, David Belasco announced that he would be producing Abdullah’s Salvage, which had also played in Baltimore, at the Belasco Theater. Salvage went on to Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC, for a week, after which, in December, Belasco announced he had canceled the production. Abdullah released a press statement saying that he, not Belasco, had withdrawn the play from its New York opening because Belasco had insisted on adding a character, San Francisco Sal, to the third act, and Abdullah refused to have the play compromised. The Times wondered if it was this conflict or “unfavorable criticisms by the newspaper critics” and “rather discouraging box office receipts” for the out-of-town runs that explained the cancellation. The Baltimore Sun’s critic claimed the play’s failure was based on overconfidence, which he said was a pardonable ailment given Abdullah’s track record:

No other man working in the American theatre can take a second or third rate piece of work and, by that particular hocus-pocus which is his own, disguise its deficiency so effectively. He has done it times without number.

But in his latest presentation he has misjudged the worth of even his highest talents. He probably knew […] that “Salvage,” at best, could only be pictorially and not dramatically effective. But he probably thought, once he got his teeth into it, he’d Burbank it into something valuable.

As The New York Times Book Review wrote on December 13, 1925, “Achmed Abdullah is a very busy man.”

Abdullah’s career thrived by leveraging a widespread Orientalism in American culture—people were fascinated with everything in an “East” that stretched from Morocco to Japan. Critic Herschel Brickell, evaluating Swinging Caravan in the Literary Review, wrote:

Mr. Abdullah knows his Samarkand and Bokhara, cities the very names of which breathe romance; he knows his Mohammedan mind, and he knows Occidentals. His stories have warmth, color, vigor, and movement as swift as the dagger-flash that brings one of them to a memorable ending.

 The New York Times critic agreed, and vamped on the tropes:

Most of the tales are aglow with the fire and magnificence of the Eastern Sun, as well as with the merciless glare of the desert and the flickering and sometimes baleful light of cities; there are glorious patches, and hectic patches, and patches of cold cynicism and disillusionment, while always the forms of rich men and of poor, of dervishes and veiled women and turbaned grandees, troop like an incessant swinging caravan before the reader’s eyes.

The writer, presumably aware that this was faint praise, concluded: “Perhaps the most striking fact about the book is its variety and range.”

As always, part of the allure of this Orientalism was sexual. Swinging Caravan, Boston Transcript said, “is vivid, vitally picturesque, alive with the age-long life of the old, old east, yet it mingles the sort of frankness of speech we find in the Restoration drama—decidedly no book to put into the hands of the young.” This last is, of course, a classic, effective sales pitch. In the collection’s first story, “A Gesture of No Importance,” a young, blue-eyed Boston woman goes on a dare to an opium and hashish den on the wild side of Tunis and watches a 14-year-old “gypsy” do seductive dances for the men. The Bostonian develops a crush on an Arab aristocrat, who commands her to leave the den of vice with him:

[B]y his side, she sensed the Orient folding about her shoulders like an immense, silken burnoose.

She did not think. She only felt.

Currents of cosmic life, strong as the hands of God yet gentle as the hands of little children, seemed to flow from his body into hers, tugging at her soul. Her hand was in his. She heard the humming of his blood in her own veins with a steady reverberation, a powerful rhythm and measure. His fingers moved a little, curled inside her hand, caressed her palm. A shiver ran through her like a network, immensely delicate and immensely strong, of a million feathery touches; and there was in her subconscious mind something like a sudden shifting of values, ethical, racial, civilizational.

As the two characters walk toward his home, declaring their undying love for each other, they pass through the Jewish quarter. The merchants there remind her of America in their vibrant social life and their striving to improve their lives. At one point, a Jewish merchant accidentally burns a hole in the Arab lover’s burnoose with a cigarette, and the lover pulls a knife out and slashes the man’s throat. She is, of course, aghast. He tells her it is of no importance. “What is one dead dog more or less in a house of dogs?” he asks her, but she cannot reconcile herself to the murder. She hears church bells from the Christian quarter, and they seem to call her home to Boston: “Back Bay—Christianity—black walnut furniture and antimacassars and Emerson and wax fruit under glass—and, occasionally, a mild cocktail … ‘Binng banng!’ sang the bells. ‘Home! Come home!’ Home—she thought—my own people!”

Despite the schematic writing, even intelligent critics seemed to have been at least partially taken in. “Most of the stories are brilliantly plausible,” The New Republic argued. “[A]ll are spectacular; but to this reader only one—‘The Great Wife’—went below the surface glitter to emotional verities.” That story, also set in Tunis, follows Hamed Ali, whose wife is barren. He takes a second wife to follow the demand of the “law of Islam” to have children. His first wife, “because of the matchmaking instinct congenital to all Oriental women,” decides to help. When he takes a 17-year-old bride, the first wife begins to get jealous and decides, after months of hearing her husband’s endearments, to stab the girl to death with a dagger. The girl is saved by giving birth, and when her husband hands the older wife the newborn infant, she fervently embraces it along with co-motherhood, and all is well. That all happens in the last paragraph. Where the critic found “emotional verities” remains a mystery.

Abdullah wrote over 35 books, as many plays, and 30-plus screenplays. These last included Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927), an Oscar nominee, and he was one of five credited screenwriters on The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), also nominated for an Oscar. He died on his 64th birthday in 1945. There were no Romanoffs at his funeral, but his obituary was replete with his royal ancestors and his global exploits, including a story of having turned down the gift of an African king’s two daughters. It listed many of his successful plays, books, and films, none of which have had much staying power. But in 1925, he was, indeed, a man about town, appearing in the gossip columns as regularly as he added to his astounding cinematic, theatrical, literary, and self-mythologizing output.