The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a novel in the pulp fiction style with an adventure story featuring real pulp fiction writers. The main characters are Lester Dent and William Gibson. Dent wrote the adventures of Doc Savage as Kenneth Robeson while Gibson wrote the adventures of The Shadow as Maxwell Grant. A young and slightly annoying L. Ron Hubbard is a major supporting character and of course there are cameos by other famous writers of the period (both dead, alive, and semi-dead).
I have not actually read much Doc Savage or the Shadow but I have always been interested in this genre. Supposedly, each chapter is written in the style of the featured character but I don’t know enough about the literature to really appreciate this.
Dames, Chinatown, poison gas, zombies, and the ending to the greatest pulp fiction story ever all intertwine with (possibly true) biographical material about two of the most popular writers of the 1930s.
