Mulvaney Stories (1897)

If there are better short stories out there than Kipling's even dozen MULVANEY STORIES I do not know them. In his earliest years as a published author working as a journalist in India, Rudyard Kipling dashed off 18 tales of three British privates serving in India. The three were Irish, London Cockney and Yorkshire: respectively, Terence Mulvaney, Stanley Ortheris and John Learoyd. Learoyd was 6 1/2 feet tall and powerful, Mulvaney not much shorter but perhaps even stronger, but Ortheris was a little, feisty, moody man, expert in dog raising and taxidermy. *** The story that launched the three army friends into literature was published in 1887 in an Anglo-Indian newspaper that employed Kipling. It was titled, "The Three Musketeers." Twelve of the 18 yarns of the three soldiers were later pulled together in 1897 for the future (1907) Nobel Prize winner as THE MULVANEY STORIES. Each is told by an Anglo-Indian newspaperman who, after initial suspicion, has been accepted by Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd as a respected friend of much higher social standing than they. Let's just call that narrator Rudyard Kipling himself and be done with it. *** This book tells tales of the Soldiers Three in war and peace, on the Grand Trunk Road, being kind to poor underpaid natives ("naygurs") while playing tricks on well off babus and Hindu priests. One feature that turns some readers off is Kipling's rendering of the speech patterns of North England, of London and of southern Ireland. Kipling has, in my opinion, a great ear for speech patterns as well as for soldiers' bragging and boasting. I despise misrepresentations of regional dialects (as in Richard Hooker's M.A.S.H.). But judge Kipling for yourself from a sample below. *** The tale is "The Courting of Dinah Shadd." Young Dinah would become Mulvaney's adoring wife and narrator Kipling's great friend. But the marriage almost didn't happen, as Mulvaney tells Kipling, Learoyd and Ortheris. As he often did, Mulvaney, when telling his yarns, would cast a mournful eye back to his glory days 15 or 20 years earlier when he was a lofty Corporal working hard for his sergeant's stripes: "In the days av me youth, as I have more than wanst tould you, I was a man that filled the eye an' delighted the sowl av women. Niver man was hated as I have been. Niver man was loved as I -- no, not within half a day's march av ut. For the first five years av me service, when I was what I wud give me sowl to be now, I tuk whatever was within me reach an' digested ut, an' that's more than most men can say. ... I could play wid four women at wanst, an' kape them from finin' out anything about the other three, and smile like a full=blown marigold through ut all. ... An' so I lived an' so I was happy..." ***If you have never read Kipling, THE MULVANEY STORIES are as as grand a starting place as any. And, I predict, you will not stop with them. -OOO-