Friday's Forgotten Books - The Yellow Turban

Charlotte Jay was the pen name of Australian mystery author Geraldine Halls (1919-1996). Her marriage to Albert Halls of UNESCO enabled her to travel the world to exotic locations like Pakistan, Japan, Thailand, England, Lebanon, India, Papua New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands, many of which she used in her books. Jay penned nine standalone crime fiction novels (as well as other works under her married name), and although largely forgotten today, she was in fact the very first winner of the Mystery Writers' Association of America's Edgar Award of the for Best Novel of the Year, Beat Not the Bones, in 1954. Another of her books, The Fugitive Eye, was adapted for television in 1961 as an episode starring Charlton Heston of the also (unjustly) largely-forgotten TV series "Alcoa Premiere," hosted by Fred Astaire with music by John Williams.

Jay was something of a late bloomer as a writer, working as a shorthand typist in Australia and England and then as a court stenographer in New Guinea, before turning her hand to novels. Her first was published in 1951, when Jay was in her early 30s. She wrote crime novels until around 1970, when she switched to writing romantic suspense and mainstream novels, for reasons which aren't very clear.

Jay uses a first-person male narrative for The Yellow Turban, something not all that common for women authors when the book was written in 1955. The central character is William Brooke, a vagabond Englishman who is lulled by a high fee (only a third of which is paid in advance) to find and retrieve an old friend, Roy Finlay, from Karachi and bring him back to England. Brooke's instructions include cryptic warnings about "secrecy" and "trouble," which Brooke largely ignores as he checks in at a seedy hotel and starts to work.

When Brooke tries to find Finlay, who has disappeared, he begins to realize his missing friend's job wasn't exactly what Brooke had thought, while every step of his investigation is dogged by a sinister man in a yellow turban. Misgivings and confusion turn to outright terror when he climbs into bed one night and finds a blood-drenched corpse. He ends up on the run from the police, who think he's the murderer, and shadowy men who want to kill him for reasons unknown to Brooke, in a journey that takes him to the Kurat mountains and into the heart of Pakistan.

The 1950s Pakistani settings of The Yellow Turban are particularly relevant to current events of our day, and it's fascinating to catch a glimpse of the country's culture that Jay would surely have witnessed first-hand on her own travels. No doubt, some of the villages and cultures have changed little during the intervening half-century, with insights into corruption, a disintegrating civilization and the relentless misery of just trying to surive from one day to the next. But there are also glimpses of the Pakistani people, of various faiths, political views, classes and backgrounds, that Jay manages to convey through her descriptive writing:

On a kong seat covered by red plastic, a thin, dirty young man, wearing baggy white trousers and a buttoned-up gray coat, lay curled up with his eyes closed and his naked toes twiching like a dreaming dog.

Conversation in Pakistan, I was to learn, was frequently only a means of self-expression. The idea of communication between man and man gets lost somehow.

I suppose you can get used to bribing people. Maybe you get an exaggerated idea in your had that money will corupt anyone, and maybe, after you've lived in the East ong enough, it will. Customs are like diseaases, you can breathe them in from the air, soak them through your skin. 

And still the great crowd merged on, a white boiling mass speckled with black dots like grains of dust blown onto a bowl of foam. The flagellants moved on and a group of drummers approached, heralding a tower made from green and crimson tinsel paper. It stopped directly in front of us, the crowd formed a circle around it and a group of ragged little boys danced forward, each with a knife in his hand.

This landscape was disordered, certainly, but without force or intension, like a disordered room when clothes are left lying around. The objects on it appeared to have some prescribed place to stand or go, some sense of prupose and direction, and had just dropped in their tracks out of lassitude of frustration before they took up their positions.

Ultimately, the plot and setting of The Yellow Turban end up merging age-old themes of man's war with himself and others into the insanity mankind has created with 20th (and 21st) century technological evils. The novel's denoument near a crumbling monastery proves to be a fitting symbol for the crumbling worlds of  William Brooke, Roy Finlay and the people of Pakistan.

Comments

[Patti Abbott]

This looks very exotic yet relevant. Never heard of it or her before.

[Paul D. Brazill]

new to me but does look interesting

[George Kelley]

I've read some Charlotte Jay that ACE Books published, but not this one. Looks provocative!

[BV Lawson]

Hey, Patti! I have to admit, she was off my radar, too. When I went looking for more of her books at the library and online, I began to see why--they are very difficult to find, even via the usual used book/auction type sites. There was also very little about her life on the Web, which makes me even more curious.

[BV Lawson]

George, you'll have to recommend some other good titles by her you've read, and I'll see if I can track it down, although it looks like it may have to be via inter-library loan.

[BV Lawson]

Paul, I'll post this on your blog, too, but I love your choice for today's FFB -- I have a brother who lives in La-La Land, and a P.I. with a philosophical bent sounds like fun.

[Todd Mason]

Cool. I'm another who has never come across her work, as far as I know. Thanks.

[Martin Edwards]

I hadn't heard of this one, but you have got me interested, too!

[Evan Lewis]

Pakistan in the 50s would indeed be an interesting sight.

[BV Lawson]

The author's observations of her travels there, which are obviously included in the book, are quite poetic and descriptive. Some folks may find that she overdoes it (especially if you're into more action-oriented stories), but I think it worked well for this plot.