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The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril: A Novel
by Paul Malmont
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Synopses & Reviews
The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a thrilling debut novel that casts the rivalry between two of pulp fiction's most revered writers into its own saga, which bursts from the pages with blood, cruelty, fear, mystery, vengeance, courageous heroes, evil villains, dames in distress, secret identities, disguises, global schemes, hideous deaths, beautiful psychics, superweapons, cliff-hanging escapes, and other outrageous pulp lies that are all completely true.
Return to 1937, when America is turning to the pulps for relief from the Depression, and meet Walter Gibson, the mind behind The Shadow, and his rival for the top-selling spot on the nation's newsstands, Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage. The murder of Gibson's friend H. P. Lovecraft — victim of a mysterious death that literally makes the skin crawl — is about to bring these two writers face to face with a peril sprung from the pulps.
The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is at once a valentine to an old-fashioned genre as well as a modern, meta-literary examination of the classic hero pulp. From the palaces and battlefields of warlord-plagued China to the seedy waterfronts of Providence, Rhode Island; from frozen seas and cursed islands to the dizzying and labyrinthine alleys and tunnels of lower Manhattan, Dent and Gibson, joined by the young pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard and a host of colorful characters, finally step out from behind the shadows of their creations to take part in a heroic journey far greater than any story they have imagined as they race to stop a madman destined to create a new empire born of, and based in, pure, gaseous evil.
The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a swashbuckling romantic tale of writers and writing, magic and love, marriage and fatherhood, and ambition and loss that weaves the true lives of its real-life characters into a fictional epic.
Review:
"Malmont's debut thriller reads like pages torn from the pulp magazines to which it pays nostalgic homage. It's 1937, and the nation's two top pulp writers — William Gibson, author of novels featuring caped crime fighter 'The Shadow,' and Lester Dent, the creator of do-gooder hero 'Doc Savage' — are trying to solve real-life mysteries that each hopes will give him bragging rights as the world's best yarn spinner. Gibson follows rumors that pulp colleague H. P. Lovecraft was murdered to the fog-shrouded Providence, R.I., waterfront. Dent tracks clues to an impossible killing through the bowels of New York's Chinatown. As the two adventures dovetail, they spawn sinuous subplots involving tong wars, secret chemical warfare, pirate mercenaries, kidnappings, revolution in China and weird science run amok. Lovecraft, L. Ron Hubbard, Louis L'Amour and Chester Himes all play prominent supporting roles and offer piquant observations on the penny-a-word writing life that conjure a colorful sense of time and place. Like the pulpsters he reveres, Malmont doesn't let the facts get in the way of his storytelling, and the result is a fun, if wildly improbable, pulp joyride. 100,000 first printing; author tour. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"If you are old enough to remember stretching out on the floor in front of the family radio and listening in wonder as a scary voice proclaimed, 'Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!' — followed by maniacal laughter — you might enjoy 'The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril,' Paul Malmont's tribute to the pulp fiction world of the 1930s. Malmont, who works in advertising in New ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) York, clearly loves the pulps, and his first novel offers as its heroes three of their best-known writers: Walter Gibson, creator of the Shadow; Lester Dent, creator of the Doc Savage series; and L. Ron Hubbard, here a 25-year-old writer of westerns and later the founder of Scientology. Malmont injects these three rivals into a plot that is itself pure pulp, assaulting us with everything from burning buildings to decapitation, from poison gas to the Yellow Peril. Along the way he also digresses on nearly forgotten lore of the pulp world, which at its peak was selling 30 million magazines a month, only to be all but wiped out by World War II paper rationing. In Malmont's opening scene, Gibson and Dent argue in Greenwich Village's White Horse Tavern as the young Hubbard looks on. The Shadow and Doc Savage have made Gibson and Dent the nation's two top pulp writers, but Gibson is the genre's biggest star, thanks to the popular movie and radio versions of 'The Shadow.' He taunts Dent, who is known to dream of writing for the Saturday Evening Post, 'You're just a nickel-a-word pulp monkey like me, selling daydreams at wholesale prices to soda jerkers in Boise and schoolboys in Kansas City.' He also lectures his rival on the nature of pulp: 'To make true pulp, really great stomach-churning, white-knuckled, turn-your-hair-white pulp, you have to fill it with a pack of outright lies. Secret identities ... Superweapons. Global