David B Riley

As you can tell by the cover, this book hearkens back to the days of Ace Doubles.

It doesn’t exactly give you two novels. Both of them have an episodic feel to them though David B. Riley’s The Venerable Travels of Ling Fung seems to be all new while Laura Givens' Chin Song Ping and the Long, Long Night is mostly reprints assembled around a frame.

Both books have Chinese immigrants, men on the make, in the American Old West.

I’ve long thought that weird westerns could do more with the show more Chinese. Even though I prefer the science fiction variety of the weird western, I’d like to see it use more Chinese mythology and history even it that means a fantasy weird western.

Ling Fung is kind of a Shaolin monk (obvious shades of the old tv show Kung Fu) and kind of a Jesuit though he didn’t complete training with either before a death sentence by the Chinese Emperor forced him to flee to America. There Riley puts him in the same fictional universe as his Miles O’Malley books, and Ling possibly solves the problem of Ah Puch, Mayan God of Death, for good.

He also learns the practicalities of bounty hunting (it’s not the gross, it’s the net), runs across a cannibal and a yeti, investigates the mystery as to whom is buying all the .40 caliber Purdy ammunition, and gets enough guns and knives from people trying to kill him to stock his own store with them.

To be honest, this one was a trifle disappointing. It’s genial enough and gave me a smile several times, but it just wasn’t as funny as the O’Malley books.

Givens, however, was even better than hoped since I’ve liked her Ping stories. He’s a hopeless romantic and lover of women, an acrobat, and a conman.

Givens gives us a frame of Ping’s grandson Tommy and five other American GIS facing death in France in World War Two. (For reasons not entirely clear, they are going to be killed by either their fellow Americans or their German captors.) To pass the night, Tommy tells stories of his grandfather.

I’ve already reviewed two of those stories in Six-Guns Straight From Hell and Gunslingers and Ghost Stories.

Chin Song Ping and the Fists of Steel” is a delightful bit of Chinoiserie steampunkery with the graceful and sentient automaton Iron Tiger, a Chinese creation of silk, bamboo, brass, and steel; in an exhibition match against the American Goliath, a steam-powered hulk with a carnival chicken as its control system. Of course, things go wrong.

The love of Ping’s life, Louise, gets embroiled in a succession struggle to be the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans in “Ching Song Ping and the Mojo Uprising”. Louise, which turns out to be important later, is the granddaughter of the legendary Marie Laveau and has some magic powers of her own.

Teddy Roosevelt gets plenty of on-stage time in “Chin Song Ping and the Dragon Merchants”. It purports to be the real story behind the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Said story involves vicious Tongs, and the Chinese Emperor thinking an American market for dragon meat is the solution to his fiscal woes. Oh, and Ping looking for a very special wedding dress.

And Givens wraps the frame up with a surprise and keeps us fond of the exuberant, clever, and adaptable Ping who is always up to a new challenge – especially for the sake of love.

Recommended for weird western fans, especially if you like your stories with more humor than menace or just want something Chinese. show less

Miles O’Malley would be the first to tell you he’s not very bright and kind of naïve and that his horse Paul is smarter than he is.

He’s not a very good barber either.

Yet, as he wanders about the West circa 1880, he manages to tangle with vampires, time travelers, Susquatches, a robot, Martians, ghosts, demons and best them through some mix of charm, a lot of luck, and some fine shootin’ courtesy of a special revolver.

Which brings up Miles’ mighty peculiar circle of friends and show more acquaintances. There’s Nick Mephistopheles who gave him that gun. Miles doesn’t just pay a call to Hell to meet Nick. Miles also goes to Heaven.

There’s Molly Madison, intrepid female reporter and fellow boarder at the same San Francisco rooming house as Miles. Wing Ding, Chinese laundry owner and smuggler, tags along for a few adventures.
Miles gets a lot of carnal attention from Mabel and Janus. They’re not fallen women but fallen angels.

And there’s crazy Angel, who’s not an angel, and Major Franks and Judge Hastings who keeps having Miles arrested to interrogate him about his many adventures.

That’s because Miles keeps running into the Gray Army, a bunch of diehard Confederates who want to cause an Indian revolt in California and take it over.

But they’re not the real problem.

