The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a Historical Novel That Sorta Happened

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Sometimes, you just have to go back to your roots. . .

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I'll readily own up to the fact that the exploits of the Shadow and Conan the Barbarian, not to mention the overwrought H.P. Lovecraft horror tales, inspired me to write as much, if not more, as anything I learned in English Lit. Not to discount Dickens or James Joyce, but the lurid, action-packed tales conjured by Walter Gibson and Lester Dent never failed to transport me to a reality that scraped the world in which we live. My father's addiction to Louis L'amour westerns didn't help matters, either.

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The bottom line remains the same-- the pulps, the dime novels, whatever you want to call them-- were the cornerstone that lay the foundation of pop culture as we know it. They predated comic books, they inspired movies of the time, they created the formula by which American detective series would more or less follow to this day and they launched the careers of more than a few writers who went on to become mainstays of popular literature.

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Paul Malmont's debut novel The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is both a homage to the pulps and the men who wrote them, and a lightning-paced, intricate adventure novel in its own right. Set in 1937 New York, when the pulps were at their zenith, it casts the genre's most popular writers as the unlikely alter-egos of their creations. Walter Gibson (aka Maxwell Grant) and Lester Dent (aka Kenneth Robeson) were the creators of the Shadow and Doc Savage, respectively, the most popular characters of the time. The rivalry between the two writers, and their competition to tell the ultimate pulp tale, is the thread that holds the novel together. That quest leads them on divergent paths that lead to the same destination.

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"Let me tell you a story," Walter Gibson tells a young Ron Hubbard at the novel's opening. "You tell me where real ends and pulp begins." Thus begins this wildly entertaining adventure that weaves historical fact and outlandish implausibility into a package that leaves the reader wondering which parts actually happened, and which were pulp conjurings.

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The death of H.P. Lovecraft, then a fringe writer, even for the pulps, serves as the hook for the mystery that draw Gibson and Dent into a web of intrigue that stretches from NewYork's Upper West Side to the the northern steppes of Manchurian China. As one might expect from a novel that is itself a pulp adventure, facts, though they are laced throughout the work, never get in the way of the story. What we're treated to as a result is a cornucopia of real-life characters playing against a conspiracy of super-villains. Orson Welles and Mao Tse Tung are among the cameo players here, though their roles are hardly pivotal. Robert Heinlein and Louis L'amour are integral to the plot, however. The villains, at least the main ones, a Chinese warlord bent on revenge, and an American military man with no motive beyond greed, are drawn in detail convincingly realistic.

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The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a pulp at heart, though, and Malmont wallows in the possibilities of the genre. There are subplots involving Chinatown's Tong Wars of the early 20th century, chemical weaponry of mass destruction left over from WWI, mutated, lumbering zombies, madman motivations and nightmare visions. There are outrageous escapes, six-shooter gun battles, sword fights, treasure hunts and the obligatory femme fatale-- in this case, a psychic with a pet chicken).

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Where Malmont is at his best, however, is in his ability to breathe genuine life into his characters. They all have a compelling backstory, from Gibson and Dent, to the "villain" Zhang Mei, and Malmont skillfully interweaves those pasts into the context of the plot. While it does make the novel a bit long-ish (371 pages), it puts the reader into a universe that is immersive and irresistable. In fact, this is a novel that reads like a movie looks. Dissolves and intercuts abound in the story in a cinematic prose style that cries out to be made into a film.

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As an action-adventure novel, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a thrill ride the likes of which are rarely seen in mainstream publishing. As a homage to the guys who wrote those thrilling tales that influenced all pop culture to come--and did so for a penny a word--it's a testament to the power of a ripping good yarn.

The Two Faces of the Batman

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Batman is, bar none, the most iconic fictional character of the last century. Google "Batman" and you will find over 51 million entries--Only Superman can compete with those figures. James Bond, Spider-Man and Mickey Mouse don't even come close. While current searches give The Man of Steel a slight edge over the Dark Knight, that can easily be attributed to the PR surrounding the release of Superman Returns earlier this year. And while I am in no way dismissing the cultural significance of Superman or Mickey Mouse, I contend that that the Batman appeals to us on a much more visceral level.

