This time I look at another adventure tale from the “King of Pulps,” H. Bedford-Jones (1887-1949), set in China: Fang Tung, Magician. Reprinted by Steeger Books in their H. Bedford-Jones Library, it originally appeared in All-Story Weekly for Aug. 2, 1919, and was cover featured. The cover is used for this volume.
This novel is set in China in 1919, which was going through internal turmoil. The Republic of China was struggling, trying to make China a modern nation, also dealing with intrusions by both the Japanese and various European powers. With this background of intrigue, this story also includes possible occult powers and those trying to control the future of China.
We start off with a tale of a peasant, a Taoist priest, and a pear tree. This tale is heard by a journalist, who writes it up and it gets published in several European papers in the area. The journalist, Eric Heald, is an American recently arrived in China, working for a paper in Shanghai. He will be our hero.
Heald meets up with Major Pendragon, a British national when he received a fu-dog statue, and the major says it comes from the Taoist priest of this story, Fang Tung. Fang Tung has been insulted by the article and is using his magic against Heald. For the tale is true. Pendragon recruits Heald to assist him in stopping Fang Tung, and they head out to meet our other major character: Mary Garth.
Pendragon is injured along the way, and Heald gets him to Mary. She a young American woman who was raised in China by her doctor father, now dead. She provides medical care to the Chinese, and, as such, is greatly respected. Fang Tung desires her as his wife. We learn he had a previously lover and wife, a Japanese woman who taught him his occult or mental powers: Hotaru San, Lady Firefly. But she is dead, apparently due to a plague caused by Fang Tung!
Heald and Mary head out with some of Pendragon’s Manchus to find Fang Tung’s hidden headquarters and put an end to him. Along the way the pickup a Korean beggar named Poha. He will play a major role in this tale, but how you’ll have to see.
This is an interesting tale, and the ending may not be what you expected. I was surprised by the element of magic in the tale, as Bedford-Jones is usually more realistic in his tales. But it’s handled well here.
While Pendragon, Heald, and Mary are all “foreign devils,” they are not working to have China under foreign control, but to free it from an evil force so it may grow and develop in its own way as a modern democratic nation.
It’s another in Steeger Book’s H. Bedford-Jones Library.
Bedford-Jones wrote several tales set in the Orient, some that I have reviewed and more to come. Check them out, as many are quite interesting tales.
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