The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge
by
Robert J. Pearsall
Introduction by
Nathan Vernon Madison
Altus Press • 2014
Copyright Information
© 2014 Altus Press
Publication History:
“Introduction” appears here for the first time. Copyright © 2013 Nathan Vernon Madison. All Rights Reserved.
“Rogues’ End” originally appeared in the August 3, 1919 issue of Adventure (Volume 22, Number 3).
“Undue Influence” originally appeared in the August 18, 1919 issue of Adventure (Volume 22, Number 4).
“Fair Loot” originally appeared in the September 18, 1919 issue of Adventure (Volume 22, Number 6).
“The Eight Vultures of Kwang-Ho” originally appeared in the October 3, 1919 issue of Adventure (Volume 23, Number 1).
“Silver Sycees” originally appeared in the November 3, 1919 issue of Adventure (Volume 23, Number 3).
“The Wizardry of Fear” originally appeared in the January 18, 1920 issue of Adventure (Volume 24, Number 2).
“The Tablet of Shun” originally appeared in the February 3, 1920 issue of Adventure (Volume 24, Number 3).
“Ghost-Ruled” originally appeared in the February 18, 1920 issue of Adventure (Volume 24, Number 4).
“The Test of the Five Arrows” originally appeared in the March 18, 1920 issue of Adventure (Volume 24, Number 6).
“Ming Gold” originally appeared in the April 18, 1920 issue of Adventure (Volume 25, Number 2).
“Intrigue” originally appeared in the June 18, 1920 issue of Adventure (Volume 25, Number 4).
“The Shu King” originally appeared in the July 3, 1920 issue of Adventure (Volume 26, Number 1).
“The Escape” originally appeared in the August 18, 1920 issue of Adventure (Volume 26, Number 4).
“The Dragon Speaks” originally appeared in the November 18, 1920 issue of Adventure (Volume 27, Number 4).
Photographs courtesy of Sandra Pearsall.
ADVENTURE, with its distinctive logo design, is a trademark of Argosy Communications, Inc. Used with permission.
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Designed by Matthew Moring/Altus Press
Special Thanks to Andrea Cacek, Joel Frieman, Everard P. Digges LaTouche, Nathan Vernon Madison, Sandra Pearsall, Ray Riethmeier and Ray Skirsky.
Introduction by Nathan Vernon Madison
HIS yellowish eyes, only slightly oblique, glared at us with an effect of venomous disdain. His curiously deracialized face—then we had but heard, without being able to prove, the story of the long process planned in advance by which that deracialization had been effected—altered not a line from calmness.
His face was so terrible in its suggestion of force, black and diabolical, and so little like humanity that it was hard for me to keep from shrinking back from him as from a great uncleanness. I still retained my first thought of him, that he was an incredible nightmare come to life, an impossibility housed in flesh, a perfect animal egotism that might be destroyed, but could never be subdued.
Thus appears Koshinga, menacing leader of the enigmatic Ko Lao Hui tong, and mastermind behind any number of devious plots against the West; plots thwarted only by the daring exploits of adventurers Hazard and Partridge. Over the course of fourteen stories, published in the pulp magazine Adventure from 1919 to 1920, Robert James Pearsall documented the exploits of Partridge, specialist in the unusual, and Hazard, adventurer extraordinaire, throughout China in the pairs’ attempts to prevent Koshinga’s supplanting of the young Chinese Republic with his own despotic rule. Unlike many pulp authors who wrote about the Far East, Pearsall could actually base his stories on personal experiences in China, providing a firm, sound foundation for the fantasy and adventures he created.
Much of Robert Pearsall’s youth remains indiscernible, as his family remembers that he was “resolutely determined” not to speak of his childhood. Through records, family histories, and short, autobiographical works penned by Pearsall himself, a rough sketch, at least, can be made. He was born in Port Huron, Michigan, on the 26th of March, 1885; known only from Robert’s later marriage records, his parents were O.A. Pearsall and Margaret Ramsey Pearsall. Some of the few, scant bits of information regarding his youth are found in an installment of “The Men Who Make The Argosy,” for the February 15, 1930 edition of Argosy All-Story Weekly:
Born on a Michigan farm some forty years ago, my first adventure occurred at the tender age of six, when I was flung by a merry crowd from a pile-driver half a mile off shore of Lake Huron. The laudable intention was to “larn” me how to swim—and I learned. The incident is mentioned as characteristic of an ungentle period and place; perhaps it also explains why my earliest strong impulse was a centrifugal one—to leave, in any direction.
