I came across this one in the stacks and was immediately fascinated. As a longtime fan of The Shadow pulps, I'm familiar with the original author Walter Gibson, and also Lester Dent whose primary work was Doc Savage, but who also lent his pen to bring The Shadow to life. The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a rollercoaster of weird loosely plausible scifi and pulpy action, but it doesn't feature The Shadow or Doc Savage. Instead the main players are the author's themselves, getting tangled up in the kind of mystery and mayhem they can use to fuel their work, with one Ron Hubbard also along for the ride.
It starts with the death of H.P. Lovecraft, whom our pulp authors loosely know mainly through his letters, since he's not as successful commercially as they are. Walter Gibson goes to attend his funeral, and it turns out there's some weird mystery surrounding what may have been a murder rather than a death from stomach cancer, and our authors just can't leave that kind of mystery alone because a good story needs unraveling. There's a lot of politics behind it all, with the advance of Chiang Kai-Shek and the Japanese forces invading China, and the more personal private battle between Walter Gibson and Lester Dent over a real Shadow story that was eventually published as a collaboration.
This story is too pulpy and sci-fi to be just historical fiction, but also too accurate historically to be dismissed as a pure flight of fancy. As Walter Gibson would say, 'you tell me where real ends and the pulp begins.'
