The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Read Free Page A

year by year the disparity increases. The great impoverished nine-tenths, mostly workers, cannot buy the goods they create. Hence unemployment increases. The more unemployment, the less the purchasing power, and so on—a vicious cycle which leads only to a final terrible collapse. The only remedy is a more equal spread of our national income. Permit the workers to buy the products of their labor. With our modern machinery, this means a luxury income. Nothing less will do. If you doubt this solution, try to find another. It seems to me simple mathematics. That it is also simple justice should not lessen its merit.
    A loving family man, who instilled in his children, and through them his grandchildren, a deep sense of tolerance, in terms of both race (he was also an active participant in the Washington state-area NAACP in the 1930s) and politics, as well as a tradition of political activism, Robert Pearsall’s beliefs were more so the product of a conviction that people deserved to be treated equally, no matter their social status, than any hard-line dedication to Leninist or Marxist theory.
    While much of Robert’s personal history may be in question or incomplete, one thing is not conjecture: his prodigious output of fictional works. While his stories, well over ninety in number, appeared primarily in pulp magazines, they oftentimes appeared in newspapers as well; some he seemingly sold to the newspapers directly, while others were printed in newspapers owned by The Frank A. Munsey Company. He wrote stories that ran a gamut of genres, from drama to mystery to westerns, but it is his tales of the Orient that is our focus at the moment.
    The adventures of Hazard and Partridge suggest a detailed understanding of ancient and modern Chinese history on Robert’s part; locations, characters, societies and other occurrences that Hazard and Partridge come across are linked, in one form or another, to actual events and persons throughout China’s long history. Stories such as those contained in this book automatically draw comparisons to Sax Rohmer and the various intrigues of the nefarious Dr. Fu-Manchu. While many aspects can be compared and contrasted, one fact is evidently clear: Rohmer, by his own admission, had never set foot in China and had no understanding of China, outside of his journalistic visits to London’s Chinatown and Limehouse districts when concocting his Fu-Manchu tales, whereas Pearsall had definitely spent some time in China and drew upon such experiences for his stories.
    The Ko Lao Hui, the evil secret society through which Koshinga works his devilish deeds, was real, to some extent. The history of secret societies in China is nearly as long as Chinese history itself, with various groups participating variably in the creation, success, or overthrow of several Chinese dynasties throughout the centuries. Groups with deep connections and dedications to Buddhist and Taoist ceremony and cosmology, the societies were homes for a myriad of individuals, from brigands and bandits to revolutionaries and everyday criminals. Following the overthrow of the native, ethnic Han Chinese Ming dynasty by the foreign, Manchurian Qing dynasty, many secret societies assumed a nationalistic/ethnocentric nature, espousing “overthrow the Qing, restore the Ming.” 
    The Ko Lao Hui, or “Elder Brothers Society,” was one such group whose origins are shrouded in mystery. While their earliest years seem to show an amalgamation of rituals and codes belonging to several different groups, it can be stated with certainty that they began to assert themselves as an individual entity in the last years of the Taiping Rebellion. The Taiping Rebellion, the bloodiest, continuous civil war in human history, with at least 20 million deaths, lasted roughly from 1851 to 1864, and was largely religious and nationalistic in nature. The movement that led to the rebellion was started by a man named Hong Xiuquan (or Hung Hsiu-ch’üan, in the