Ker, David
Entry updated 24 June 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1842-1914) UK author of Scots ancestry who became a tutor in Russia and was Daily Telegraph and New York Herald war correspondent with the Russian army in the 1870s. His stories for boys set in Central Asia include The Boy Slave in Bokhara (1874) and three Lost Race tales: The Lost City; Or, the Boy Explorers in Central Asia (16 October 1883-1 January 1884 Harper's Young People Illustrated Weekly; 1884), in which an ancient Greek city is found in Tashkent; O'er Tartar Deserts; Or, English and Russian in Central Asia (1898); and Ilderim the Afghan: A Tale of the Indian Border (1904). Tales set elsewhere include Lost Among White Africans: A Boy's Adventures on the Upper Congo (1886), in which a tribe of white Africans, descended from Portuguese explorers, has flourished; and Into Unknown Seas; Or, the Cruise of Two Sailor-Boys (1886).
Two vts of Lost Among White Africans – The Lost Race & The Unknown River 1888 and Out with Stanley; Or, Adventures in the Great Dark Land undated – are listed in E F Bleiler's Science Fiction: The Early Years (1990) but have not been traced. [JC]
David Ker
born Bowden Vale, Cheshire: October 1842
died Hindhead, Surrey: 9 August 1914
works
- The Boy Slave in Bokhara (London: Griffith Farran Okeden and Welsh, 1874) [hb/]
- The Lost City; Or, the Boy Explorers in Central Asia (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1884) [hb/]
- Lost Among White Africans: A Boy's Adventures on the Upper Congo (London: Cassell, 1886) [hb/]
- Into Unknown Seas; Or, the Cruise of Two Sailor-Boys (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1886) [hb/]
- O'er Tartar Deserts; Or, English and Russian in Central Asia (London: W and R Chambers, 1898) [illus/hb/Joseph Finnemore]
- Ilderim the Afghan: A Tale of the Indian Border (London: Religious Tract Society, 1904) [illus/hb/Alfred Pearse]
links
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