Mundy's first Yasmini adventure is quite short, easily finished in one sitting. It's also an unfocused effort, with a stuffy British colonel, an over eager British captain, a sly native officer, and an exotic seductress from "the north." Its villain is a simple outlaw. Of these characters, the two most interesting are the colonel, Stapleton, and Yasmini the seductress.

A Soldier and a Gentleman intends to introduce Yasmini. Beautiful and treacherous, in later volumes we find her pictured as a golden-haired woman of mixed racial ancestry. Indian, part Russian, and perhaps partly from the peoples inhabiting the Caucuses. Lithe and strong, she is a match for any man, physically and intellectually. A few decades later and she would have been featured in American hard-boiled detective fiction as a femme fatale. In Mundy's world, where he first imagined her right before World War I, she is a figure unique for her deviousness and physical threats.

Colonel Stapleton, however, is another matter. He is not a love interest for Yasmini. To the extent there is one in this novel, that role goes to Captain Boileau. But Stapleton is "the Gentleman" to which the title refers. And his values, firmly fixed in the Victorian era, are not so effective in the year 1914. In fact, there is a bit of Colonel Blimp in him. Blimp would later come to personify outdated, reactionary elements of fossilized imperial military incompetence, unsuited for the twentieth century. Colonel Stapleton gets a jump on him, allowing his courtly manners and actions almost to make possible the escape of the murderous outlaw, Gopi Lall.

Had I read this novel first, I'm not sure I would have pursued the series. But I read King of the Khyber Rifles right before. It is a much more detailed and nuanced work, with far better characterizations and even ideas to explore. There isn't much of that in A Soldier and a Gentleman. At best, it is pure adventure magazine material, which, not coincidentally, is where it first appeared. ( )