For regular BOOKGASM readers, it’s no newsflash that we’re in love with Paul Malmont’s debut novel, THE CHINATOWN DEATH CLOUD PERIL. Seriously, three of us among our small staff already have read it, gone nuts over it, and we don’t agree on anything. It’s a thrilling literary adventure starring Lester Dent and Walter Gibson, the real-life creative forces behind pulp heroes Doc Savage and The Shadow. Malmont’s creative, too – not just as a novelist, but in his day job as a copy director for an online media advertising firm. Who knows what lurks in the heart of Malmont? We do, now that we’ve talked to him about the book’s genesis and his plans for the future. And now you will, too…

BOOKGASM: Why these characters and why this story?

MALMONT: I’ve always found stories that mixed the real and the unreal fascinating, that take the real and fictionalize it. Like the movie TIME AFTER TIME, where H.G. Wells becomes a time traveler? That was a wonderful story and invention, and I’m fond of that kind of storytelling.

So in the proud tradition of it – or as The New York Times said, “literary cannibalization” – I had come to thinking I wanted to tell a story about Lester Dent and Doc Savage. But I realized I couldn’t tell that story without including Walter Gibson’s story, because there was a whole “white and dark” thing going on there between them. Then I read one of Isaac Asimov’s many autobiographies, and he mentioned he knew L. Ron Hubbard in the pulp scene. I thought, “That’s it! L. Ron Hubbard is the missing ingredient, the X factor. He makes it all come together.”

I didn’t want to tell a flat-out pulp story, but I wanted to capture the experience of reading the pulps in a more adult, literary way. I also wanted to capture that promise of the pulps. When I was reading Bantam’s Doc Savage reissues, I’d look at the cover and think, “Oh, this is the one that’s going to blow my mind!” And then you read them – and they’re fun, don’t get me wrong – but the formula shows through pretty quickly. So I wanted to write that one pulp that the cover always promised. I just couldn’t use the conventions of the pulp stories to tell a story about their conventions.

BOOKGASM: What about the secondary characters, particularly Dent’s wife. How much of that was true?

MALMONT: She was supposedly quite the character – a wonderful, sophisticated, churchgoing lady with a strong streak of adventure. I found out more about her afterwards from people who knew her. Lester Dent was the moral center – the strong, silent character – but inside he’s someone straight up and down, and that’s not as interesting of a head to be inside. The better and more conflicted character of that relationship was Nora, so that was a nice twist to play upon, and I found it was a great way to watch Lester and comment on him.

BOOKGASM: So other than reading these pulps–

MALMONT: Thirty years of wasted youth.

BOOKGASM: –how much research did you have to do?

MALMONT: I’m still finding out things – God bless the fans, they’re the first to point out the inaccuracies. But originally, I found out that Philip José Farmer had written this fictionalized biography of Doc Savage – very clever – but in it was a real chapter about Lester Dent. That’s where I found out that (Doc Savage’s credited author) Kenneth Robeson wasn’t even a real person. So that’s all I had to go on for a long time. Then I found some thesis projects that were published by the small press. But it was hard to find information. These people were twice removed: one, because they weren’t published under their own name, and two, because they belong to this fringe, cultish literary genre.

But I found things as I needed to. For example, a magician who knew Walter Gibson. He told me things like when Gibson’s marriages took place and that sort of thing. So that helped. And at a certain point, I made stuff up, though not as much as you’d think. There’s more fact to it than fiction.

I’ve been told that I nailed the Walter Gibson character, but I haven’t heard from anybody related to anybody. The Dents were childless; I think Gibson has a son who is in his 70s and was a dentist, but I’m not sure if he’s even still alive. I had to give Simon & Schuster a list of all the real people in the book, and the only one I know is still alive is Stan Lee, who makes a small appearance.

BOOKGASM: Why do think The Shadow and Doc Savage have survived all these years, even though the pulps have not?

MALMONT: I’m not sure I agree that they have. Doc Savage has kind of limped on. There’s a second-generation love there, but you know, if there’s not a new movie, I don’t think he’s going to last too much longer. He doesn’t translate all that well into comics, either. But The Shadow is different. The radio show really captured people’s imagination, so that was drilled so deeply into our consciousness. And everyone knows “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”; even if they’ve never heard it, it’s probably one of the five most recognizable phrases around. I think a lot of that has to do with Orson Welles and the power of radio at the time. Today, The Shadow still lurks at the dark edges of the American psyche. He recurs into motifs up to Batman and beyond. Doc Savage, as an archetype, lives on in the likes of Superman, but as a character, not as much.

BOOKGASM: And not even Alec Baldwin could kill The Shadow.

MALMONT: That’s true!

BOOKGASM: I’m also in advertising and have kids at home, so how do you find time to write a novel? The last thing I want to do after work is sit back down in front of the computer again.

MALMONT: Well, I don’t. I do it when I get up. I used to be a 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. writer, but when our son was born, I had to give that up fast. After about a year, he got into a groove where he would wake up at 5 a.m. consistently, and I’d get up with him so my wife could sleep before I went to work. After about a couple of weeks, I saw that my laptop wasn’t doing anything so I thought I’d sit down and write Chapter 1 just to see how it would come out. If it matched the idea I had been kicking around in my head for a couple years, I thought maybe I’d keep trying. Because I had never written a novel before.

I didn’t even tell my wife I was doing it. I had involved her in too many crazy schemes already, so I just kept it secret and wrote from about 5:30 to 7:30 a.m. Finally, after a year, I gave her the title page on Mother’s Day. She looked it at and said, “You’re writing a book?” And I said, “No, I already wrote it! It’s finished.” Before I had thought about making it into a screenplay, but that’s the wrong kind of medium for telling this story. I’d have to give up too much. But I finished it in May 2004, had an agent in October, sold it April of 2005 and it just came out in May.

BOOKGASM: So what’s next?

MALMONT: A book about Jack London. As I was researching this book, Jack London kept coming up. In some ways, he was the first writer to become a huge success because of the magazine industry. It was a new mass media and he sold and sold and sold and made a lot of money. So in researching these writers and their macho manly adventures, I found they all had their roots in Jack London, who had done it first and better. So who’s the colossus from which all this has sprung? It’s Jack London.

So I’m going to tell the story of his last year. Here’s this incredibly famous man – the first writer celebrity – and makes a fortune, loses a fortune and is dead at the age of 40. Today he’s mostly known as “the wolf guy,” but he wrote science fiction, fantasy, sports tales – he was a Socialist with an agenda, and I think there’s a great love story to be told there. So, 2008, keep your fingers crossed. –Rod Lott

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OTHER RECENT BOOKGASM AUTHOR INTERVIEWS:
• Q&A with BOOK OF THE DEAD’s Douglas Preston
• Q&A with MONSTER ISLAND’s David Wellington
• Q&A with THE DEVIL IS A GENTLEMAN’s J.C. Hallman