schemes. Hideous deaths. Cliffhanging escapes. ... Horrors from the grave. Lost lands. Overwhelming odds. Impossible heroics.' That litany sums up the story that follows. Gibson and Hubbard ride Gibson's private Pullman car up to Providence, R.I., to attend the funeral of the horror story writer H.P. Lovecraft; this being pulp, Lovecraft later returns to life. We travel to China and meet Zhang Mei, a warlord known as the Dragon of Terror and Peril, who is battling for control of his country with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, Mao Tse-tung's Communists and the Japanese invaders. Next the warlord journeys to America to steal a hoard of poison gas. Dent, his beautiful wife and Hubbard make a dangerous sea voyage to an island where the gas is stored, only to be attacked by what appear to be zombies: 'A fourth slavering monster appeared from behind a rock pile and flung itself at Norma. Its moist hands closed around her throat.' All this leads to a barn-burner of a finish, as the Dragon of Terror and Peril threatens to put an end to our heroes, and much of New York's Chinatown, with his 'death cloud.' This saga goes on too long, and I lack the eloquence to do justice to its melodramatic excesses — but that's the way of nickel-a-word pulp. It must be said that the story adheres to Lester Dent's No. 1 rule of pulp writing: 'Avoid monotony.' Monotony is not a problem here.Other pulp writers make cameo appearances: Robert Heinlein, who went on to science-fiction fame; a cowboy who calls himself Lew and is later known as Louis L'Amour, the prolific western novelist; and novelist-to-be Chester Himes, a young ex-convict who works for Gibson and is starting to write for a Harlem pulp called Bronzeman. The young Orson Welles, who played the Shadow on the wildly successful radio show, delivers a long, fascinating monologue on how he would turn the series into a first-class movie: 'Movies are all about the interplay between light and dark, black and white. And so is The Shadow.' As Malmont notes, the pulps evolved from the penny dreadfuls and dime novels of earlier eras. He credits the success of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan stories with launching the pulp craze, and soon there were dozens of pulp magazines, some romantic, some horrific (shudders, they were called) and some spicy, but for a time the best-sellers were detective stories. (Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, publishing stories in Black Mask, were the best pulp writers of their day before they advanced to novels.) The success of the Shadow caused 'hero' pulps to overshadow detective magazines, perhaps because Depression-era Americans yearned not just for detectives to solve crimes but also for heroic avengers to protect them from a hostile world. Malmont hints at the continuing evolution of popular entertainment when he has Hubbard encounter two young men who are trying to sell a comic book: 'The crude drawings seemed to show a muscular strongman in circus tights chasing some crooks.' Hubbard laughs and tells them that people want to read stories, not look at pictures of men in capes. He can't imagine that soon the pulps will be dead and comic books, along with television, will have replaced them. Nor can he have foreseen the huge postwar popularity of paperback novels, or that in the 21st century crime and adventure novels, now called thrillers, would dominate the hardback best-seller lists and make millionaires of writers who, in the pulp era, would have been lucky to earn a nickel a word." Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers(at symbol)aol.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review:
"[A] wild romp...inventive, if a bit overlong....A little too much of a good thing." Kirkus Reviews
Review:
"There's more than enough blood, cruelty, fear, mystery, and vengeance here — along with nostalgia and literary gab — to appeal to fans of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Alan Moore's Victorian fantasies." School Library Journal
Review:
"The very definition of a ripping yarn with infamous villains, nefarious plots, and hair-breadth escapes. That the square-jawed heroes are also writers — pulpateers — makes the game a whole new kind of thrill ride. Pulp fiction at its best." Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil
Synopsis:
Set in the colorful world of the 1930s and peopled with writers H.P. Lovecraft, L. Ron Hubbard, Lester Dent, and Walter Gibson, this swashbuckling literary thriller propels the characters into a genuine pulp adventure in which they try to thwart a madman intent on creating a new global empire. About the Author Paul Malmont works in advertising. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780743287852
- Subtitle:
- A Novel
- Author:
- Malmont, Paul
- Publisher:
- Simon and Schuster
- Subject:
- Literary
- Subject:
- Historical
- Subject:
- 20th century
- Subject:
- Mystery & Detective - General
- Subject:
- Suspense
- Subject:
- Mystery & Detective - Historical
- Subject:
- Authors, American
- Subject:
- Mystery & Detective - Hard-Boiled
- Copyright:
- 2006
- Publication Date:
- May 2006
- Binding:
- Hardback
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 384
- Dimensions:
- 9.25 x 6.125 in
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