by Daniel Harvey

Paul Malmont and his debut novel, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, made quite a splash in 2006. The work made the cut on many of the "must read" lists of the summer -- from the Village Voice to US News & World Report -- and its popularity shows little sign of slowing. It earned Malmont a spot on Kirkus Fiction Spotlight 35 Hot Debuts list. When he's not exploring American Mythmaking in prose Malmont works as a copy director at a leading interactive ad agency in New York City (he and I are coworkers). He lives with his wife and children in Brooklyn.

The work is part post-modern pastiche and part loving homage to pulp adventures of the 30s and 40s. Rather than featuring the characters often found in these sorts of guns-blazing, two-fisted romps Malmont turns the spotlight on their authors including Walter Gibson (aka Maxwell Grant creator of The Shadow), Lester Dent (aka Kenneth Robeson creator of Doc Savage), H. P. Lovecraft (mastermind behind the Cthulhu Mythos) and Ron Hubbard (yes that Ron Hubbard). In the story they contend with successes, failures, and betrayals both personal and professional all the while being inextricably drawn into a chaotic world of asian assassins, horrofic things that go bump in the night, lost treasures and curses and more.

DH: Hey there!

PM: Hey

DH: I've got a ton of questions and notes for you. Some less formed than others but I think good material for a conversation anywho.

PM: OK. Then let's get started.

DH: Do you see a synergy between the plight of the characters to breakthrough and your own struggles as a debut author?

PM: To some extent - I paralleled my characters' hopes and dreams to get into the slicks, or the top tier of pulps, to my hopes, as a working writer, to be able to write something more exciting than the things I get to write on a daily basis - concept docs, marketing pitches, ad copy, etc.

DH: You're a writer writing about writers. Do you see that as a post-modern device, perhaps even a necessary one for today’s audience?

PM: I think that level of Meta-ness is an essential element of the book that lifts it from a pulp museum piece to the level of some kind of literature. I think that the convention works particularly well in this case because it's satisfying both to fans of pulps/thrillers/genre, and those seeking something a little more thoughtful - but no less fun.

DH: Was Kavalier & Clay an influence on you? Have comparisons been drawn in reviews? If so, has does that make you feel?

PM: Well - I had actually been working on this before I read K&C. But I was thrilled at the reception Chabon's work received and it certainly encouraged me to keep going. I think what his book revealed (again) is that there is a broad audience out there that cares about the geek stuff and good writing. It showed how mainstream the fringe has become. Anytime anyone compares to me to a good writer it's a nice compliment. Several comparisons have been to Alan Moore which is great because I really love his work.

DH: That's an interesting comparison -- especially in regards to work like League of Extraordinary Gentleman

DH: How did you arrive at the big idea for your story?

PM: I had always wanted to tell a story about the pulps in an unconventional way. At one point I thought about writing an "autobiography" of a pulp hero. Anyway - I had made a short film about magicians and the subject of Walter Gibson, Orson Welles, and The Shadow came up and I started thinking about telling a story about the three of them. Once I started to think about that, well then I had to include Lester Dent. Then L. Ron Hubbard and so on... And all of a sudden it's not just a story about Walter Gibson - it's a top-to-bottom overview of the whole Pulp Era.

PM: Then the plot came in two ways...

(Lester Dent)

DH: Which were?

PM: It had to begin with the death of Lovecraft, and end with the Chinatown Unity Rally - both real events.

DH: Why those two events?

PM: Because they seemed ripe with dramatic possibilities. Trying to connect the two events - now that was work! The Unity Rally in particular represents the end of the Tong wars and the end of the Chinatown that was so prevalent in the pulps.

DH: Was there something more than a sense of the exotic or the shock of the new that made Chinatown and the broader culture so prevalent?

PM: In fact I think it was our very American fear-of-the-other that led to the racist portrayals in the pulps known as the Yellow Peril. There was explicit government policy, in the form of the Chinese Exclusion Act to prevent Chinese from assimilating more easily into American culture.

PM: I knew I had to address the Yellow Peril in the pulps - but I wanted to do it in a way that made sense to contemporary audiences and sensibilities.

DH: Zhang Mei was one of the more dynamic characters -- I'm assuming created from whole cloth by you -- in the story. At times depicted as hero, other times villain

DH: Did you ever feel that you were in danger of retreading that "fearful" ground?

PM: Yeah - in some ways I consider him not even an antagonist or villain - but the anti-protagonist. All I could do was try to create a character as real as possible and explain his motivations, and then hopefully people would understand that I was trying to subvert the whole Yellow Peril trope.

