The Starkenden Quest

Down on his luck and down to his last few shillings, John Crayton finds himself marooned in Yokohama at the Four Winds Hotel. A financial disaster has nearly wiped out his bank account back home in England and he needs a job quickly in order to pay his hotel bill or risk jail in Japan. He and a similarly unemployed friend have a fortuitous encounter with the shady and morose Abel Starkenden in a local bar that changes their luck. The Starkenden Quest has overtones of Haggard, Bedford-Jones and all the Indiana Jones movies. Starkenden and his two explorers-for-hire encounter a run-in with Chinese pirates, crossing a raging river of white rapids in a most unusual fashion, and travelling through an ancient cavern equipped with a lantern made from a human skull. Collins is well worth investigating for readers who like intelligent rousing adventures. First published in 1925 by Gerald Duckworth and Co. The Starkenden Quest was popular enough in its day to merit an abridged version in the pulp magazine Famous Fantastic Mysteries in the October 1949 issue. The Raven’s Head Press edition contains a foreword by genre fiction critic J.F. Norris who gives us a fascinating insight into the man behind the novel, Gilbert Collins. A ROUSING ADVENTURE NOVEL IN THE LOST RACE GENRE WITH DWARFISH APE-LIKE CREATURES, A HIDDEN TREASURE TROVE OF GEMS, A MUMMY, A WHITE GODDESS, A LOVE INTEREST AND HEROIC CHARACTERS FIGHTING FOR THEIR LIVES. THIS IS PULP…

Gilbert Henry Collins (1890 - ?) was born in Southampton, the son of Hariett and Henry Collins. From 1919 through 1922 he served as a member of the British Consular Service in China. He drew from his work experience and travels in Asia as the basis for several works of non-fiction including Sidelights of Song (1920 ), Far Eastern Jaunts (1922) and Extreme Oriental Mixture (1925). For a time during the late 1920s Collins worked for the humor magazine Punch. He served as the founder and chairman of Saturday Nights Swimming Club in Bournemouth where he made his home from 1930 to 1936. Eventually he abandoned memoir and travel writing for fiction, specializing in detective and thriller novels. Those works include The Valley of the Eyes Unseen (1923), The Starkenden Quest (1925), Horror Comes to Thripplands (1930), The Phantom Tourer (1931) and The Dead Walk (1933). In 1937 he was named in a lawsuit along with his publisher Ward Lock for using without permission the work of deceased writer Harold Scarborough. Collins never wrote another book afterwards. Shortly after the trial he left his home of Bournemouth and seems to have disappeared. A death date of 1960 is most likely inaccurate as it is for a completely different Gilbert Henry Collins who was born in London in 1861.