Robert always claimed an Irish, Catholic lineage, although documentary evidence raises some questions; in some censuses, Robert claimed his mother was born in Ireland. Alternatively, other census-takers to the Pearsall household were told, rather, it was Robert’s father who was the Irish immigrant, and that his mother was a native of New York. Regardless of his parents’ background, it is acknowledged that, early in his childhood, he was abandoned by his parents and left an orphan; by the age of 11, he was on his own. As would be the case for many years in his life, it seems a period of wandering and varying occupations were his lot, with Robert himself recalling stints in the Midwest, in Chicago and Detroit, specifically.
So far as official records are concerned, Robert James Pearsall next appears in the United States Marine Corps, enlisting November 21, 1907 at a recruiting station in California; in February of the following year, he was posted to Olongapo, a city on the western coast of the Philippines, at the time an insular territory of the United States. Olongapo was Robert’s home until August of 1909, when he was transferred to the American Legation in Peking (Beijing), China.
Following the suppression of the Boxer Uprising in 1901, the eight nations which had provided forces to restore order to Peking and other areas affected by the Boxers’ anti-foreign attacks were granted special concessions, areas of Chinese territory completely under foreign control—in these legations, consulates and embassies were located, as well as churches, missions, and other signs of a Western presence. Robert’s time in Peking lasted a year, before he was transferred back to the Philippines, first to Cavite and then to the capital city of Manila. Robert’s last appearance in the United States Marine Corps Muster Rolls is September of 1911, and for good reason—he was in prison.
Specifically, he was in a military prison and subsequently “discharged, as ‘undesirable, because of misconduct,’ By order of Major General Commandant, August 31, 1911.” On the reasons for this confinement and discharge, both family history and later, written accounts corroborate with one another. According to a small biography that appeared in the October, 1912 issue of The Writer: “[Pearsall] served for some time in the marine corps, from which he was finally discharged owing to an unfortunate difference of opinion with his superior officers as to the extent to which it was allowable to draw on his service experience for literary material.” According to family tradition, he wrote a story that was based on one of his superior officer’s co-ownership of an Olongapo brothel. Robert, however, was held only briefly; by October of 1912, he was free and living in San Francisco. The next several years of Robert’s life are not well-documented, although family history and Robert, in his o
wn writings, agree that he spent a number of years abroad; family memories say he was in the East, particularly China for several years, and Robert himself claims that at some point prior to 1918, he had spent three years in the Orient altogether,” holding a variety of vocations, from waiter to English teacher, all the while writing, both fiction as well as news articles for local papers in Peking (Beijing) and Tientsin (or Tianjin, as it is commonly known today).
Robert returned to America at some point around America’s entry into the First World War, in either mid-1917 or early 1918, and began courting Cornelia Brainard (born October 23, 1891), a native of Des Moines, Iowa; how the pair initially met is not known. The couple were married in August of 1918, two months after Robert enlisted in the United States Army, an act that Andrea Cacek, Robert’s granddaughter, jokingly claims was partly intended to “scare her into marrying him.” Robert’s past as a marine made him quite popular among his fellow infantrymen during his stint in the Army; but it was a brief experience. Just as he was about to ship out to Europe, the Armistice of November 1918 went into effect, for all intents and purposes ending the First World War; Robert received an honorable discharge the following month.
