German Bilingual Reader 10 : Die weisse Schlange

A seedy bar in Khartoum is the focal point of a mistery. For two years wealthy travellers have been vanishing without a trace. Who is responsible? What has happened to them? And what is behind the enigmatic White Snake?
Be enthralled by a pukka adventure in the exotic capital of the Sudan where many people still remember the mahdi, that religious fanatic and slave trader who defeated and killed Gordon of Khartoum.

Walther August Gottfried Kabel (* 8 August 1878 in Danzig;
6 May 1935 in Kleinmachnow) was a German entertainment writer. He is considered one of the most widely read German popular writers of the 1920s.
Walther Kabel's father was a professional soldier and sent his son to a grammar school. After graduating from high school, he studied law and became a trainee teacher.
Presumably during his time as a recruit (from 1906), Kabel came into contact with the publisher Max Lehmann, who at the time ran the "Berliner Druck- und Verlagsgesellschaft". In 1909, Lehmann renamed his company "Verlag moderner Lekture"; it became one of the most successful houses for light literature. Kabel wrote over fifty titles for the small-format booklet series "Manne und Max" under the pseudonym "Walther Neuschub", which were also repeatedly reprinted by the publishing house.
Kabel took part in the First World War as a front-line officer. During this time he wrote eleven titles under the pseudonym W. Belka for the series "Das Eiserne Kreuz", which Lehmann had founded. After the First World War, Kabel also published erotic literature in the publisher's "Intimate Stories" series. He chose M.E.Schugge as his pseudonym here.
His first long detective novel "Das Haus am Muhlengraben" was such a success that the publisher Lehmann offered him to become the main author of a weekly series of novels, which was published under the title "Der Detektiv". In 1921, the title of the series was changed to "Harald Harst - Aus meinem Leben". Kabel chose the name Max Schraut as his pseudonym, who also acts as the first-person narrator in the booklets. Until 1933, 396 novel issues appeared in this series. Another extensive series was "Olaf K. Abelsens Abenteuer abseits vom Alltagsweg" (Olaf K. Abelsen's adventures off the beaten track), published in fifty paperbacks of 160 to 190 pages by the "Verlag moderner Lekture", the adventures of an innocent man persecuted around the globe.
After the Nazi "seizure of power" in 1933, Kabel, despite being a member of the NSDAP, was condemned as a "dirt-and-filth author" and banned from writing, and his works were banned. He himself resigned from the NSDAP. He died in Kleinmachnow in May 1935 from a gunshot wound, possibly suicide.