Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  Take, to begin with, the Mr. Chang series written by A. E. Apple. Stories featuring this "slant-eyed Chinaman" first appeared in Detective Story Magazine, a fairly well thought of pulp, in 1919 and continued until 1931—a total of some thirty tales. Several of these stories were spliced together into a pair of episodic novels published by Chelsea House: Mr. Chang of Scotland Yard (1926) and Mr. Chang's Crime Ray (1928). Both these remarkable books must be read to be disbelieved.

  (Robert Sampson, in an article on the Mr. Chang series for a fan magazine, postulates that Apple was basically a satirist. "The trick in this series," he says, "is to pull the reader's leg, gently, gently, and gently, gently, let the reader know it." If this is so, Apple was one of the most gently inept satirists ever to take pen in hand. He may have realized this himself in later years; his literary career came to an end when he took his own life in 1933.)

  It should be pointed out first of all that Mr. Chang is no Fu Manchu. He neither thinks nor acts nor talks like Fu Manchu; about all they have in common is grandiose venality. How can one tremble in the presence of a master criminal who says such things as, "I am enjoying your company quite too much to permit you to desert me. Stick around, old boy! In a few minutes we are going to open a can of sardines and make merry." How can one hate an archvillain who is billed as having the most cunning of minds but who, at the beginning of Mr. Chang's Crime Ray, has been captured in his Montreal headquarters by a Scotland Yard detective named Lontana because Mr. Chang "had made the fatal blunder of hiding himself in a room that had only one exit. He had reasoned that if his secret room had two entrances instead of one, it would double the chance of his being reached and captured."

  So much for the wily brain of Mr. Chang.

  This novel continues in the same vein. Mr. Chang is taken aboard a train bound for Toronto, where he is to be tried for murder; but Lontana is not a very smart detective, and he accepts a cigarette from the evildoer, which turns Out to have been "doped with a powerful drug." When Lontana falls unconscious to the floor, Mr. Chang takes the key to his handcuffs and unlocks them. Then "his arm crept inside his shirt. The jade dagger, his emergency weapon, which had been overlooked when he was frisked, flashed into view."

  At which point Mr. Chang turns Lontana's head and prepares to cut his throat. But instead he pauses—

  "The jade dagger," he reflected, "is a killer reserved for royalty or for taking my own life in final emergency. It would be sacrilege to contaminate it with the foul blood of a Caucasian inferior."

  The green blade slowly was returned to its concealed sheath.

  Should he strangle Lontana? Would it be more judicious merely to knock him on the head? Mr. Chang meditated. After all, he decided, little could be gained by killing him.

  So he doesn't kill Lontana after all. Elaborated reason: "Another would-be Nemesis would take Lontana's place—possibly one who would be more difficult to outwit."

  Mr. Chang then escapes from the train by jumping off when it slows down for a curve and makes his way through a heavy fog to a nearby farmhouse. As he approaches, he is attacked by a large dog, which he proceeds to shoot with Lontana's gun. Lights go on in the house, and the resident demands to know what is going on. Mr. Chang tells him to stay where he is; then he cuts the telephone wires and enters the barn, where he finds a locked car. After determining that the owner probably has the keys in the house, he "wired around the lock [and] started the engine"

  But before he can drive away, he hears the sound of someone opening the kitchen door of the house. He promptly fires in the direction of the sound and a frightened squeal reaches his ears, along with the "clatter of a shotgun dropped precipitately on a stone walk." Does Mr. Chang go to see if the farmer is dead or wounded? Of course not. Does he drive away in the car? Not just yet. Instead—

  Leaving the engine running, he darted back into the barn.

  In a stall he had noticed a horse, the oldest means of pursuit. While a horse could not overtake this auto, it could get the householder to a neighbor's telephone more quickly than he could go afoot.

  Mr. Chang was in no mood to take chances. He shot the horse through the head.

  The book overflows with this sort of hilarious logic. It also overflows with insane coincidences, incredible situations, a crazy quilt of plot devices, Abbott and Costello characters, and a cathode-ray device "resembling a three-circuit nonregenerative radio" that is capable of killing people at thirty feet, can be strapped on the back and used portably as long as the wearer carries a very long electrical cord with him, and is known among other appellations as the Crime Ray, the Death Ray, and the Murder Machine.

