Percival Christopher Wren (1875 - 1941) was an English writer, mostly of adventure fiction. He is remembered best for Beau Geste, a much-filmed book of 1924, involving the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. This was one of 33 novels and short story collections that he wrote, mostly dealing with colonial soldiering in Africa. His literary influences included Frederick Marryat, R. M. Ballantyne, G. A. Henty, and H. Rider Haggard. He graduated with a Master of Arts degree from St Catherine's Society, now St Catherine's College, Oxford but then a non-collegiate institution for poorer students. Wren subsequently claimed to have worked as a navy deckhand, costermonger and fairground boxer during a three-year period between school and Oxford, as well as enlisting briefly as a cavalry trooper in the Queen's Bays (2nd Dragoon Guards). Wren worked as a boarding school teacher for a few years, during which he married Alice Shovelier and had a daughter (Estelle, born 1901). In 1903, he joined the Indian Education Service as headmaster of Karachi High School. Between 1903 and 1907 he also worked with the Educational Inspectorate for Sind and lectured at a teachers' training college.