Over the next several years, the Pearsall family (joined in 1920 by daughter Janice) travelled throughout California, beginning in Palo Alto, then Alameda, moving for a brief time in the mid-’20s to Denver, Colorado, before returning to the west coast by way of Oakland, and then journeying up through the Pacific Northwest to Tacoma, Washington, where the family seemed finally to settle by 1935. During these years, the family had grown, with the births of sons Robert Brainard on September 18, 1920, and Don Conroy on June 8, 1925. While in most censuses and directory listings, Robert referred to his vocation as “writer,” he also held a number of other occupations, particularly that of Encyclopædia Britannica salesman, a job he would hold—with a brief intermission at the height of the Great Depression and during World War II—for most of his life. This occupation may have been one reason behind the Pearsalls’ constant relocations. Despite these moves, the Pearsall children and grandchildren remember a devoted family man who paid the utmost attention to his children and their well-being, no matter their location or circumstances.
By 1925, Pearsall had been writing stories for at least twenty years, and had been published in American pulp magazines for fifteen of those. From January of 1909 to October of 1912, his works appeared exclusively in two of the Frank A. Munsey Company’s titles, The All-Story and The Cavalier. Other periodicals began carrying his stories, such as New Story, People’s Ideal Fiction, Pearson’s and Collier’s, the latter two of which were not pulp magazines, but the “more-sophisticated” slicks of the era. Short Stories, published by Doubleday, Street & Smith’s The Popular Magazine, and Ridgway’s Adventure also distributed Pearsall’s writings; it was the August 3, 1919 issue of Adventure which introduced John Partridge, in the story “Rogue’s End.” The Popular Magazine, Short Stories and Adventure remained Pearsall’s primary titles, although in the late 1920s he added Frank Munsey’s flagship Argosy to this list—by the mid 1930s, Pearsall had been published in all of the “Big Four” titles of the pulp industry—Adventure, Argosy, Blue Book and Short Stories. Possible connections with fellow writers, pulp or otherwise, is uncertain, although it is known that he counted Call of the Wild author Jack London among his friends.
In April of 1935, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was formed; a part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program to combat the Great Depression, the main purpose of the WPA was to create jobs for the millions upon millions of unemployed Americans throughout the country. While the WPA is best remembered for the public parks and various recreation facilities the enrolled workers built across the United States, cultural and artistic programs were also funded. One of these was the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), tasked with producing works that chronicled everything from local history to local folklore and included biographies of average, everyday Americans as well as broad-based ethnographies. From 1935 to at least 1939, Robert served as a writer for the FWP; among other projects, he participated in recording the history of, and helped create educational programs for, the Queet Native American tribe of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. He continued writing fiction as well, with Pearsall works appearing in Argosy, McCall Publishing’s Blue Book, Thrilling Publication’s The Phantom Detective and other pulps in the mid to late 1930s. By 1942, Robert had left the WPA and began work at the Fort Lewis military base, nine miles outside of Tacoma; he seems to have worked in some capacity as support for engineers stationed at the base, although the exact nature of his work is unknown. After a brief stint as an agent for the Franklin Life Insurance Company following the end of World War II, Robert returned to Britannica sales in 1947.
On September 21, 1948, Robert suffered a heart attack while on the road, in Grays Harbor, Washington, and died. His wife, Cornelia, survived him by almost a decade; in the early 1950s, she moved with her daughter Janice, and Janice’s husband Vincent Lauritz to West Germany, where Vincent, a soldier in the United States Army, had been assigned. Cornelia died, following a long battle with cancer, in Germany, on June 6, 1956, at the age of 65.
Politically, Robert Pearsall was a Socialist (and in religion, a self-confessed “ex-Catholic atheist”); for a number of years, he was also a fully-fledged member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). A regular attendant of national meetings, he knew many prominent members of the party, such as Gus Hall, the perennial CPUSA candidate for president. He was also a participant in labor rallies and strikes, particularly the Longshoreman’s Strike that ran along the west coast of the United States in 1934. This was likely in his capacity as a member of the CPUSA, as he never belonged to a union or any trade that was unionized. He passed down his tendency towards political and social activism to both his daughter, Janice (who actually participated with him in the Longshoreman’s Strike), and Janice’s daughter, Andrea. Robert’s political beliefs seemingly go back to his young adulthood, if not further.
