The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

by Paul Malmont

  Astounding Stories, Campbell’s mag, wasn’t hanging on a clip from a clothesline out in front like the very best-selling titles, the hero books like Doc Savage or The Shadow or G-8 and His Battle Aces, but it was clearly visible, full cover on display, on the first rack above the slicks like Collier’s and Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and the chewing gums and chocolate bars. On the same row as Astounding were some of the other bestsellers that month, titles that were flying out of newsstands, soda shops, and drugstores all across America: The Spider, Thrilling Detective, Adventure, Thrilling Adventures, Amazing Stories, Blue Book, Weird Tales, Dime Mystery, Phantom Detective, and the granddaddy of them all, still going strong after more than forty years, Argosy.

  The cover of each and every mag on the newsstand was a brilliant four-color explosion of breathtaking action captured forever in a frozen moment of suspense: the instant before a righteous fist impacted against a gnarled and snarling face; a plane spiraling disastrously toward earth as its hero struggled to untangle his parachute from its tail; Art Deco skyscrapers crumbling under a devastating alien onslaught. The Flash loved the mags’ cover art, though he knew how much it was derided within the industry and without. He knew it was what sold the mags to begin with and then kept folks coming back to find out what was in them. Ten million of them a month. Each buying an average of three mags. That meant that thirty million pulps, give or take, were being read by America each and every month! It was the cheapest and most popular form of entertainment in the country, and as long as the covers beckoned from the newsstands, it would continue to be so.

  Behind the first row were the mags that still sold consistently well but just were not gangbusters. Their bold legends were clearly visible but most of the artwork was covered by other mags. The Flash was disheartened to see that many of these titles were westerns and two-fisted tales—his bread and butter. Thrilling Western, for example, had done well by him and he by it, but it would never pay more than two and a half cents a word. Same for All-American Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories. None of them had broken out while he had been writing for them. Probably none of them ever would.

  The third row of mags were all pulled up from behind the second row so men could see the mags that boys couldn’t bring home. In addition to the mushy Love, True Love, Romance, and True Romance titles were Spicy Adventure Stories, Spicy Mystery Stories, Spicy Detective Stories, even Spicy Western Stories published by a man named Donenfeld. Their cover artists were inventive in coming up with endlessly daring ways to put glamorous and scantily clad women in harm’s way. They knew how to deliver the goods. These were the mags that had imperiled the entire industry recently, as Mayor La Guardia was so offended by their lurid scenes that he was threatening to have the garbagemen rip them from the newsstands as they executed their rounds. Some of them were making good on the mayor’s threats. Some newsstand owners had recently taken to ripping the covers from the pulps before placing them on the racks, as if that would help. The Flash had certainly never written for any of the mags on this row, but their covers had given him plenty of stimulating moments. Every writer he knew had a stash of the men’s mags in one of his desk drawers.

  He had also never written, nor would ever condescend to write, for the final row. This was the row whose titles were mostly blocked by the arousing arrangement of the men’s mags before them. Here were the shudder and menace mags like Terror Tales, Horror Stories, Strange Detective Mysteries (Who was strange? The detectives or the mysteries?), Eerie Stories, and others. Dreck. The bottom of the bottom of the literary barrel. This was the ghetto where that Lovecraft fellow had tried to eke out a name for himself. An assortment of dark perversions and decadences, never permeated by the light of a well-written phrase or inspiring insight. Many of these mags were the literary equivalent of the filthy eight-page Tijuana bibles the old Italians hid under their newspapers and would sell you if you asked for the “funnies.” He supposed that somebody must be reading them. Publishers ran their mags on a slim profit margin that didn’t allow for much misjudgment of the public’s desires. If a mag slipped only one month, it could be gone from the stands the next, its publisher bankrupt, its eds pounding the pavement and looking for work.