It’s their boss: Ah Puch, the Mayan God of Death. He’s got a grudge against Nick and the world in general. (And he’s not the only Indian god showing up.)

Miles tells a good story more on the humor than suspense side.

All three stories are rather episodic in nature. I suspect they were fused together from short stories to make three novels rather in the manner of Aaron B. Larson’s The Weird Western Adventures of Haakon Jones, a novel Riley holds highly. (Yeah, the titles are even similar.)

There’s even a crossover appearance with another Riley series character, Grumpy Gaines, Texas Ranger.

I’ll definitely pony up cash for more Miles O’Malley stories.

And, nope, I don’t know why it isn’t titled The Devil Draws Three. show less

John Wayne movies typically featured town streets frequented, as they in fact were, by working Native Americans, Latinos—and Chinese. They were there, they had adventures of their own. Hadrosaur Productions in this offering strings two sets of related stories into a satisfying necklace of carved jade, containing legends, monsters, magic and martial arts swirling around a pair of intriguing Chinese immigrant anti-heroes in the later 19th Century.

Both authors offer individual menus with show more similar Chinese offerings: Vicious Native American gods, bandits and bravos, monsters, miners, minors and supernatural mayhem appear throughout both halves of what intentionally reminds one of an old Ace ‘Double.’ It’s a good pairing, as both authors have pleasantly contrasting techniques of narration and take their stories in wildly differing directions.

David Riley’s Ling Fung is a pragmatic ‘It’s just business’ assassin, exiled to America into the grudging arms of his expatriate family. Domestic stresses drive Fung out into adventures where Riley’s ‘ratcheting’ technique of storytelling works to good purpose. Thing go from normal to odd to more odd to decidedly freaky. One encounters a competent dog who snores begging in vain for scraps of a supernatural menace while the hero and his fourteen year old partner stock their gun shop with the discarded weaponry of minions, robbers, and incompetent mine guards. Heavy footsteps sound outside. One enjoys the trip despite the dire perils along the way.

Laura Givens brackets the adventures of her acrobatic Mandarin-on-the-make Chin Song Ping by having his stories told by his grandson to doomed G.I.s awaiting torture and death at the hands of their Nazi captors. Givens starts out florid and stays there, as steam and clockwork automata meet in battle, and a trickster plots a dire prank upon the invaders of the Southwest among famished ghosts. Voudoun deities and politics merge into a conspiracy of dragons, earthquakes, and the back alleys of New Orleans and San Francisco’s Chinatown. It’s a bit overwhelming, but never less than fun.

One could pick historical and mythological nits, and some interesting characters do not linger–but complaints would be silly when a dreary winter afternoon is evaporating under the authors’ unleashed and scintillating displays of martial arts, myth, and magic. Boredom stands no chance against them. One will not regret time spent perusing the wonderful and drastic adventures of Riley and Givens; Fung and Ping. show less

Riley adds to the same universe that his Miles O’Malley stories are set in with four stories and an essay, “A Most Baffling Event”, on the Great 1897 Airship in western America.

Two stories involve the U.S. Navy’s first airship, the Wanderer: “Wandering About: The Adventures of the Airship Wanderer” and “The Toy Men”.

In the first, the airship gets involved into Russian incursions in America, both on the ground and in the air. It seems the Russians have been in contact with show more Martians and hope to use the alliance to get parts of California and all of Alaska back from the United States. Good, genial fun that even the frequent talk about food doesn’t slow down. (And neither does frequent mention of the port wine President Chester Arthur inherited from his successor and is trying to foist of on visitors.) It features Penelope Hudson who shows up in Riley’s The Devil Draws Two.

The second story is shorter, quirkier, and funnier when a rogue State Department decides to launch a real war on Christmas – or, at least, Santa Claus.

“Watch the Sky” got incorporated into The Devil Draws Two so, if curious, you can look up my review of that.

“The Big Green Orb” is a fun story – in fact the first of the O’Malley stories I read and that convinced me to read the rest of the series. While it takes place after The Devil Draws Two, you can read it first. It prominently features Secret Service agent Penelope Hudson and O’Malley. Like “The Toy Men”, it has another rogue U.S. official determined to stir up war and that has to be stopped. show less