The Carpet from Bagdad

In 1911, George P. A. Jones is a vice-president at a carpet company, a young man torn between his practical Boston upbringing and a restless imagination that dreams of distant deserts and forbidden love. When he embarks on a year-long adventure seeking excitement, he stumbles into a dangerous game involving a sacred prayer rug stolen from a Baghdad mosque, a gang of criminals funding a New York bank robbery, and a mysterious woman whose fate is entwined with the carpet's guardian. What begins as a romantic quest for fulfillment becomes a high-stakes chase across exotic locales, where George must reconcile the man he is with the man he longs to become. MacGrath delivers swift, pulp-era storytelling: danger, desire, and double-crosses wrapped in Orientalist adventure. It's a product of its time, yes, but it captures the early twentieth-century hunger for escape, for romance, for somewhere the ordinary cannot reach.