[3] Two brothers of the Filala commune, both leather merchants in Tabelbala Algeria, travel on business to the city of Tessalit, accompanied by their young nephew, Driss.
— Colm Tóibín in The London Review of Books (2007)[5] The story for 'The Delicate Prey' had its origins in an actual incident described to Bowles by a "French captain" in the winter of 1947–1948 at Timimoun, Algeria.
The outlines of the event, including Filala leather merchants, their murder by a bandit and his capture and execution with the approval of French authorities, all appear in the short work of fiction.
Don't publish that…everyone will think you're a monster, and it will do you irreparable harm..."[8][9] Bowles opted to submit "The Delicate Prey" for publication in the Paris Zero in 1949, a journal that had a very limited circulation.
[12][13] The shocking act of gratuitous violence that marks the climax of the story earned Bowles the epithet "the pornographer of terror" and "a secret lover of the horror he evokes" by literary critic Leslie A. Fiedler in The Kenyon Review.
[14] Biographer Allen Hibbard writes: ...at its most basic level, castration (penectomy) invokes our fears of vulnerability, of having our most personal, productive potential violently and irrationally ripped from us.