  He knew in his bones he was destined for the top tier. After all, he was The Flash. Sometimes (when an ed demanded) he was also Kurt von Rachen, L. Ron Hubbard, and Frederick Engelhardt. But he liked The Flash best of all. Of course it wasn’t a name he published under, like the others. It was a nickname given to him by his agent, Ed Bodin, because he could write so damn fast. He liked The Flash a hell of a sight better than Red, which was what he had most often been nicknamed until he embarked on his writing career, on account of his shock of thick red hair. But these days, Red was gone and no one in New York or Hollywood need ever know that he had existed. There was only The Flash.

  Fact is, he earned the name outright. He was blazingly fast at turning out stories. Like a machine. He wrote faster than anyone he knew, except maybe Gibson. And Dent. It was just like when he had been a boy in Montana and could read earlier and faster than anyone else. He took great pride in his ability to write fast, and to hell with writer’s block. Sometimes he felt like he was a river of words, that they flowed out of him with unimaginable force to soak the pages churning through his Remington. It was as if his imagination was fed by a deep spring. He had every confidence that the wellspring would never run dry. Why should it? It hadn’t yet. He knew his mind and never doubted it.

  Gibson’s story about the Sweet Flower War had been pretty damn good, all right, he thought. He could use a killer story like that to bust things wide open. But if both Gibson and Dent had drawn on it, they’d know where it came from if he wrote it again, even if he used a pen name. Still, it was tough to let that one go. Really good stories were hard to come by.

  These days, every two weeks, he had a new story to sell to the mags. It wasn’t easy. It was righteously hard work, tougher than laying tracks or stowing cargo had ever been. But he did it because he loved writing. He loved using his mind and his fingertips to move mountains, shape the universe, wreak havoc. Rewriting? If a fella knew what he was doing the first time, he wouldn’t have to rewrite. Muses? Hell, fear of starvation was the name of his muse. He didn’t hold with the theories about motivation, which he overheard other writers talking about at his Knickerbocker gatherings; his characters knew what to do. They knew from right and wrong, good and evil. That’s all you needed to know about someone to know what they would do. Besides, there wasn’t time for motivation. Not when the eds were trying to chisel a guy. The only way to make money in this industry was to write as best a sharpster could, as fast as he could.

  His writing had attracted attention too. He actually had a small but loyal group of readers. The eds heard from them occasionally when they would write in and demand more Hubbard. Even if a few of those letters were actually written by The Flash himself, that didn’t devalue the bona fide original and unsolicited letters that the eds would receive. His dim glow of fame, within the limited sphere of the mags, had at least made it a little easier to sell stories. When eds received a Hubbard story, they didn’t have to read it too carefully anymore. His name on the cover page was a mark of recognized quality. They could publish it easily and it would help sell. Which was the name of the game. So that was one thing he had over both Gibson and Dent: although they were top sellers, nobody in America knew who they were; they were hidden behind house names, Maxwell Grant and Kenneth Robeson. He, on the other hand, was becoming known by his own name.

  The top tier, that was his destiny. He knew he’d get there. He loved the pulp business like no one else he knew. Most of the writers he knew were cynical about it, embarrassed by where their fortunes and talents had abandoned them and damned by their ambitions. They longed to be published in hardcover. Read in libraries. Discussed in cafés. They longed to be lionized like the legendary Street & Smith writers: Horatio Alger, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, and, most of all, Jack L
ondon. The Flash didn’t crave the stature of those alumni, or even of Dent and Gibson. Particularly those two men, he felt, were his peers, who owed their elevated positions to the benefits of age and timing more than talent. When he looked desirously at another’s career, and chose to emulate its course, the writer could only be Edgar Rice Burroughs.

  Tarzana. The thought of it practically made him sigh with longing. Burroughs’s ape-man had practically ushered in the pulp age, as publishers sprang up all over the place to try and produce a successful imitation. Through careful control Burroughs had parlayed the character in the funny papers, movies, toys, and games, not to mention a seemingly endless string of new novels and their lucrative international translations. With the money he had made doing this, he had turned around and bought himself a kingdom. A whole valley in California! Just outside of Los Angeles. He built and sold houses on the land to the suckers who wanted to get out of the city. He ran the town council. He was king of the pulp jungle.

