The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

"Let me tell you a story. And you tell me where real ends and pulp begins..."
If, like me you get a kick out of the classic pulp of yesteryear, then it's highly likely you'll enjoy the heck out of debut novelist Paul Malmont's The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, a book replete with all those dime-store novel thrills and spills, but also a piece of fiction about the men who created them.
The pulps pre-dated comic books, inspired movies and serials, and became a cornerstone of pop culture that's as pervasive now as it was then. In creating a fictional homage to the pulps, Malmont's book also manages to be a lightning paced dash that takes in post Depression America, warlord-plagued China, the creepy mist filled waterfronts of Rhode Island and the secret temples and opium dens of New York's Chinatown. It also introduces us to Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage and Walter Gibson, creator of The Shadow, two writers at odds with each other and wrestling with the notion of self-identity (both men published under the enforced pseudonyms of Kenneth Robeson and Maxwell Grant respectively).
The death of H.P. Lovecraft, at the time a relatively obscure pulp writer, serves as the catalyst for the mystery that draws Gibson and his young protege, Ron Hubbard (yes, that L. Ron Hubbard) into a mystery at a medical lab right out of a Lovecraft story, and to an island full of zombies. Meanwhile Dent and his wife, who are a beautifully drawn couple, struggling to get past a recent miscarriage, find themselves investigating an old Chinatown tong murder that leads them to an abandoned theatre, a golden statue and whip wielding assassin.
To say more would spoil a rip-roaring three hundred-odd pages. But along the way to the action-packed finale are treasure maps, secret codes, Chinese warlords, barrels of toxic nerve gas and femme fatale (who also happens to be a psychic with a pet chicken).
In addition there are a cornucopia of cameo players for the geeks: Orson Welles (who starred as The Shadow on the radio for several years, and who was a comic and pulp fan), Robert Heinlein, Al Capone (Gibson wrote his biography) and Louis L'Amour, among others. There's even a cameo for Seigel and Schuster: two young fledgling comic artists who are in New York to sell their Super-Man idea; Hubbard tells them not to bother - comic books will never take off...
It's a wonderful and irresistable immersion into 30's America, a pulp story with some of the breadth of Michael Chabon's Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier and Clay, and bears a real sense of compassion for Dent and Gibson as men who despite their fame, lacked the respect of literary authors like Hemingway.
A ripping yarn, as they say. Well worth a trip to Amazon for...