Shanghai Pulp – L. Ron Hubbard’s Spy Killer

Wandering around a bookshop the other week I stumbled across a copy of L Ron Hubbard’s Spy Killer, republished in a great fun series from Galaxy Press entitled Stories from the Golden Age. The Golden Age of pulp fiction they mean of course, a genre Hubbard (yea, the weird Scientology guy). Spy Killer was published in the late 1930s and, while it is rather predictable, it is a rather good brief journey through China at the time – a chaotic Shanghai, warlords, Japanese spies, Japanese invaders, beautiful but untrustworthy White Russian women, trustworthy (of course) American women in the Shanghai Settlement and Kurt Reid, bunko sailor in a heap of trouble in old Shanghai. We also get a side trip to Kalgan (now Zhangjiakou) under Japanese control. And, of course, some hefty doses of Yellow Peril thrown in for good measure. So maybe not such a bad read and an hour or two’s fun reading…Hubbard did write a few other China-set pulps but this is the only one with Shanghai included I think.