  Mr. Chang is intent on stealing the Murder Machine, which has been invented by a man named Professor Farrada (one of whose idiosyncrasies is studying dead bodies through very large magnifying glasses). To help him in this nefarious pursuit, Mr. Chang kidnaps a messenger boy named Ned and recruits him into his gang. He also enlists the aid of evil Dr. Yat, an "aged and half-mummified Malay witch doctor" who keeps various items under his voluminous robes, not the least of which is a baby boa constrictor. At one point, Dr. Yat produces the snake and tells Mr. Chang, "I shall train it, developing in its diminutive brain an obsession for wrapping itself around the most convenient human throat. You would find it invaluable—a time saver in your profession, doing your strangling for you."

  Pitted against Mr. Chang is a Chinese detective, Dr. Ling, "famed trapper of men whose souls have been ousted from their bodies by jungle beasts," who has been summoned by a powerful tong of right-thinking Chinese who wish to put an end to Mr. Chang's villainous ways. The fact that Dr. Ling is the hero of the piece is kept cleverly concealed until midway through the book. At first, we are led to believe the hero is Lontana, but after his brush with death on the train, we never hear of him again. Then we are led to believe the hero is Ned, Mr. Chang's young recruit, who is only pretending to be on the master criminal's team because he yearns to be a detective and has an adventurous spirit; he disappears from the narrative at about the same time as Dr. Ling shows up, not long after witnessing the effects of the Death Ray and then collapsing in Mr. Chang's headquarters. (Mr. Chang asks Dr. Yat if the boy is dead. The old fiend shakes his head. "A youth like this, my magnificent friend," he says, "has such vitality that he could scarcely be killed with a club. The boy has merely fainted from the over-excitement of narrating his tale. In a matter of seconds he will be restored to consciousness. I shall hasten his return from the black realm of suspended time by administering a sedative.")

  Any attempt to summarize the plot in detail would result in several pages approximating gibberish. Suffice it to say that Mr. Chang manages to steal the Murder Machine, in the process disposing of Dr. Farrada, but all for naught, because the device is "out of order," owing to the fact that one of six colored bulbs has been cracked in transport and "there escaped a gas that was the vital link of this mechanism." Mr. Chang attempts to hoax Dr. Ling into believing the Crime Ray is still operational, but Dr. Ling refuses to fall for the trick. So Mr. Chang, after a series of incidents concerning hunchbacked coolies, opium dens, and chases through underground tunnels, attempts to invade the tong house where Dr. Ling has his headquarters. His twofold purpose is to assassinate the good doctor and steal the $250,000 the tong has put up for Mr. Chang's capture.

  But Dr. Ling is wise to this plan, too, and creates a carefully concealed trap in the room where the money is being kept in plain sight. And Mr. Chang walks right into it.

  He took a quick step forward, and another. Close to the table now, his long and tapering fingers of a born strangler clutched greedily for the plunder.

  The cloth-covered flooring sagged underfoot as his weight descended on it. . . Clang! A metallic sound came loudly from the rear.

  Mr. Chang whirled, pistol in each hand, ready to shoot an intruder.

  "Hoila!" he whispered, meaning, "I am frustrated."

  And indeed he is. For, "responding to an electrical contact effected by the s
agging of the floor," a latticework door of heavy steel bars shoots forth from the wall at his right and locks itself on the other side. Mr. Chang rips up the floor covering, tears down tapestries, and discovers steel bars everywhere: the room is a cleverly concealed giant cage in which he is trapped.

  After a gas knocks Mr. Chang out, Dr. Ling appears and notes that the cages—and Mr. Chang—will soon be on a Chinese ship bound for China. Then, "in undisguised awe," he says, "Thus ends the career of the notorious Mr. Chang"—a fact for which we should all be properly grateful.

