Jay was something of a late bloomer as a writer, working as a shorthand typist in Australia and England and then as a court stenographer in New Guinea, before turning her hand to novels. Her first was published in 1951, when Jay was in her early 30s. She wrote crime novels until around 1970, when she switched to writing romantic suspense and mainstream novels, for reasons which aren't very clear.
When Brooke tries to find Finlay, who has disappeared, he begins to realize his missing friend's job wasn't exactly what Brooke had thought, while every step of his investigation is dogged by a sinister man in a yellow turban. Misgivings and confusion turn to outright terror when he climbs into bed one night and finds a blood-drenched corpse. He ends up on the run from the police, who think he's the murderer, and shadowy men who want to kill him for reasons unknown to Brooke, in a journey that takes him to the Kurat mountains and into the heart of Pakistan.
The 1950s Pakistani settings of The Yellow Turban are particularly relevant to current events of our day, and it's fascinating to catch a glimpse of the country's culture that Jay would surely have witnessed first-hand on her own travels. No doubt, some of the villages and cultures have changed little during the intervening half-century. There are hints of the Pakistani people, of various faiths, political views, classes and backgrounds, that Jay manages to convey through her descriptive writing:
On a kong seat covered by red plastic, a thin, dirty young man, wearing baggy white trousers and a buttoned-up gray coat, lay curled up with his eyes closed and his naked toes twiching like a dreaming dog.
Conversation in Pakistan, I was to learn, was frequently only a means of self-expression. The idea of communication between man and man gets lost somehow.
I suppose you can get used to bribing people. Maybe you get an exaggerated idea in your had that money will corupt anyone, and maybe, after you've lived in the East ong enough, it will. Customs are like diseaases, you can breathe them in from the air, soak them through your skin.
And still the great crowd merged on, a white boiling mass speckled with black dots like grains of dust blown onto a bowl of foam. The flagellants moved on and a group of drummers approached, heralding a tower made from green and crimson tinsel paper. It stopped directly in front of us, the crowd formed a circle around it and a group of ragged little boys danced forward, each with a knife in his hand.
This landscape was disordered, certainly, but without force or intension, like a disordered room when clothes are left lying around. The objects on it appeared to have some prescribed place to stand or go, some sense of prupose and direction, and had just dropped in their tracks out of lassitude of frustration before they took up their positions.
Ultimately, the plot and setting of The Yellow Turban end up merging age-old themes of man's war with himself and others into the insanity mankind has created with 20th (and 21st) century technological evils. The novel's denouement near a crumbling monastery proves to be a fitting symbol for the crumbling worlds of William Brooke, Roy Finlay, and the people of Pakistan in the 1950s.
