I must confess a pronounced weakness for well-crafted mysteries spun around real historical characters and settings. Two I've enjoyed recently were John Darnton's "The Darwin Conspiracy," which fictionalizes events during the voyage of the Beagle in the 1830s to crack some of the unexplained mysteries about Britain's great naturalist, and "The Interpretation of Murder," Jed Rubenfeld's tale about Sigmund Freud's first visit to New York in 1909, where the doctor's yet-untested theories on psychoanalysis are applied to apprehend a serial killer.
"The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril" takes place in the depths of the Great Depression, which overlapped with the golden age of matinee movie serials, radio melodramas and pulp magazines with titles like Argosy, Doc Savage and The Shadow, full of the stuff of fantasy, with super heroes pursuing insidious villains through the rat-infested catacombs running beneath every major city. Pulp writers wracked their brains for new ideas to keep their eager readers entertained.
In "Chinatown," author Paul Malmont turns the tables, making the pulp writers the stars of their own thriller. The narrative spins together three of the most famous: Walter B. Gibson, originator of Lamont Cranston, the secretive crime fighter better known as The Shadow; Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage, the model for the Indiana Jones films; and the ambitious L. Ron Hubbard, who was to graduate from pulp fiction to establish the Church of Scientology.
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