‘Happily Ever After’… ‘The Devil Shed Tears’… ‘Love in Morocco’… she could conjure up a good title, could Countess Helene Magriska. Including her own, as it happens. Know as Enid Brockies to her friends, the pseudonymous scribe made East meets West her speciality. Today’s collectors want books for their titles and subjects just as much as the content and this one ticks a lot of boxes. Here we see ‘handsome young Egyptian’ Ahmed Alamo Bey getting to grips with all the west has to offer in the shapely form of young Sandra Silvareigh, out in Cairo with her aunt. (Nowhere to be seen, you’ll notice. Tsk…) It’s left to ‘stolid and undemonstrative’ Englishman Michael Napier to step in and save the day; Sandra thereby missing out on the burgeoning scenes of liberation and sexual freedoms of the fifties. Oh dear… Tomorrow we’ll dive right into those liberated times and look at another kind of love – the abnormal kind…
Pemberton, c 1950. Reprint.