  Just before the decision to move back to New York had been made, The Flash had been in Hollywood writing a serial movie adventure, The Secret of Treasure Island. He had made the pilgrimage to the promised land of Tarzana and seen for himself what it had to offer. It was peaceful and bucolic in the California way. Fragrant orange trees basked in the warm sun, shading the little backyards behind the small houses Burroughs had built and sold.

  He could do better, he had decided as he strolled down the elm-lined sidewalks of Tarzana. He had tried to meet Burroughs but the people at his gatehouse said he was otherwise engaged. Imagine being too busy to meet The Flash! He suspected that Burroughs, now an elderly man, might be jealous of The Flash’s youth and vitality. Burroughs was richer than Croesus. He had created an empire. By simply writing! Now why wouldn’t The Flash himself aspire to do the same?

  Tarzana.

  To get there he knew he first had to jump from the second row to the clothesline. Astounding Stories looked like it might finally be the way. Campbell had already moved it from the second row to the first. It just needed a push to get to the top tier. Then maybe The Flash could land a hero mag for himself.

  He turned from the newsstand. It was much colder in New York than it had been a few months ago in Hollywood. A fell winter wind blew off the dank Hudson River, which he could see just west of him. The wind stung the ears and eyes, and he turned up his collar, wishing he had had time to pack a heavier coat. Upon his return from Hollywood, he hadn’t even made it up the stone path from the front gate to the white door of his house in Bremerton, Washington, before his wife, Polly, had turned him away. He had had an affair with a starlet, and a jealous former lover of hers had written his wife a letter, ratting him out. He loved his wife and loved being married, and he didn’t feel he deserved to be banished from their household just because he had done something stupid out of loneliness. The suitcase he had brought with him to his hotel in New York was the same one he had been carrying when she had appeared in tears upon their front porch. In it then, and now carefully arrayed on his cabinet in the hotel, was an untouched brand-new teddy bear for his son, Ron Jr.; and a china doll for his daughter, Catherine.

  Damn, it was cold. He looked at the faces of the men hovering outside the Street & Smith building—anxious men, expectant men, hopeful men. Men who hoped to be able to slip a story to a passing ed in exchange for a few bucks or a break. He realized that no matter how many times the radio played “Happy Days Are Here Again!” or Roosevelt spoke about the next New Deal, the Depression was not over. Especially not for these men. These were the penny-a-word men. Most of them had other jobs and were here on their lunch hour. Some of them spent an entire day out here, trying to scribble stories in notebooks as they waited. The Flash felt a moment of dread. This was the fate that awaited him if he fell to the third row, or farther. Even a guy with talent could end up like Lovecraft. In truth he knew that his moments of weakness, as with that actress, could put him out here on the street faster than failure to anticipate the public taste ever could.

  He walked past the line of men, aware that they were staring at him. A tall, gawky teen tried to foist some pages on him but stepped back at the last moment. The teen looked at his face eagerly and then his face fell as he realized that The Flash wasn’t an ed. Just a writer.

  Francis Scott Street and Francis Shubael Smith had founded the company which took their names in 1855. The firm had made its home in this seven-story, block-long building fifteen years before The Flash was born. Even outside it was possible to feel the deep and persistent thrumming vibrations of the enormous printers, rolling and pounding below the street in the basement; and the binders, which folded the cheap pulp paper into four sections to make a book. Farther up the street he could see the trucks at the loading docks, and the teamsters tossing the bales of freshly printed pulps into them. Some of them were down to their undershirts, even in the chill air, and their coarse language and rough joking reinforced for The Flash that the pulp business was hard work. From the discipline and determination it took to write pulps to the aggressive tactics it took to get them published and onto the newsstands, it was a man’s job. He knew of no women pulp writers—even the romances were written by men—and he couldn’t name a female artist or ed to save his life. Not that there weren’t women in pulps. There were assistants and secretaries.

  God, that actress! What had he been thinking?

