Sometime in the early 2000s, after reading a boatload of American and British literature in high school and college, and an even bigger boatload of crime novels and thrillers in the years after college, I caught the pulp fiction bug.
Maybe it started with the Tarzan novels I’d read in junior high, or the Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler classics that were part of my deep dive into detective fiction during the 1980s and ‘90s. And I’m sure the large collection of Doc Savage paperbacks that I had scooped up from a used bookstore in Cleveland Heights sometime around 2001 had something to do with it too.
Whenever it happened, it didn’t take long for me to figure out the connection between the pulp fiction of the 1930s and ‘40s and the genre fiction of the early 21st century. Slowly, almost subconsciously, I was following a path – however undefined – toward the kinds of stories I might like to write someday.
And then along came a book called The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, written by Paul Malmont and published twenty years ago this month, in June of 2006.
The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a story of mystery and swashbuckling adventure, with two protagonists who happen to be highly prolific and successful writers from the original pulp era: Walter Gibson and Lester Dent, the primary authors of the Shadow and Doc Savage adventures, respectively. Malmont portrays Gibson and Dent as rivals, but ultimately as allies as they go up against a rogue U.S. Army officer who has gained access to a deadly chemical agent left over from World War I. His plan to use it against a Chinese warlord on a revenge mission spins out of control, and soon it’s up to the two pulp scribes to stop a deadly gas that threatens all of New York City.
USA Today called the book “a high-energy novel…written with a confident hand by an author who understands what it takes to write a good story and keep readers mesmerized from page one and yearning for more when it’s over.”
Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil (2001) and Sunnyside (2009), called it “the very definition of a gripping yarn, with infamous villains, nefarious plots, and hairbreadth escapes…Pulp fiction at its best.”
For me, the book was a turning point. Suddenly, it felt like the spirit of classic pulp fiction was alive and well in the new century, and it still had mainstream appeal. Suddenly, the way forward on that path I’d been following with tentative steps looked a lot clearer. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the earliest notes for my first Midnight Guardian novel, Hour of Darkness, started coming together within a year after I read The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril.
Fast forward twenty years. I reached out to Paul Malmont a few months ago and asked him if he’d be interested in answering a few questions about the book on the occasion of its 20th anniversary. He was extremely gracious when I approached him, and very generous with his time and his responses. It’s an honor to feature him here on the blog, and I’m grateful for his cooperation. Our Q&A went like this:
JCB: Tell me about your relationship with the pulps, and when and how you discovered them. Was it a form of literature that you were already immersed in when you set out to write The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril?
PM: Oh, these are two easy childhood memories to access. We’d driven past a movie theater, and the poster was for a movie called Doc Savage and it caught my attention because my dad said, “Oh, they finally made a movie of that?” Then sometime soon after that, I saw what I thought was the paperback movie adaptation (those were huge at the time), but it turned out to be the Bantam re-issue of Doc Savage: Man of Bronze tied to the move, with photos inside. I was hooked from the beginning because it was so not what I expected. I loved the era, the characters, and the adventure. When I found out it was a series, I had a quest. My parents loved flea markets and antique stores, and I could usually find a Bantam book or two. A few times I even found the original pulps.
Around the same time, probably the same year, I got a box record set of The Shadow featuring Orson Welles. I fell in love with that character too! Same era! Harder to find books as they never had the major reissue that Doc Savage had. But I did find things like the Batman/Shadow crossover.
Later in my teens, my interests were routed back to Doc with Philip Jose Farmer’s Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life and A Feast Unknown. It was like finding a cool friend who took the stuff I liked seriously (certainly none of my other cool friends did). I never achieved pro-level collecting status, and as I got older and the reprints started carrying two novels at the same time, I kind of fell out, though I did buy every issue of the ‘80s Doc Savage and The Shadow comic runs at Forbidden Planet, where I also found Walter B. Gibson’s The Shadow Scrapbook and Will Murray’s The Duende History of the Shadow Magazine.
Lots of other interests kind of coalesced over the next fifteen or so years until I realized that I knew as much about the pulps as anyone, and that a lot of interesting people were writing pulps and living in New York at the same time – a time I loved in a city I had made my home.
JCB: The main protagonists of the novel are Walter Gibson and Lester Dent – the primary authors of the Shadow and Doc Savage pulps, respectively. Were these two pulp heroes – and/or these two writers – among your personal favorites from the era? Were there other favorites as well?
PM: Actually, I was a fan of Kenneth Robeson and Maxwell Grant! Those guys had names that reeked of adventure, and I imagined they must have led larger-than-life, well, lives. Honestly, I was a little disappointed when I found out that Robeson was just some guy named Lester. Ugh! And then a Walter. Double ugh! I made my peace with it. I was also a fan of other writers from that time, like Lovecraft, Heinlein, and the best (and youngest of them), Bradbury.
JCB: Making these two real-life pulp writers the protagonists of a pulp adventure novel is a clever device. Where did the idea come from?
