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Pulp fiction. It's not just the name of a Quentin Tarantino movie.
It's also a literary genre as popular in the 1930s, '40s and '50s as comic books and graphic novels are today.
Named for the cheap wood-pulp paper on which they were printed, the novels were the ultimate adventure stories spiced with fantasy, science fiction and plenty of superheroes. Doc Savage and The Shadow were among the most popular pulp-fiction heroes of this long-gone era; they were the precursors of and the inspirations for such beloved characters as Superman and Indiana Jones.
Now, debut novelist Paul Malmont, an admirer of this lost genre, has written The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril as a tribute to pulp fiction, but not all of it is made up.
He incorporates into his story, set in the 1930s, some of the greatest pulp fiction writers of the time: Lester Dent (Doc Savage) and Walter Gibson (The Shadow). And he name-drops other burgeoning or established celebs of the era, including Ron Hubbard (he later gained notoriety as L. Ron Hubbard), Edgar Rice Burroughs, Orson Welles, Harry Blackstone and Harry Houdini.
Most haunting is writer Howard Lovecraft, who was dismissed as a hack when he was alive but is recognized today as H.P. Lovecraft, one of the finest science-fiction/fantasy writers of all time.
There's a lot going on in Malmont's novel, but one very noir mystery drives the story. It has to do with rival tongs (territorial secret societies that focused on protection) in New York's Chinatown and the mystery of how one gang was able to murder a man locked in a building protected by a rival gang. Ah Hoon is discovered with a bullet hole in his forehead, but there doesn't appear to be any way a gunman could have gotten in or out of the room.
Dent and Gibson become the action heroes they write about as they try to solve the mystery as well as stop the impending doom that could kill thousands of New Yorkers if they can't find some missing metal drums filled with a deadly gas.
It's not so clear what's true and what isn't in The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, but that is half the fun. This high-energy novel is written with a confident hand by an author who understands what it takes to write a good story and keep readers mesmerized from page 1 and yearning for more when it's over.
It's a novel filled with rich characters, high adventure and fantasy -- just like classic pulp fiction.
The Chinatown
Death Cloud Peril
By Paul Malmont
Simon & Schuster, 371 pp., $24
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