Family history maintains that during his time in China he was a “communist organizer.” Any such official role is highly doubtful, given the history of the time. Before World War I, during his years of travels in the East, there was no real communist presence in China, as a Chinese Communist Party did not appear until 1920, and then only after the backing and support of Bolshevik agents from the newly-formed Soviet Union. The fact that the Communist Party did not exist during Robert’s time in China, however, does not necessarily contradict the notion that he was engaged in some form of political work. A truncated picture of China during the time Pearsall would have been living in “The Middle Kingdom,” which admittedly does no justice to the abrupt and widespread changes sweeping the nation at the time, is in order.
In November of 1908, the Empress Dowager Cixi died, leaving the toddler Puyi as the twelfth ruler of China’s Qing Dynasty, founded in 1644 by semi-nomadic invaders from the northern territory of Manchuria. Puyi inherited an Empire on the verge of collapse; since the mid-nineteenth century the strength and sovereignty of the Chinese Empire had been weakened significantly. The Opium Wars of the 1840s had made China nearly a vassal of the Western powers; the outcome of the Boxer Uprising at the turn of the century, and the strengthening of foreign legations only aided in this. The humiliating loss to Meiji Japan during the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 cast doubt on China’s ability to remain a power even in her own “backyard.” This was also a period which saw a rise in ethnic Chinese nationalism, a “China for the Chinese” sentiment that rejected the foreign Manchu, even after so many centuries in power. As the early 1900s advanced, calls for modernization, liberalization, nationalism, and even republicanism grew from a whisper to a roar as the death of Cixi approached. In 1911, an uprising in the city of Wuchang (part of modern-day Wuhan) led to a revolution which created the Republic of China, and in 1912, the child emperor Puyi abdicated, abolishing the Qing dynasty. Sun Yat-sen, the guiding light of
the revolutionary movement was appointed provisional president, but was not as strong a leader as was needed; with the collapse of the Qing, warlords throughout the Empire took control of territory for themselves, and it was with these military strongmen that the fledgling Republic had to contend.
This was the period in which Robert Pearsall would have been in China—a time of rapid changes and of questionable futures. While perhaps not communist in name, there were definitely groups scattered across the former Empire which advocated socialist ideals. If he was indeed in Peking, the chances of his coming across sympathetic ears only increased: the two recognized founders of the Chinese Communist Party, Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, were professors at Peking University—also employed there was a young library clerk named Mao Zedong. Yuan Shikai, a powerful warlord who succeeded to the presidency upon the resignation of Sun Yat-sen, did not hold the revolutionary fervor of his predecessor; in 1915, he attempted to establish a new dynasty, with himself as Emperor of a new Chinese Empire, a move that only emboldened revolutionary and reform movements throughout the country. It is not impossible, in the least, that Robert, during his years in China, had some interaction with socialist-minded students and thinkers. Peking at the time was literally a melting pot of political and nationalist questions and ideas.
From the picture that comes to us through both familial recollections and his own writings and actions, Robert Pearsall was drawn to socialism and communism for their utopian and idealistic aspects, as were many writers of the time, who either were not aware, or chose not to be aware, of the horrors communism had brought to Russia, from the famine of 1921, to Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. In the early days of the Soviet Union, many on the political left believed that the revolution had indeed lit a path to the ideal, classless society; disillusionment, as the truth became increasingly apparent, gradually affected many such thinkers. As late as 1934, letters appeared in newspapers’ editorial sections under Robert’s name, asserting that a “warless world” and a “classless society” were in fact being built in Soviet Russia. His break with the CPUSA, which by his own admission came about as a result of his belief that the Soviets exerted too much control over the CPUSA, may have been fueled by the realization that no such utopian society was even being attempted, let alone created, in Russia despite what propaganda claimed. It is also possible that, like many socialist-minded thinkers of the day, he believed that Stalinist excesses represented a brief “bump in the road” on an otherwise promising path toward actual, realized communism, which was begun in 1917. After leaving the CPUSA, Robert spoke publically, even opening his own home for some functions, against the Russian influence over the CPUSA. Perhaps the best understanding of how Robert approached society and politics can be found in his own words, in a letter he wrote to the Editorial Page of the Oakland Tribune, published in its May 7, 1932 edition:
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