  He put his hand on the door and opened it up. The security guard inside waved him on in. His tenure as president of the Guild had granted him certain privileges; easy access to the Street & Smith building was one of them. The reception lobby was faded and dark. The walls were brown from years of cigarette and cigar smoke (The Flash detested smoking). The carpet was worn from years of shuffling feet. The wood desk was scuffed, and the club chairs were leaking stuffing. In spite of the scent of smoke, he loved it all. He headed for the elevator.

  She had had long, loose blond hair and staggering blue eyes and she smelled like an orange grove on the Malibu shores at sunset. She was California incarnate. When he had first been introduced to her on the set, she had been dressed in the wardrobe of an explorer, with tight beige jodhpurs and a crisp white blouse that accented the dark tan of her cleavage. Later he would find that skin to be smooth and warm, covering muscles toned by years spent splashing through the surf. She was utterly without restraint, introducing him to situations and sensations he had never even dreamt of. Her red lips and sharp tongue had peppered his body with kisses; she had devoured him in every way. He had tried to match her enthusiasm; after all, he was a young man in his prime. Not even his own wife had made him feel so powerful in bed as this fierce Hollywood creature.

  With a practiced twist of the wrist, the uniformed operator stopped the elevator at the second floor. The cacophony that hit The Flash when the door slid open made him wince. A man wearing a vest and ink-stained apron stepped onto the elevator, carrying a heavy tray of spent lead slugs and space bands. The Flash saw dozens of men just like him sitting in front of machines with giant rollers—the linotype machines. The men were endlessly keying in letter combinations to create the lines of text which would be used to make the molds for the pages the presses waited to print. Hubbard watched with fascination as the man at the station nearest to him slammed a lever back to force his finished page mold, all the letters backwards, into the next level, where molten metal would flow over it and create a mirror cast. This was the room where the type became hot, where the words became real.

  The linotype man took the ride to the third floor, the sorting room, where his tray of slugs would be cleaned and sorted by men standing at wooden bins and prepared for the next round. The man gave him a dead-eye look. He didn’t care that The Flash was a writer. He didn’t care about the pulps. His father when he worked here probably hadn’t cared about the mags that they had then, called “dime novels,” and even earlier than that, the “penny dreadfuls.” If Street & Smith decided tomorrow to print Bibles, he’d show up and carry lett
ers for the Bibles. Just a job. The man exited at the next floor with a bored look at The Flash. Then the operator drew the door shut and the elevator rose again, ascending to the publishing floor, where The Flash stepped off. Campbell’s office was at the far end of the long, dark wood-paneled corridor. To his left was the archive, which held the fifty years of manuscripts published by the house. On his right were offices for writers, artists, and eds. The floor above him, the top floor, held the management offices, where guys like Henry Ralston worked. The money men. The men who owned The Shadow and Doc Savage.

  He shook the tangle of thoughts of Polly and Hollywood from his head. It was time to be The Flash and The Flash was here to sell. He strode with confidence down the hall.

  He passed a life-size poster sign of Walter Gibson holding a typewriter. The advertisement boasted that Street & Smith writer Gibson had been recognized as holding the record for writing the most words ever, over a million, about a single character—The Shadow. The man’s output was staggering. And so was his impact. Before The Shadow’s appearance, all the top tier mags were detective stories. Within a year of The Shadow’s first issue all the bestseller mags were heroic avengers who did more than solve a crime; they combated it. It was as if the nation as a whole had decided in one collective moment that they were tired of justice being served after the fact; they wanted it dished out in advance. They didn’t want someone to just look out for them, in the middle of this Depression; they wanted someone to protect them. And the pulps were more than willing to accommodate them. According to the poster, Walter Gibson had achieved greatness on his Smith Corona. The Flash sniffed at the numbers. He was easily turning out a hundred thousand words a month, in his estimation. Okay, they weren’t about a single character, but he was certainly on track to set some sort of record. If only he had a hero mag, then he would earn the record and the endorsement money.