Hard-Boiled Harrison: Pulp Chinatown, Occult Detection, and Howard’s Most Overlooked Character

The Arbo Files

Cover of Steve Harrison’s Casebook (2011)

Pulp detective fiction writers always used Chinatown as shorthand for exoticism and danger. Although physically inside of all-American cities like San Francisco or New York, the Chinatowns of Black Mask and other publications are depicted as a liminal space wherein the rules of the cop-and-crook game do not appl…