PM: I’m a huge fan of the movie Time After Time – one of my all-time faves. I always loved that meta layer when fiction collides with real life in an interesting way. I was also really inspired by Dragon, which took the angle that Bruce Lee lived in a Bruce Lee movie. I had made a short film called The King of the Magicians (available on YouTube), and at the end I dedicated it to Walter B. Gibson and Orson Welles, two magicians responsible for creating The Shadow that I loved, and I had The Shadow appear. In the course of explaining to people why I put that in there and why it was so important to me, I realized I actually knew a lot about these people and their works. At one point I realized it was possible for all of them to be in New York City at the same time, along with L. Ron Hubbard, Louis L’Amour and others, and it all fell into place.
I also wanted to explain to my wife and kids why these dusty old books taking up shelf space meant so much to me.
JCB: You set up Gibson and Dent as rivals in the story. To the best of my knowledge (based on a fair amount of research), this was not the nature of their relationship in real life. What prompted you to take it in that direction for the story?
PM: I always like to say that while my characters based on real people do share similarities with them, they’re fictional creations. The idea of two people vying for a number one spot in any field is inherently dramatic. I also know first-hand how writers can be confident and insecure and jealous and supportive at the same time, and that was the drama I needed to begin to create characters and conflict.
JCB: Your subsequent novel, The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown (2011), is built on a similar premise, although the character emphasis shifts away from Gibson and Dent and focuses more on sci-fi writers Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov. It’s often referred to as the sequel to Chinatown. Do you see it as such?
PM: Absolutely. I admired how The Angel of Darkness flipped protagonists after The Alienist. It was also the natural arc of the pulp industry itself as the science-fiction genre ascended to primacy very quickly and overwhelmed many of the other genres, including the hero pulps. Also, when I discovered that a couple of people I had already written about – particularly Heinlein and Asimov – were involved in a very science-fiction sounding endeavor for the Navy in Philadelphia, I knew I had my story.
JCB: I often find the life stories of the pulp writers to be just as interesting and colorful – and maybe even more interesting in some cases – than the fictional stories they churned out. I wonder if this is the case for you as well – for Gibson and Dent, or perhaps for others.
PM: I actually knew of Walter B. Gibson from his books on magic before I knew that he was Maxwell Grant. So I knew he had a somewhat exotic life (compared to me at that time). I think part of the mystique that develops around writers comes from readers trying to imagine how a dimension of the writer’s life becomes an integral part of their work. I think Hemingway kind of set the romantic mental model that people have for writers who live like they write.
JCB: Do you still see the influences and hear the echoes of classic pulp fiction in our modern-day mainstream entertainment: fiction, film, TV, comics, etc.? If so, tell me where in particular you see and hear it.
PM: Of course Doc Savage and The Shadow resonate through Superman and Batman today. A lot of television procedural thriller series follow Lester Dent’s structure of a main character’s A-plot arc with secondary characters paired up to follow the B-plot arc – and all of it meeting up to resolve the story in the end. But nothing would make me happier than a really good movie or TV version of Doc Savage and The Shadow. Or The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril!
JCB: What about the other dimension of your career? You were a marketing executive at DC for several years. Can you provide a brief description of what else you’ve been doing in parallel with the novel writing?
PM: I left DC in 2020. During my time there I helped launch the DC Universe streaming platform. I created the news and entertainment program DC Daily, which ran every day. I also ran the websites and social media for DC, Mad Magazine, and Vertigo, and hosted the Vertigo Lounge podcast. It was a good time to be in the superhero business! For the past few years I’ve been at Amazon/AWS running creative gen AI initiatives for internal video projects. I’ve also been building BYONDR.io, an AI-powered paranormal investigation app and media eco-system.
JCB: In the time that you’ve been involved with those other endeavors, your fiction writing seems to have been on hiatus. Do you plan to come back to it someday? If so, what kinds of stories do you still want to tell?
PM: Well, I’ve never stopped writing, but I just haven’t been publishing. I’ve written three novels during that time. The new one, Relative Spies, is a fictional account of my grandfather, a spy. I’m very proud of it. We’ll see if the publishing market responds to it. And then maybe you’ll get to read it. I’m also working on an immersive theatrical adaptation of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. I’m also developing an old-time-radio serialized version of The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril. No promises on that one, though.
JCB: Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions. The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril was a book that encouraged me to take a deeper dive into classic pulp fiction – and in many respects, it was a catalyst for my own fiction writing. I’m grateful that we finally got a chance to connect and talk about your work.
PM: I really appreciate you reaching out and inviting me to do this. I’m so glad that people like you still remember my book fondly. I love the community keeping Doc and The Shadow going. I’m curious to see what happens when those properties start hitting the public domain over the next few years. Maybe we’ll see some talented people figuring out some new takes.
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The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is still in print and available on Amazon or from your local bookseller. For more information about Paul Malmont, his books, and the various other pursuits that have been keeping him busy over the past several years, visit his website and take a look around. In the meantime, if any evildoers happen to rise up and threaten your town, have no fear. The author assures me that there are plenty of intrepid writers from the golden age of the pulps who are ready to spring into action and save the day.