Novel Review: The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont
I love pulp novels. Particularly the hero pulps - The Shadow, Doc Savage and The Spider.
So when I saw "The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril" on the bookshop shelf with its distressed cover and the sadly slightly camp depiction of Lester Dent (on the UK cover). I had to buy it. [amazon.com][amazon.co.uk]
Although we don't start by following Lester Dent's advice, in the "First line, or as near thereto as possible, introduce the hero and swat him with a fistful of trouble." We do get quickly introduced to the main heroes Lester Dent, Walter B. Gibson, L. Ron Hubbard and get a feel for the plot of the novel - "where does the real end and the pulp begin".
Set in 1937 you get a pretty good overview of the pulp industry and the life of the writers that inhabit it.
Pretty soon after the death of H. P. Lovecraft. our heroes Lester Dent, Walter B. Gibson, L. Ron Hubbard and a few other pulp authors start fighting their way through a pulp adventure of their own. (sadly no Norvell W. Page that I noticed, but then The Spider did not get published by Street and Smith so that probably explains why).
Unashamedly a hero pulp with outrageous plot episodes and cliffhanger chapter endings. The prose pushes you through the book quickly enough so you get the feel of reading a classic pulp.
The text contains a few 'spicy' episodes that I don't think would have graced the Street and Smith published adventures that it modelled but even these seemed tame enough that they probably wouldn't draw the modern reader's attention.
I haven't read much about the real life stories of the pulp authors mentioned so I don't know how antagonistic, or otherwise, they acted towards each other. But I read enough parallels between the authors and the characters they wrote about to keep a pulp fan happy.
The novel treats the heroes respectfully and at no point do any of them suffer an episode that would make you overly cringe for their character. And they do tend to experience the type of things that they would put their own heroes through so Gibson suffers in a different way than Dent, in the same way that Doc Savage suffered through very different trials than The Shadow's tribulations.
Recommended reading for all Hero pulp fans. Good reading for thriller fans that want to get a feel for where their genre blossomed. And well written enough for lovers of modern literature. I liked it.
Related Links
- amazon.com
- amazon.co.uk
- Author's official web site - http://www.paulmalmont.com/
- Pulp downloads - http://pulpgen.com/pulp/downloads/index.html