Talbot Mundy (born William Lancaster Gribbon, 1879–1940) was a world-traveling Englishman and, before he found writing, a scoundrel with a rap sheet virtually as long as his future literary output (fraud, impersonation, swindling, adultery, bigamy, imprisonment, even deportation from Africa!) before emigrating to the United States in 1909, where gambling with New York gangsters netted him a nearly fatal beating and a radical, life-altering opportunity: a reporter that covered the incident was so impressed with Mundy's globe-trotting tales that he lent him a typewriter and urged him to write while nursing his wounds. Mundy seized the moment and never looked back, becoming one of the most prolific pulp writers of the 1920s, producing 19 novel-length stories between 1921 and 1923 alone! Not least among them was The Nine Unknown, wherein a priest tasks Jimgrim and his motley cohorts with discovering where the world's supply of gold and silver is disappearing, which will lead, most assuredly, to the fabled Nine Unknown Men and, more importantly, their nine books of secret Ancient Wisdom which the priest seeks to destroy.

However, what they discover is something more valuable than precious metals, and why the Nine Unknown is far more than legend. .