  If Mr. Chang leaves something to be desired as an Oriental villain, the same cannot be said for Whang Sut Soon, the archfiend of Tom Roan's The Dragon Strikes Back (1936). Whang is pure Fu Manchu. There are no Western-style incongruities in his speech; he is every bit the "satanic Chinaman" and he damned well talks like one. Especially when he has a beautiful white woman in his clutches.

  "Before you are an hour older you will be on your knees to me. Begging, my little white flower. Begging with all your heart. With one blow I am going to crush you. All your pride and fire I will wipe away with but the lifting of my hand. I will show you but one thing, but one spectacle. It will not be a spectacle for the eyes of children or old women, or even men with weak stomachs. . . - But know, white flower, as you view this morning's event that I am your master; that I am the master of horror."

  As bad as the Mr. Chang stories are, A. E. Apple's prose is for the most part pedestrian and rather dull. There is nothing pedestrian or dull about the prose of Tom Roan. On the contrary, it is some of the more lurid and inflammatory writing ever committed to paper—in spots outrivaling Sydney Horler at his absurd and sensational worst.

  Roan was first and foremost a pulp writer. And a pulp writer of the old school, at that: flamboyant, opinionated, tough-minded, bigoted, and slightly cracked. In short, a character. (Damon Knight, in his collection of critical essays on science fiction, In Search of Wonder, mentions that Roan made occasional visits to editorial offices wearing a ten-gallon hat and cussing like a muleskinner.) A former peace officer who grew up in a lawless section of Alabama, where the towns had names like Slick Lizard Ridge and Bloody Beat 22, Roan was primarily a writer of Westerns, among them such sensitive tales of the old frontier as "Here's Lead in Your Guts!" Although some of his Western and adventure pulp stories are populated by villainous Chinese, The Dragon Strikes Back is his only Fu Manchu pastiche and his only mystery novel; it may or may not have first appeared as a pulp serial prior to book publication. Unlike the crate of rotten Apple previously examined, one has the perverse wish that Roan had gone on to write several more "serious comedies" in the criminous field.

  The Dragon Strikes Back opens with a news report of the sinking of a Japanese ship bound from Nagasaki to the United States with a dozen high-ranking Japanese government officials on board. A submarine flying the American flag is responsible, having fired two torpedoes that struck the Japanese vessel amidships. The Nippon government is naturally peeved at this and makes an official protest. In San Francisco, where the novel is set, a Japanese admiral named Takemura and "the Japanese consulate, Takahasha" [sic], visit a US vessel commanded by Vice-Admiral Beauregard Blunt and threaten that Japan will declare war unless a satisfactory explanation for the torpedoing is immediately forthcoming.

  Blunt does not take too kindly to threats from "little brown Japs." He denies American involvement and tells Takemura and Takahasha that "we have been to war before, and if you have read your history, then surely you must know that we have shown that we, too, have teeth in our mouths and fighting guts in our bellies." After which he has them thrown off his ship.

  Meanwhile, the novel's two protagonists are talking things over in San Francisco's Federal Building. One is "Old Eternity Bill" Mandell, an enormously fat man who has spent forty years in the US Secret Service and whom nothing seems to bother; he has "the ability to chuckle under the most trying circumstances," a Teddy Roosevelt-like fondness for the word "Bully!", and an appetite for eye-popping amounts of food and drink; and he takes a trenchant delight in thumbing his nose at his superiors in Washington. His assistant, on the other hand, is an excitable young man named Andrew Lee, son of "Hellon-Wheels Charley" Lee and a cavalry captain on loan to the Secret Service from the army. Lee is the hotheaded type, always rushing around looking for trouble; Old Eternity Bill is forever counseling patience to him. He also thinks Andy ought to get married. "Think of it!" he says. "A pretty girl to cuddle up to on cold nights and her shirt-tail to keep your feet warm. Bully, my boy, bully! Maybe a couple of little dingy-dingies coming along to call you 'papa.'"

