L. Ron Hubbard
Spy Killer
1936 (2008 reprint, Galaxy Press)
In the middle of reading, I accidentally spilled beer all over my copy of this book and it’s just as well. These Galaxy Press reprints of L. Ron Hubbard’s early pulp fiction work ARE a little too spiffy. They could use some rough treatment to match the contents.
Also, while I have klutzed up some rare collectibles in my day, reducing $100 vintage, outta-print records or books or movies to $3 damaged goods with one spilled drink or false step, I’m not concerned about this one. My local Half Price Books has stacks of these Hubbard reissues for $2 each, which is also perfect. Pulp should be cheap.
Cheap and stained.
If you’re reading junk like Spy Killer, you should be fine with that.
The story of this 1936 novella is Goofball City.
It begins with your regular, brawny pulp story man’s man, a tall hunk a’ beefcake named Kurt Reid. He escapes from a boat where he was falsely accused of murder and then stows away on another boat headed to China and manned by a Chinese crew. It’s cool though because Kurt Reid speaks the language. His crazy life as a man of action has taken him all over Asia and he knows all about it.
That’s the first page.
Once he’s on the mainland he takes a load off in a tea house, where he meets a beautiful Russian woman named Varinka. She’s in trouble and has money. Kurt’s in trouble, too, but has nothing except his fists, so this is the start of a beautiful friendship.
When two armed Chinese enforcers show up for Varinka, Kurt handily beats them up and swipes their guns.
Kurt runs off with Varinka, bumps into a woman from his past–Anna Carsten, an even more beautiful creature who once wanted to marry him, but it didn’t work out–and eventually gets himself captured by the nefarious Lin Wing, who commands the Death Squad that wants Varinka and who knows that Kurt is wanted for murder.
Lin Wing isn’t here though to bring Kurt to justice. No, he wants to use the leverage that he has against Kurt to get him to find and kill a mysterious spy known as Takekiki.
Kurt grudgingly goes along with it and eventually learns–FUCKING SPOILER ALERT–that Takekiki is Varinka!
Oh my God! Is your pulse pounding, yet? No? Are you sure? Is there a doctor in the house who can check?
More twists and turns and fistfights and gunplay follow. Kurt disguises himself as Chinese at one point with make-up and “a small band behind his ears which pulled his eyes up at the corners, giving them a slant”. Anna Carsten eventually fits into the big picture of it all in the dumbest way possible.
88 pages of story, originally published in a magazine called Five Novels Monthly. Fairly large print. Galaxy’s already slim printing feels longer at first though because it devotes at least forty pages to a foreward, an afterword, a sample of another Hubbard story called Orders Is Orders, a long list of other Hubbard stories organized by genre and even a glossary for readers who were born yesterday and don’t know what a gunwale is or what sayonara means.
This isn’t a good book, but I had a good time reading it. I dig the work of pulp hustlers, guys like Hubbard who pounded out stories for a penny a word. No time for “art”; just keep the thing moving. Fuck adjectives. Verbs, verbs, verbs everywhere.
Paragraphs such as this one make me happy:
“He took the middle of the street with a swagger. His face, usually so handsome, was twisted up into a hard-boiled scowl. His gait was a sea roll and he carried the automatic in plain sight. He was insane and he knew it and he didn’t care.”
I want that last sentence on my gravestone.