DH: You mentioned that bridging those two events together was a work... tell me about the role research played in the work

PM: Well - I had Lovecraft on one end, and the Chinatown Unity Rally on the other - and then there were things I knew I needed to get in in order to pay homage to the pulps - settings like broken-down waterfronts and warehouses, tramp steamers, lost islands, trains, etc. so I had to look for something to connect them all, and that became the lost gas from WWI. Now that was inspired by an article I had come across which hypothesized that a Dutch steamer, the Orang Medan, which had been found adrift in the 40's with the crew all dead in horrible positions, was the result of an accident during the black market trade in WWI chemicals.

PM: Research to me is great and is one of the reasons I think I love the web. Research to me is a very hypertextual experience. Each door opens two more interesting ones.

DH: Correct me if I'm wrong, but you've actually met Gibson?

(Walter Gibson)

PM: You're wrong and I'm correcting you. The only Gibson resource I had when I was writing the book was a magician by the name of Tony Spina who used to run Tannen's Magic Shop here in NY. He knew Gibson well and gave me some great help. Now that the book is out, most of the Gibson fan club - people who knew him, wrote the articles I used for research and such, have checked in to let me know what I got wrong and right... and wrong.

DH: Tell me about your relationship to the pulps. What first hooked you? What maintained your interest?

PM: I first found one of the Bantam reprints of Doc Savage - Man of Bronze in 1976 at a school book fair... those Bantam reprints had amazing covers by James Bama which are totally iconic and the depiction of Doc Savage. So I'm reading it, and it's about the 30's, and not at all what I expect, in fact it's even better. And my dad tells me there's a whole bunch more of them and tells me about the pulps. And he gets me the Orson Welles Shadow broadcasts. So I was sunk from then on.

DH: Does that mean you have a lot of pulp ephemera cluttering up your mom's basement?

PM: I don't really have a collection so-to-speak because I could never find or afford pulps out in Pennsylvania.

DH: "Never find or afford pulps" seems so painfully... antithetical to the whole point, right?

PM: I know - they cost 10 cents in 1937. Two months ago in Chicago at the Windy City Pulp Convention where we introduced the book - I paid $150 for a copy of The Shadow.

DH: Which issue?

PM: The Golden Vulture of course! A gift for my editor.

DH: well played.

DH: In the story the characters debate "what's real" and "what's pulp" -- what guidelines for creating a convincing reality did you put in place for yourself?

PM: Simple. To use as many facts as possible. The more realistic it was - then the more permission I could give myself to go pulp.

PM: Truthful is a better word than realistic...

PM: But, y'know, it's just a fun fiction with some facts sprinkled throughout.

DH: Are there moments where you felt the two impulses collided? Moments where you thought they complemented one another well?

PM: Well - the one time I didn't know whether or not it would work and if I was going too far was when one of the characters appears to come back from the dead.

PM: And I think it works really well with the Tale of the Sweet Flower War.

DH: Zombies are always fair game.

PM: Yeah - but it was hard and took a lot of work before I felt it really worked in a way that played fair with my own rules.

DH: Agreed. The earlier introduction of "The Watchman" helped that succeed I think.

PM: Yeah - that episode really shows the audience where the book is going. If they're still with me after that section then I think I've got 'em 'til the end.

DH: The characters talk about eras of pulp, the hierarchy of pulp, and most importantly "who is pulp." Who do you feel is pulp today?

PM: Chuck Palahniuk, the late Patrick O'Brian, Max Allan Collins, Charlie Hughes, Geoff Johns, Frank Miller.

DH: Geoff Johns? Some members of the community here are gonna get a kick out of that

PM: Yeah - I've read a couple of his Flash scripts and they're brilliant - even before they become comic books.

PM: Also -forgot to add J. J. Abrams (lost) and Joel Surnow (24)

PM: 24 is probably the biggest pulp in the culture right now.

PM: A direct descendant of G8-And His Battle Aces, or The Spider.

DH: I have to confess, as much as I had a geekgasm about The Avenger reference in the story (which I think was really just brilliant by the way), if you had managed to get The Spider in there...

PM: Well - the guy who created and wrote The Spider - Norvell Page - is a real colorful character in his own right. Maybe someday...

DH: What do you see in your future? Novels in a similar space? Moving this story into other media -- say film?

PM: Well, I'm still pursuing the roots of that type of masculine American mythmaking so I'm going back a little further in time for my next book. Then I'm hoping to return to visit some of these characters again during WW2. But not all of them. And some new ones.

DH: Sounds great. Just make sure you leave time to help me with those concept docs and marketing pitches.

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