  Old Eternity Bill is convinced that someone is trying to start a war between the United States and Japan; he just doesn't know who yet. He is even more convinced, and more mystified, the following day when Admiral Takemura is found slain. That is, Admiral Takemura's skeleton is found—"fully dressed and leaning nonchalantly against a lamppost in the fog settled about the corners of Jones and California streets on Russian Hill." The bones have been drilled and wired together, with thin strips of steel reinforcing them, and one of the admiral's cigars has been placed in the skeleton's "mouth." "With that cigar gripped so jauntily between his teeth, Admiral Takemura had looked like some gay-dog of a ghost from a graveyard who had been out making a night of it and, tired from his long prowl, had stopped to rest there against the lamp-post where dawn had overtaken him with his leering grin and the empty holes of his skull looking down over an awakening city."

  Dr. Rodin Lafferty, the police surgeon, takes charge of the skeleton and determines that "a number of bones about the head and torso had been broken, as if crushed in the powerful embrace of some wild animal or monster." There are also strange, bill-like markings on the bones, indicating that the flesh had been devoured.

  This startling new development fails to ruffle Old Eternity Bill's composure, though the Japanese are again up in arms. He and Andy Lee go out to see Vice-Admiral Blunt aboard his ship. While they are with the admiral, Blunt's daughter, Holly, "almost shockingly pretty," arrives to see her father. ('"Good morning, Admiral Beauregard Blunt! Is the old pressure up or down?' ") As soon as he sets eyes on her, Captain Lee is smitten. The attraction proves to be mutual, as we discover a short while later when Andy and Holly ride back to shore together in "the Admiral's barge."

  "Your eyes are green," he told her. "Green! A magnificent green! I have never seen a pair like them! And your name is Holly, and holly is green. Green like your eyes! Please, Holly, may I call you Holly?"

  "Yes, Captain—"

  "Andy!" he corrected. "Just Andy—"

  "In private, perhaps," she nodded, "but you know the Service. Always climbing, the title always changing. . . . Some day you will go back—to the Army.

  Then it will be 'Major' Lee, then 'Colonel' Lee, then, I hope, 'General' Lee. Sounds beautiful, doesn't it?"

  "Yes, Holly! But—you are so beautiful—"

  "Not a bad-looking fellow yourself, Andy!"

  "Oh, hell! I'm serious, Holly!"

  "Well?"

  "I mean it, Holly!" he seized her hands. "Honest, I do!"

  "Hell-on-Wheels Charley!" she smiled. "They say he was a fast one, Andy."

  "Don't you believe me, Holly?"

  "Oh, of course I do, Andy! When I first looked at you, I said to myself, 'Glory be, what a handsome droll fellow!"

  "Holly!"

  "Yes, Andy?"

  "Are you never serious a moment?"

  "Yes, Andy, you poor, too-serious gal-loot! If you must know—honestly, truly and no foolin'—I have always liked the cavalry."

  "Holly!"

  Silence, the motor chug-chuging. A minute passed, then two—three. There was a gasp, a long-drawn sigh.

  "Why, Andy, you've kissed the admiral's daughter!"

  Later that night, after "the Army kissed the Navy good-bye in the hallway of Admiral Blunt's old brown-stone," Holly is kidnapped by what is alleged to be "two damned, slant-eyed Japs." The admiral call
s Old Eternity Bill, who, along with a distraught Captain Lee, hurries to the admiral's house. There they are told that Holly's mother has been severely beaten and is now in the care of the family doctor, whom Blunt called immediately.

  I started looking then for our house-boy, Wu Fong Sam. He is in the basement, bound and gagged, and tied to the main drain pipe. He had blood on his face—"

  "You didn't release him, admiral?"

  "No. I haven't even touched him—"

  "Splendid!" nodded Mandell. "I wish everybody had your foresight in such things."

  Lest you think Old Eternity Bill a cold-hearted racist, he has a perfectly good reason for wanting Wu Fong Sam left trussed up and bleeding: he wishes to examine the ropes that bind the man and the gag stuffed in his mouth for possible clues. Of course, Old Eternity does take time out before releasing Wu to eat a couple of slices of cake, some cheese, three cold pig knuckles, and to wash it all down with three bottles of beer. But he may be forgiven for that, too; a detective needs "physical stimulation," as he points out to Andy Lee, and "a man must keep up his strength."