The Red Dragon

Bullets fly, intrigues abound, and the Great Wall of China serves as a picturesque backdrop for this pulp adventure first published in the February 1935 issue of the magazine Five Novels. Feisty Betty Sheldon, who's determined to recover the mysterious "Black Chest" that her archeologist father was killed for digging up, teams with American soldier-of-fortune Mike Stuart, known throughout China as "the Red Dragon," for a pell-mell expedition to war-torn Manchuria. Despised by his enemies as "a white thief in a yellow land," Mike has a price on his head from the invading Japanese army, and is also in the gun sights of George Blakely, a conniving treasure hunter in cahoots with the Japanese who will stoop to kidnapping, and even murder, to get his hands on the Black Chest. Hubbard (The Devil with Wings) delivers a tidy finale that shows why he was one of the most popular genre writers of his generation. (June)