Achmed Abdullah

Le voleur de Bagdad

The Thief of Bagdad

May 22, 2025
Novel
240 pages
115 × 190 mm
13,90 €
9791039206457
979-1-0392-0645-7

“Le Domaine” collection

																Achmed Abdullah, Le voleur de Bagdad
																Achmed Abdullah, Le voleur de Bagdad

Ahmed el-Bagdadi, from the Bedouin tribe of the Benni Hussaynieh, “bold horsemen, fierce for gain, ticklish dignity”, abandoned the nomadic life for the joys of the bazaar. So many years later, in the honorable guild of thieves of Baghdad, the “city of gold”, of which he was a skilled and respected member, he is still spoken of with a mixture of awe and fascination. This novel is the prodigious tale of his adventures, his exploits and his clandestine love affair with a princess.
If no one has forgotten the Raoul Walsh film that made Douglas Fairbanks famous in 1924, who remembers the screenwriter, one of the most popular authors of the interwar period: “Captain” Achmed Abdullah? He immediately turned it into a “novel-cinema” worthy of the Arabian Nights, with its unbridled orientalism. The Thief of Baghdad, wrote Douglas Fairbanks in his preface, ”is the story of the things we dream of, a tale of what happens when we step outside ourselves to conquer the Lands of Fantasy.

A century after its publication, it’s time to rediscover the masterpiece of this forgotten writer-adventurer!

The author

Achmed Abdullah (1881-1945) claimed to have been born in Afghanistan, sometimes to a father who was the governor of Kabul, sometimes to a cousin of Tsar Nicholas II. He invented a school career at Eton, Oxford, Berlin, Paris, and Cairo, said he was raised in Islam but was a devout Catholic. He allegedly fought in the Boxer Rebellion in China, served in the British army in Tibet and Africa, and was elevated to the rank of pasha in the Ottoman army in 1914. As a spy for His Majesty, he was supposedly caught by the Germans, narrowly escaping the firing squad. After emigrating to New York, he published around fifty pulp stories (detective, adventure, disaster novels) from 1915 to 1939. From 1920 to 1935, he was also a screenwriter for Hollywood (Henry Hathaway, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, 1935), where his turban, small mustache, and bow tie were legendary. Only three of his novels have been translated into French, including A Perfect Gentleman (1919) and The Trail of the Beast (1929).

Strong points

The reissue of the masterpiece by one of Hollywood’s most popular authors, adapted for the screen five times between 1924 and 2003;

the preface by film star Douglas Fairbanks;

a short introduction to the author and the book’s genesis.

May 22, 2025
Novel
240 pages
115 × 190 mm
13,90 €
9791039206457
979-1-0392-0645-7

“Le Domaine” collection