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Bruce Wayne is a man obsessed with bringing all evildoers to justice, all borne out of seeing his parents murdered before his eyes. We all know that set-up--it's embedded in the pop culture psyche in no uncertain terms. Simple on the surface, it appeals to our primal sense of justice.

We all want to see evil punished.--and therein lies the cathartic nature of Batman. Through him, we know that justice will prevail, regardless of the odds.

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The character of Batman has been with us for sixty-seven years now, introduced to the world in the May,1939 issue of Detective Comics. To put that in a historical perspective, that was eleven US Presidents ago, Germany had not yet invaded Poland and America was clawing its way out of the Great Depression. Oh yeah, and comic books, a new media format back then, cost all of ten cents. In a world at the precipice of turmoil, the shadow of a bat meting out justice offered a darker, but more realistic hero than a god-like alien from Krypton. Batman was somebody a kid could relate to-- a hero, who, in theory, he could grow up to become.

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Batman was, and I think still is (although I could be wrong),

the only superhero who had no superpowers--he wasn't an alien deriving his powers from the sun, he wasn't given a ring with unlimited potentials, he didn't take an accidental chemical bath, he wasn't bitten by a radioactive spider, he wasn't a mutant--Bruce Wayne worked his ass off to become Batman. And that's what made him more real than any of the others.

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Batman is in many ways the lineal descendant of the Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro and, of course, the Shadow, with one glaring exception--Bruce Wayne was motivated by a grief that ate at his soul. He had to release the pain of his loss, the fears that gnawed his psyche by projecting them into the evils that had been inflicted in him by his trauma. That sort of distress would leave anybody two routes in their lifepath: either a quest to heal, or a quest to destroy the pain. Batman has walked a precarious line between the two extremes throughout his various incarnations through the years. Leave out the downright silly stories of the fifties, and two distinct personalities emerge: Batman, the Caped Crusader, and the Batman, the Dark Knight.

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The Caped Crusader personality is most fully realized in the Denny O'Neil--Neal Adams stories of the mid-seventies to early eighties, and it is here that Batman finally emerges as a genuinely sympathetic character. O'Neil explored the psyche of Bruce Wayne as well as Batman, and Neal Adams drew the character as grim, determined, and most of all, bat-like. Theirs was a character fraught with angst-- part detective, part romantic, part avenger, and completely human.

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In 1986, with his The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller built on the themes that O'Neil/Adams had explored and presented a Batman that went beyond the roots of the character to examine the the dichotomy of Bruce Wayne and his alter ego: namely, is Bruce Wayne Batman, or is the Batman merely portraying Bruce Wayne? Ultimately, that is what is the core of the Batman mythos. It's also in that issue that we are afforded the opportunity to explore the yin-yang nature of humanity.

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As integral as the Batman is to pop culture, only two movies have come close to capturing the character of Batman: Tim Burton's 1989 mega-hit Batman, and Chris Nolan's 2005 take Batman Begins. Burton's version is responsible for the resurgence of comic book characters as feature-length movies. Played largely as Wagnerian opera, Burton's version takes a lot of liberties--such as having the Joker being the killer of Wayne's parents-- but achieving a visual aura that set a new standard for all superhero movies that would follow it. His follow-up Batman Returns, however, failed artistically in that Batman spent most of the film reacting, rather than acting, to events going on around him. The Schumacher versions that followed sent the character on a downward spiral that can only be charitably called campy messes.

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Batman Begins finally got the myth right. Chris Nolan and his team did their research, tweaked key points hinted at in the comics (most notably Frank Miller's Batman: Year One) and presented a film that not only was true to the original concept of the character (fear as a weapon), but offered a fascinating psychological study as well. This was a film about motives as much as it was about action. For the first time, the public was presented with a universal hero in the Batman, a character that at once delineates the duality of the mind with a clarity that speaks best in a visual vocabulary.

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What it comes down to is this: something in Batman strikes a universal chord that resonates in all of us. His obsessions echo our fundamental need for balance. In an uncertain world, we all need a Batman to protect us. Pity that in our world, there is no Batman.

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